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Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 18, Issue 1145, 13 October 1871, Page 2

A late Wanganui paper states that the Maori ploughing match at Aramo ho was to take place in a few days, and adds :—Great is the enthusiasm of the natives over this novel contest. We are informed that a large demand has been lixJMle for ploughs, and we noticed the other day a. Maori cart containing four moving in the direction of Aramoho. A detfeieney in harness js being su[)plied by the ivakines in the most elaborate and ingenious flax tackle. Just imagine for a moment a pair of horses harnessed in flax being driven by an aboriginal! This is a sight which of itself would be well worth seeing, and one that would bear describing to our relations in the old country. Jf the weather be fine, the town will surely pay a visit to Aramoho on this occasion. On the night of the 6th September, a room at the Adelaide Railway workshop, where the books were kept, was "■ecretly entered, and the whole of the ledgers, journals, and other books, with the exception of the men's time-book, wepe utterly destroyed. TJie Government intend offering a reward of iUOO for tlie discovery of the perpetraiors of this malicious act, ' " : '"

THE -COST ,0E .GOVERNMENT. We quote the following from the Thames Advertiser, September M : —A pamphlet has heen published in Auckland entitled " The Provinces and the ' Budget of Retrenchment.' " It is brief, earnest, and full of facts and figures. Its purpose is to show that Mr Yogel's proposed subversion of the provinces will be in the highest degree hurtful to the colony. It contends that the General Government is extravagant and wasteful, while the Provincial Governments have done all the really useful colonising work that has been accomplished. After giving a number of figaies to show that the extravagance and wasce the colony has to complain of has been caused by the General Government, and that, on the contrary, the money entrusted to the provinces has, on the whole, been well spent, the 1 pamphlet says :—" The sixteen years of colonial self-government have borne financially bitter fruit indeed for New Zealand. The colony was essentially costly to govern, from the exis<ence of ifcs many centres of population, but such costliness ought to have been more apparent in 1854 than in 1870. Yet in 1854, ,£4 7,484 sufficed to provide for all the departments of Colonial Government, while in 1870 it cost £593,000, besides the huge department of Defence, at a cost of .£329,000. In other words, when there were only 32,000 settlers s=caHered over those islands, they could be governed at a cost for departments of <£l 9s per head in each year; but in 1870, with a population numbering eight sords for every one in the colony sixteen years before, the cost of the departments of our Colonial government amounted to a tax of j£3 12s on every man, woman, ajid child amongst us. Is it possible, by any force of language, to represent a more damnatory picture of the effect of a yicpus system of government 1 Can it be .conceived that to increase the departments of such a government will tend to reduction of expense ? Is it possible that purity and economy of local administration can ever be the product of this colonial hot b,ed of patronage and place-making 1 "