THE BROOMHALL AGREEMENT AND THE THAMES MINERS.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1474, 6 November 1878, Page 3

THE BROOMHALL AGREEMENT AND THE THAMES MINERS.

On tho above subject (he Auckland evening paper of October 29th has the following : Parliament has resolved to pay Mr Broomhall £3500 compensation rather than complete tho bargain made with him for the sale of Te Aroha block. The whole of the negotiations for this land have been sadly mismanaged, and the final payment of a largo sum of money to get out of the entire business is a very appropriate sequel. Regarding hona fide, settlement us the want of the country, and especially of tho Upper Thames, wo arc by no means confident that tho advantages of shunting Mr Broomhall will bo so great as tho opponents of his scheme believe. He was strictly bound down to introduce a certain number of settlers, to erect houses, and carry out other improvements 5 and if those conditions had been rigidly enforced the establishment of a prosperous settlement on tho Upper Thames would have been assured. A largo area of the laud is rot fit for settlement without extensive drainage operations being undertaken upon a common plan, it is idle, therefore, to expect that this part of tho block at any rate will bo settled by the suppositious Thames miner in search of land, who, according to Mr Rowe, has been forced to leave the colony because the Te Aroha block was sold to Mr Broomhall. Tho most suspicious part of tho business, and that which justifies tho strong feeling which has been entertained by Sir George Grey and others against the validation of this contract, was the proposal male by Mr Broomhall to sell his rights for £SOOO to a loan and land company. Perhaps, as some of Mr Broomhall’s supporters have urged, the loan company would have been in a better position to carry out the undertaking than the projectors were ; but the experience in New Zealand of blocks of land hold by companies for speculative purposes has not conduced to faith in these companies iso promoters of bona fije colonisation. Mr Broomhall may say, and no doubt with truth, that he never professed to bo a mere philanthropist, and that tho people who were cooperating with him did so entirely on business j principles. But ho certainly did not come as tho representative or agent of a land-jobbing company, and the association of his scheme with some company of that kind, concerning the nature of which colonists liave only a vague idea, bus raised an amount of prejudice

—whether merited or not —against his purchase which did not exist before. It is really to this feeling that the scheme has now fallen a victim. The i enuineness of the cry from the Thames for land, will soon be determined. We confess we have been disposed to doubt whether so many miners are eager to turn their picks into hoes and pruning hooks, and we shall be agreeably surprised if any largo number of genuine applications for small farms are rent in from the Thames when the land is thrown open for sale. If the result should justify Mr Rowe’s oft-repeated assertion, Auckland will have every reason to be satisfied with the decision arrived at yesterday. The great darner to be apprehended, however, is that while fighting a possibly imaginary foreign monopolist, and refusing the capital which he certainly would introduce, the cream of the land may fall into the hands of homo speculators, who will neither bring money nor immigrants, and will do nothing to promote settlement.