CORRESPONDENCE.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 282, 31 July 1874, Page 3

CORRESPONDENCE.

We do not hold ourselves in any wny responsible for the opinions and sentiments expressed by correspondents. Ai/ii communications must be accompanied by the correct name and address of the writer, not necessarily for publication, but as" n guarantee of good faith.

(To the Editor of the Mount Ida Chronicle.) Sib, —In perusing Mr. Thomson's letter in your issue of Friday, last, in which he comments on.the course pursued by the land petitioners, for precluding the shareholders of the Mount Ida Pastoral Company in what the petitioners may consider a movement intended for the benefit of the public at large, and for afterwards obtaining to the petition the signatures of several shareholders of that company (his signature included), I may state that I fail to see any just ground for censure or complaint, as strenuous efforts on former occasions had been made by members of the Pastoral Company to prevent the opening up of land for settlement on their run i therefore, the sooner they were given to understand that the people of Mount Ida are determined to have, independent of the squatter, similar privileges to those other Groldfields districts have for years enjoyed, the. better. The most simple way of doing so was by not asking the members of the Pastoral Company to join in the petition. Mr. Thomson seems to lay great stress on the fact of members of that Company being asked to sign it. It would be a difficult matter, perhaps, for the party i who took round the petition to ascertain ! who' held' an interest in the Pastoral Company at that particular time. If the memorial carries a gross misstatement on the face of it, as Mr. Thom- . son asserts, such mis-statement is attributable to him and other members of the Pastoral Company who signed it, as the signatures were not obtained through misrepresentation. I cannot conceive how it is that Mr. Thomson, a wise, shrewd, .business man, signed this document without making himself thoroughly acquainted with its contents, unless* for the purpose of throwing cold water on the petition. What Mr. Thomson's motive was in signing this petition, knowing that it was for the purpose of getting a block of land for settlement ; and, being under the impression at the same time, as he asserts in his letter, that settlement on the Maniototo Plains would be a life of poverty and a miserable failure, is best known to himself.

In conclusion, I may remark, if we remain much longer under the.yoke of the squatter, while means are within our power of shaking it off, we are unworthy of the name of G-oldfields residents.—l am, &c, One of the Petitionees.