TOPICS OF TALK.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume IV, Issue 234, 29 August 1873, Page 6

TOPICS OF TALK.

„ T#e Electoral Bills have been withdrawn, Mr. Vogel, in announcing their withdrawal, took the opportunity to shadow forth what the Government proposed to do next session in the direction of Electoral reform. He said : «—" We propose next session to recommend the Legislature to abolish the present miner's right qualification, and to substitute a manhood suffrage qualification, with the double condition of registration and education —no one, however, to have two votes in any one district. The effect will be, that a person who qualifies what we. may call the residential qualification will have the condition of residence attached to the power of registration, p,nd will not have the right to exercise a second vote in the district in which he registers, although he will have the power to register himself for other electoral districts." This is rather foggy, but it seems to mean that, if any elector held a property qualification in—say the Mount Ida district — be might, if a resident on the roll for s-rr-say Maerewhenua—on his manhood suffrage qualification, be able to vote in both This seems to us a little after Mr. lieid's idea, " that a man should have a vote because of his manhood, and also a vote because of his property." Perhaps it would be ihore honest to say we don't quite know what is.meant. At any rate, we have twelve months in which to talk it pver. Jtfo little consternation will be caused by. the doubt as to the legality or otherwise of the Otago Educational Eeeerves: This doubt has been brooding • in some minds for a long time, the issue of the Crown grants having been delayed time after time. The matter would be a very, serious one to Otago should a centralising policy be.adopted, taking the control of the Waste Lands entirely from the Province.

. And why. not ? "Why should not* Port Chalmers benefit ? The selfishness of some of the speakers at the public meeting held in Dunedin, to .take into consideration the terminus of the Dunedin-Moeraki railway, is almost, too startling to be believed. We find men of such standing as Col. dargill,« : Mr; Gillies, -an d. Mr.' Stout, ..gra'v'ely proppsin g an expenditure of "£50,000 to £IOO,OOO at the expense of the Colony quite needlessly, and solely to prevent the direct line passing through the Port. Mr. Eish deserves great credit for his courage, in such a meeting to put the plain issue before the public. He said—

As regarded the railway coming to Dunedin, he held opinions different from those expressed by some of the gentlemen who had already spoken. The gentleman who seconded the last motion had something re- : garding the dredging of the Dunedin Harbor, a work which it would have been -proper to do before the Port Chalmers Railway was constructed. But it was to late to proceed vith the matter now.—(A Voice: '' No, not at all.") The railway from Dunedin to Port Chalmers formed part of the trunk line ; and |f the motion before the meeting were carried, what would they do? They would a line six miles longer .than if it went into Deborah Bay, (A Voice: "All the better;") And they would be paying juinually on the construction of this line for wear and tear of railway plant considerably |n excess of „ the amount that would be re- • quired to be' expended on the line to Deborah Bay, even though it cost £20,000 more than , the line through part of the Mount Cargill district. The expenses of the Northern line must be paid by the transit of grain and wool for export, and what would be the use pf bringing that produce to Dunedin, and • then carrying it back to Port Chalmers?— (Applause.) The effect would be to put somany hundred pounds per annum into the pockets of the agents of squatters and farmers—(laughter) —and to take so many hundred pounds per annum out of the pockets of the ratepayers, of this Province. For the Jast ten years they had been continually declaiming againsb the centralising policy of the people of the North, yet they were about •to carry out a similar- thing here. What would benefit Port Chalmers would benefit Dunedin, and they were here to propose measures not merely for their own petty inte- • rests,, but for the Province as a whale. *Star,' in a leading article, ably exposes the extreme folly the meeting : .was guilty of. Jealousy verily leads. pilled communities, as well as indivi- ' • duals, into pitfalls of imbecility; The 'Star' says:— v ; Tq enter the Port Chalmers line j$ the fort will no more make Port Chalmers the fc&rminus the junctiqn of the, tyidkn.^

Leeds and Manchester, Hull and Selby, and York and North Midland lines at Normanton has niade that station a terminus. Passengers for Dunedin will pass on to Dunedin, no matter what route is adopted; and where seven or eight miles of railway; are already made and available, it is idle waste of money to propose to throw away thirty, forty, fifty, or, we believe, one hundred thousand pounds in the construction of a line, the only effect of which will be tp increase the cost of working the whole.

Me. John Cabgill arid Mr. Gillies are of opinion that the Port Chalmers llailway was a mistake. The former gentleman says so openly—the latter growls that the money was not spent on the Harbor. We may well be thankful that the Government o.f the country is not in the hands' of the Cargills and the Gillieses of the present day, We have a good railway, which is a certainty—a railway, the trucks of which run right alongside the largest ships coming to the Province, and are loaded direct from the vessels' sides'—and we are asked to join in regretting that this money had not been spent in a speculative scheme, to prove whether a channel could be dredged or not to admit these ships to Dunedin ; and if so, whether it could be maintained as a permanent channel without the annual expenditure of many thousands of pounds: Dunedin is determined to have this chanuel, if it were for nothing else but to ruin Port Chalmers. Mr. Gillies said, "A, was time for them (the meeting) to say, We will make Dunedin the central port of New Zealand." The modest cosjb of this outrageous proposal is only £IOO,OOCTto start with—not to benefit the country, but Dunedin aj against her natural port. The country is languishing for want of the commonest roads by which to obtain the necessaries of life, and yet we would be forced,' if these gentlemen had ; their way, -to tax ourselves to spend £IOO,OOO, or even "£200,000, to enable Dunedin merchants to exult over the fall of Port Chalmers—to enable'the expenditure already incurred of hear £200,000, to connect the Port by rail, to be called a monument of progressive folly. The country should not go to sleep on this matter. Whan the Goldfields and inland agricultural plains have means of ordinary communication with the seaport towns, it will be time enough to talk'about deepening a'fast filling estuary, such as Dunedin Harbor.

The member for Waitaki has been pushing his" Bill to legalise marriage with a deceased wife's siste", not without success. We do not hope to be' able to throw any new or original light on this mucbi-disputed point. One thing does, however, occur' to iis that we have not before seennoticed. Itis always assumed that sisters are alike in nature, sympathies, and mutual attachment. We are of opinion that the contrary is rather the case. Tf we take the other sex the dissimilarity between brothers is strikingly'observable, and also their powers of mutual cdinbativeness —though there is the strong redeeming point that, however much they may fight each other, they will allow no one'elpe to attack either. We, then, by no means grant the premises nearly always taken for granted, that the surviving sister, as the cou :terpart of the deceased wife, is the right and natural successor.

The Dunedin Magistrates, in remanding the boj Gately back to the Industrial School, disregarding the protest of the Manager (Mr. Britton) that the lad had been proved to be perfectly unmanageable—a statement that was borne out by the policeacted very unwisely. The school is one of the best institutions the "State supports, and its especial good quality is this : that it has charge of the boys and girls before; as a rule, they have arrived at an age to know what crime is.. By putting an incorrigible lad like G-ately among these youngsters■: the leaven of evil is introduced that will speedily quicken the whole lump—the inmates being, from their natural instincts, peculiarly susceptible to tuition in what is wrong. A Reformatory in connection with the Gaol would - probably be"th t e best way out of the difficulty. Magistrates naturally. shrink from sending a young boy among a lot

of time-grown prisoners; and so, on the chance of saving one, they have preferred to run the risk of spoiling a number.

It was not very creditable to the j Otago Groldfields members that they made so poor'a stand oh the question of the reduction of the gold export duty. We find Mr. J. L. Gillies was the only Otago member who supported the reduction. The Premier must have spoken very hastily when he said he regretted that it had been reduced last year, and that it was no special tax. It is a tax that is thoroughly unjustified by a single argument—a direct tax and clog on enterprise—and only barely excusable if fixed, as in Victoria, at the lowest possible rate for statistical purposes. If the amount of the tax is essential to the Colony it should be raised, not from the miners, only, but on all those who live by their enterprise ; and not only on them, but on jail Colonists alike, be they miners or settlers. ." ■