The Globe. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1875.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 205, 4 February 1875, Page 2

The Globe. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1875.

The contest which is being waged between the City Council and the Christchurch cabmen will, it is now evident, be carried through. The Council have declared that they will not budge from the position that they have taken up, and that they will seek an adjustment of the differences between themselves and the cabmen in a

Court of law. The cabmen, on their part, seem equally determined to fight the matter* to the bitter end, as, at a meeting held last night at the City Hotel, they negatived by a large majority a proposition put to them that they should take out licenses, under the new bye-law, as from the Ist February; that two months' trial of the stipulated fares should be given, and that, if at the end of the time a loss was found to have accrued to the cabmen, that the whole question should be admitted to arbitration, and the Council be then placed in a position to amend the law in this respect. The cabmen, no doubt, argue that it is not fair on them that they should be compelled to try, for the benefit of the general public, what is admitted to be an experiment, and that they themselves are convinced that the experiment would terminate in a loss, which they would have no means of recovering. Under these circumstances, they prefer to trust to the uncertainty of the law, and we cannot blame them for so doing. It is not to be expected that any body of men will agree to work for the space of two months for hire which they know to be unremunerative, merely to prove to their opponents that such is the case. They would be in a worse position at the end of the stipulated two months than they are at present, and as many of them may be said to live from hand to mouth, the probability is that a certain proportion of them would have to succumb to the losses which they state they would have to suffer during the time of probation. "Whether they will win their case as against the City Council or not is a matter on which we do not venture an opinion; but we must say that the negativing of the proposition we have mentioned as having been submitted to them, seems to us to have been a matter of perfect certainty. Meanwhile, through all this turmoil, the public are, as is usual in such cases, the principal sufferers : a cab is not to be obtained now in the usual manner, and the inconvenience is already seriously felt by many citizens. The public, of course, will not consent to be without cabs, and consequently we hear of a new cab company being formed. We wish to point out to the cabmen that if this company should be successfully floated, and we see no reason why such should not be the case, they will have a new and powerful antagonist in the field. Even if the present cabmen should win their case in the courts of justice, yet, by the time that is decided, the new company will have been plying for some weeks, and will have appropriated an amount of custom that will interfere with the daily receipts of those at present engaged in the business. Moreover, the public will know to a fraction what they will have to pay to those vehicles which belong to the proposed company, and if they run, as we are assured they will do, at the rate the Council have already fixed, they must be cheaper, and therefore more likely to be used, than those cabs which are running in defiance of the Council. We recommend this consideration to those cabmen who are at present in arms against our civic authorities.