Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, APRIL. 13, 1880. MR MACABTHUR'S LETTER.

Manawatu Herald, Volume II, Issue 66, 13 April 1880, Page 2

Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, APRIL. 13, 1880. MR MACABTHUR'S LETTER.

♦ The County Chairman has contributed a long letter to the Feilding paper on the shilling rate question, in reply to Mr Sanson's letter. We shall only refer to that part of Mr Macarthur's letter in which he attempts to show that the four Southern ridings need a shilling County rate. As may be expected, the attempt is a lamentable failure, for the simple reason that those Hidings do not want, nor do they need, the shilling rate. The following is Mr Macarthur's key-note : — "-What does it matter, so long as a road is made, whether it is made out of a 2s Highways rate, or out of the Highways and County shilling rates combined." Although writing in support of the shilling County rate, Mr Macarthur cannot indicate one County work in the whole of the four Southern Hidings upon which the shilling rate could be advantageously spent. It is very fine to spice up a letter with generalisms such as Mr Macarthur employs, but in taking up the position he has, and assuming he has " disproved " that the Southern Ridings do not need the shilling rate, he should have been more specific. What are the arguments which have so triumphantly proved to his own satisfaction that the Southern Hidings need the shilling rate ? As regards Oroua, he asserts that because Mr Sanson devoted the surplus from the shilling County rate last year to subsidies for district roads, that Hiding needs a shilling rate this year also ; as regards Kawakawa, because Mr Sanson saw some 18 months ago a man ferrying a hundredweight of flour over a hole in a road for which the Council only the other day voted the sum of £300, Mr Macarthur sagely says, " Some need of a shilling rate to alter that state of things, I opine ; " as regards Awahou, he argues that because the people objected to an utterly useless expenditure on the road from Foxton to Carnarvon, and said the money could be more advantageously expended on district roads, they must surely need a shilling rate ; but as regards Horowhenua, he says : — " The Council is just occupied in clearing bush on a road some thirty miles long between Foxton and Otaki, out of a Government grant of £8000. A shilling rate is an urgent necessity in that riding in order to even maintain such a length of road." The above sentence will enable our readers to judge the quality of Mr Macarthur's " special pleading." In the Council he spoke of the Horowhenua riding needing a shilling rate to form this road, in case the Government did not renew the vote, — a most unlikely contingency; now he wants the money to maintain it ! Either Mr Macarthur has displayed in this matter great ignorance, or what is worse No one knows better than himself that the road in question is being made in isolated sections, that it cannot possibly be completed for over two years &t its present rats of progress, that it is only some twenty j miles in length, and that there will I be no traffic whatever on the line until it is completed. To write therefore of a shilling rate as an " urgent necessity " in Horowhenua to " even maintain " that road is unworthy of Mr Macarthur. He adds : " And the survey of the road between Otaki and Waikanae has still to be completed out of the Council's funds derivable from the Horowhenua Hiding." The work in question, so far as we can learn, has not yet been begun, as the County authorities are apparently waiting for an answer to their request for a grant of £15,000 for the road in question, and we certainly think that until there is some prospect of obtaining the money to make the road, it would be a criminal waste to fritter away the money of the ratepayers in surveying a line there was no possibility of making. It will be seen that Mr Macarthur has not, as he supposed, proved that >the Southern Hidings need the shilling rate. Finding no better argument available as far as the Southern Hidings are concerned, Mr

Macarthur says in effect, " Well, you should have the shilling rate, because, although you have no County works that demand the expenditure, the Highways Boards can spend it usefully." This, however, is not to the point. If we have the money, it is, of course, better to spend it usefully J on district roads than allow it to lie idle at the Bank. But that is not the question. We have never said the money could not be usefully spent. If 5s in the £ were raised, it could doubtless all be profitably employed in the formation and improvement of ; road lines. But what we have said and still adhere to is, that in view of the existing state of trade it would be unwise to levy the maximum rate ; that it would press heavily on struggling settlers ; that so far as the majority of the residents in the County were concerned, they would prefer the lower rate; and that however desirable a heavy rate might be to some few landowners who had speculated largely, and wished to push off their properties by having roads made, the voice of the people in four Ridings was dead against being taxed double for the benefit of the minority who reside on the Manchester Block. Let the County Council adhere to its work on the main roads, and if Mr Macarthur's idea of handing over all our County rates as subsidies to the Highways Boards is to prevail, then so far as the four Southern Ridings are concerned the County should be destroyed as a monentity, and the work left to the Road Boards.