TWO AND A-HALF MILLIONS.

Gisborne Times, Volume IX, Issue 806, 22 January 1903, Page 4

TWO AND A-HALF MILLIONS.

(N.Z. Herald.)

Wo are enabled to publish in another column of to-day’s issue the complete returns for 1902 of the Waihi Gold Mining Company. These show that tho winnings for the year wore over £520,000, bringing the total amount of gold won by the company to the value of slightly over two and a-half million pounds sterling. What this means to the colony may be judged by the fact that of this enormous amount no less than three-filths have been spent id wages and plant. &onic twelve hundred employees secure permanent work from this great industrial concern at wages fixed by the Arbitration Court, and the prosperous township of Waihi depends upon the scientific exploitation of comparatively low-grade reefs thus energetically carried on. Nor, apparently, has tho limit .yet been reached. Year after year tho Waihi returns have shown an unvarying incroaso, and if tho twelve months of 1900 do no more than continue as the latter months of 1902, the winnings for the current year will exceed ,£600,000. It in no way belittles the worth of the great agricultural industries of the colony to recognise the obligations it is under to the Waihi Company, which obtains its well-earned and ungrudged dividends through its confidence in tho value of its ground and the unfaltering persistence with which it backs that confidence. Tho most complete equipment and the most economic and scientific methods known to the gold-winning world have been brought into operation, with the result that, the greatest single industrial concern within the colony has been profitably instituted.