THE Mount Ida Chronicle SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1876.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 402, 25 November 1876, Page 2

THE Mount Ida Chronicle SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1876.

Foh some years business men, miners, and settlers who have resisted the ternp : tation to leave the interior for the coast have had g~od reason to know that times have been decidedly bad. There have been a few individual instances of success, commanded by indomitable, energy or luck, but these have been'sufficiently few to be exceptionally marked. To analyse the causes of this general want 0/ prosperity would not.be an easy task. It does, however, appear clearly that the comparatively few settlers who are permanently located in the interior cannot ensure any general'development of settleme.nt unless aided by wise administration in-our public works departments and tbe commercial advantages of competition, enterprise, and forethought amongst the. leading merchants of tbe Province.

There are now apparent many signs= which make it reasonable to expect that once more our mercantile men will begin to appraise the country at it's real value. During the last few-years a no. tionhas been spreading among the com mercial upper ten that the country w is done ; that no mere was to be got out of it; that it was hot worth powder an i shot if it were not that should our Mr. Jones cease to perambulate once a raon th andJbounce and growl prodigiously. BrownandCo.'s Mr. Smith','wh idil, would feel unduly elated. Besides it was thought that men of acknowledged weight, such as our Dunedin merchants, ought, without bothering with impoverished country districts, to have fortunes at their eo mand, by step; ping-in to the trade at Christchurch and the JN'orthern towns. At the first attempt at this higher flight it did indeed appear that the coast >tr v ade promised to pay best. The energy and ability of the Otago-trained commercial travellers worked wonders, and Otago goods began to. be sold in the JNorth, to the displacement of goods equally as valu-, able imported direct to or mmuf'ac.turediu,the Provinces.-.. This first success was taken by the Chamber of Com-" merce to be a sign : of-.great Colonialprogress, and our Otago merchants straightway became apostles of Centralism. Mtev a while it was found that this new- way of making fortunes by displacement was not really adding, a cent/ to ,the:wealth of the Colony. It did not even render a solitary immigrant the more able to become indedendentpr : an -.assistant in. bearing up the public debt of the Colony. The new system was also capable of being imitated, it was sadly open to reprisals.. Northern goods sold in Dunedin by adventurous pimeers from Christchurch and Auckland are now freely eaten or worn,•-not only in Dunedin, but as far inlaudas Naseby and Queenstown. The fallacy, of regarding this great coastal commission business as a sign of commercial progress is very nearly exploded. It is true the Taia,rua- sailed from Po,rt Chalmers to the West Coast only a week ago, lo;,ded to the deck with soft goods for the Kumara. It is also true that the Oiago will very shortly run direct to Hokitika or Ureymouth from Melbourne with similar goods, and, finding no market, will bring them round to Dunedin, to be trans dipped"again in due course to some other distant Kumara, via Melbourne, possibly in Northern Australia. The Hawea every fortnight co.ines down to Duiiediu, among other things, .with Christchurch made boots, and on her way passes the sister boat, t he Taupo, taking Dunedin made goods to Christchurch. At this blissful sight the colony is asked tocontemplate the beauty of a national spirit, and inland Utago is told reproachfully to mark the enterprise of our great merchants,' whose scorn is described to be cuttirigas the South Wind, and whose, approving nod should be to us country iugrates as balm.of Gilead. I -. s

What effort has been m >de in Dane din to create a foreign trade, or to open up ports to our producers where there goods could 'be sold or exchauged to advantage? If that truly representative body the Chamber of Commerce hfs been engaged in fierce agitation to have Dunedin made a free port, so that settlers might be able to live more cheaply, and the supply of imports be doubled, the echoes even of the struggle have not reached us. Has any effort been made to iuduce Australians to visit New Zealand aud trade freely with us? in the place of any such effort we find rates systematically charged by Dunedin boats for passages between the. Provinces and neighboring Colonies which practically make travelling prohibitive, except where it is a matter of compulsion. A. mau ought to be able to live as cheaply on a steamer as he cau at a first class hotel. If it were so with us as U is in America, half Melbourne would visit New Zealand in the summer months—a great number of rioitors"investing in our as yet uude-

vsioped resources. At the present tune our American service is being allowed to drift away, for all our great men of 'Dan eel in care, to the Bay of Is-. lands, to be perfectly useless, while quite as costly to Otago. Dunedin should never have let the service go at all. There was.nothing to prevent Otago running a Ijue of medium-sized boats direct, such asThe Wakatipu or tbeEasby, and gaining immensely. The heavy postages on the Suez route would have "be»rrsav!?d to Otago; Melbourne would tu\e utt.i glad to pay for the carriage of "a "mail to'alter'nate with her Suez" line; and a healthy and direct commercial trade would long since have been opened up. with San Francisco. In the North the merchants are rendered happy for a month if bo fortunate as to be able to put on board a Yankee bo:it a few tons of potatoes, half a dozen pigß, and a score of Bheep. Up North that is considered a mercantile transaction. Dunedin has very nearly arrived at a similar ideal of healthy commerce. The effect of all this apathy and misdirection of energy is beginning to be felt. The expenditure of money upon the coastal railways has helped to preserve the delusion of healthy commercial progress being possible with a gradually declining country interest. Now that the railways are nearing completion, and wages paid Jby borrowed millions are no longer replenishing the merchants' emptied caßh boxes,-,there.are symptoms of temporary commercial scare. 80 much is not now heard of the country beinw done, although the old cry has reached, and. is being repeated in act by the Government itseJf and our intelligent Waste Lands Board, it is thought quite wise tb consider the present development- of the interior as stereotyped for the next generation at least. Our wise men of Wellington accordin. ly give up their responsibility, and are well content to let. the coastal [Counties scramble for the waste lands converted into cash by speediest process.

Nothing can rectify this diseased state but the thumbscrew of impaired credit, which is close at hand. At the first twist thinking heads will again turn to the misused andneglected treasures.the interior has to offer in its minerals, and above all in its waste lands, calculated to be the homes of a producing population, rendered thrifty by necessity, but none the less a source of wealth to the Colony because trained in a hard school to economise and live frugally. With' labor plentiful and fairly; paid for, and a more healthy spirit held out to commerce in the interior—not crippled by spasmodic suspicion, as heretofore—the Goldfields of 'Otago should speedily commence to redeem their early promise.

The most unsatisfactory part of a newspaper proprietary's task is when duty imperatively demands the disturbance of. a pleasant delusion. So unsatisfactory, both to proprietary and constituents, is this duty, that too often it is shirked altogether. Every individual is allowed to believe that all his neighbors are the best-in'entioned fellows in the world, surpassed only by one, and that work, energy, and ratelaying are entirely superfluous luxuries for him and such neighbors; for the. moon, if required, would squeeze green cheese for their support, not to speak of tomato sauce, and other condiments essential to the sustenance of modern civilisation.

One of the very pleasantest of these delusions to the prospective County ratepayer is just now current in the interior. It is thought by many that the Counties are to have placed to their i credit the pastotal rents and assessments collected within their boundaries, and that therefore the more Crown lands contained within the boundaries of any County the wealthier that County will prove to be. Some few more sanguine siill believe that the proceeds of waste lands sold within a County . .will be credited to, the local fund. All these ideas are, entirely without foundation. Neither of the three Governments that hold office during the session the, Vogel Government, the Wbitaker-Atkinson-Hall Government, or the Atkinson-Whitaker Govern-, meut —proposed, anything of the kind. The-pastoral the agricultural lease rents, and all proceeds of land sales, go direct into the Colonial Treasury as land revenue. The sums received from each Provincial District —that is, from Otago, Auckland; Canterbury, &c. are <o be noted down in separate accounts to the credit of the respective districts. On the debtor side are to be charged certain ao called Colonial charges interest._.pju_ loans « raised in the late Province, now by political hocus pocus Provincial District, two per cent, on capital iuvested iu railways, .charges for education] &c. The balance of the two accounts is called the residue of the land fund, or the deficiency of the land fund. : This residue, if any, in the case of each Provincial District, is available for division among the Counties in that District, and is the only form in which land revenue can reach the County Treasury. Iu the Provincial District of Otago, for 1577. this residue is calculated to be £ L2-i0 ss. 7d.—that is supposing the land revenue for Otago keeps as high as it did last year. This munificent sum, whether £1240 or nothing, is then liable to a division. That is, any County would gost three-fifths of it in the proportion that its population bears to the wholj population of the Provincial District, and two-fifths in proportion that the area of the County bears to the arei„ of the whole Provincial District, .Roughly, Waikouaiti, Maniototo s Vincent, and Lakeland might get out of such a maximum residue £IOO apiece. That ia the only ahape in which paatoral assessments can by any

possibility accrue to the County fund for local expenditure. If any of our readers still chocse to remain in dreamland, and believe that the pastoral assessments are to go to the County Councils for local expenditure we shall not be so foolish as to annoy tLem any further by seeking to disturb so pleasant a creed. .Rather shall we rejo.'ce to find that" Faith in men and promises is still to be found in such childlike simplicity upon the Goldfields of Otago. The delusion has probably arisen from the continual reiteration of Government supporters that the L.nd fund is to be localised, and also from clause 21 of the Financial Arrangements Act, which says : " Revenues accruing from the sale, " basing, letting, or other disposal of " waste lands of the Crown, in any " district shall be deemed to be part of " theland fund of such district." The "land fund "spoken of is the Provincial land, the residue of which is that mythical £1247 ss. 7d. The " district" is the Provincial District, not the County.

The ignorance of the Waste Land* Board as to what is going on in the way of Beftlement upon proclaimed blocks and Hundreds was rrmarkably exemplified at the last week's meeting. After the Chief Surveyor's reportwas read, upon the petition for the Moonlight ilat Block, the ' Daily Times ' reports that the Acting-Chief Commissioner, Mr. Strode, said—" There was "another striking instance before " them in the case of the Kyeburn. " The Government, he knew, were •* pestered with applications to open " up that land, and, after they had " done so, not an inch of it was taken u up for settlement—Mr. Beid thought " two or three sections were taken up. " Mr. Strode said there was only one '■" bit taken up, to join on to the preI* emptive right.—Mr. Keid thought *• that in the Kyeburn there must have " been one purchase it not two. How- " ever, he knew that there had not " been much taken up »» It is a pity that Mr.' Strode, temporarily holding so high a position, was not careful to verity his statements. It is quite true that Mr. K. B. Martin, the Board's auctioneer, d d not succeed in selling the sections advertised for sale as of special value, with the exception uf the bit added to the preemptive by Mr. Preston, at the second sale, when he found the land was really being taken up, and he must secure himself. As a matter of fact, which Mr. Strode can ascertain if he likes to take the t ouble, 2000 acres or more are takf-n up—Mr. George Currie and Sons alone holding 1000 acres, which they will very speedily prove to be one of the best mixed farms of Otago. It the Board were to take the trouble to let people know what lands were open for selection on deferred payments, and would further instruct those who have taken up land in Hundreds what protection they can have against the runhrlder's sheep, or what enjoyment of the grazing facilities in the Hundreds, they need have no fears but that the Kyeburn Hundred could take care of itself. The only other bloiks opened in this district are the Maniototo Block, the Sowburn Block, the Biackstoue Block. There is one section only on each of the first.of these two blocks unoo upied, while, with regard to the Blackstone Hill block, we have no accurate information, beyond knowing that several successful farms have been created there for several years back. We shall be t'lad if our contemporary the ' Daily Times ' will contradict the statement made inadvertently by Mr. Strode, as, from the wide circulation given to the remark, considerable injury may ensue to deserving men.