THE WEEK.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 66, 18 March 1871, Page 2

THE WEEK.

Agriculturists will not be able this year to enumerate a dry autumu among their various troubles, for we have, within the last ten days, had sufficient rain to penetrate to the deepest roots, no matter how hard and dry the surface may have been, and the grass paddocks throughout the country are giving promise of an abundance of feed for the ensuing winter. But the great cry that is to be beard far and wide through the country districts is that there is no sale for produce of any description. The grazier says lie cannot find a market for his stock, and the agriculturist complaius that he is forced to leave his grain in the stack, as he cannot meet with a purchaser except at ruinously low prices, and yet, while the Waimea stock owner cannot induce the butchers to look at his bullocks, it pays an exporter at Wanganui to send us down a cargo of cattle. With regard to the low prices of corn, especially barley, some people are bold enough to assert, that sugar makes such an excellent substitute for malt that the difficulty experienced in disposing of this particular description of grain is not hard to account for. .1 suppose grumblers are to be found iv every part of the w.6rp], and from certain correspondence'!, have received from the Waimeas, I am led to suppose that a verysore point with some of my farming friends is, that, in brewing operations, good wholesome New Zealand barley is said to be discarded iv. favor of the produce of the Mauritius. Whether or not their complaint is justified by facts,

I am not. prepared fo say. but. I merely mention it as one of th« items of gossip that have readied me during the week. In my last I alluded to t!'O sacriligious robbery that had been effected ou the wharf. Tt. is a pleasure to find that the culprit was not long in being brought to justice, but that lie was soon handed over to the care of our worthy gaoler. I happened to be present in the Court during his trial, and could not fail to observe one of thoso strange occurrences il^afc occasionally crop up in our courts of law. The prisoner was, first of all, asked the customary question whether h% admitted the offence, to which he rep>i%l in j the affirmative, at the sums time saying that he wished to make a statement. This, however, for some reason or other, could not be allowed, and the evidence had to be gone through just as though the accused had pleaded not guilty. The finding of the stolen articles was proved, and their possession (raced to the piisouer, but here a grave difficulty arose. To whontrslid they belong at- the time they were sto\n ? Everybody knew that^hey were the BJshop of Nelson's ; there were his robes w\h "Bishop of Nelson" plainly marked on them, there were his books with his name in full, and in his own handwriting, as was proved by oae who was well acquainted with it, and yet no one could be found to swear that they were his property. Here was what the Yankees call "a fix " and how it would have been got out of I know not, had not the prisoner, who throughout the trial had been burning with impatience to tell his tale, generously come to the assistance of his prosecutors. Seeing that his opportunity had at last arrived he plaintively said, "If you'll allow me, Sir, I'll tell you about it and save any further bother." After a little hesitation, the magistrate thought he would allow it, and the accused was then permitted to make the full confession he was desirous of making from the first. The more I see of law, the less I see/n to it. Some people, however, appear to have a great partiality for it ; it seems to possess a strange fascination for them from which they cannot free themselves. I alluded in my last, to the case of a farmer ?;. a mercantile firm which had just been tried in the Supreme Court, and I ventured to suggest that it had not tended to enrich eiiher the plaintiff or the defendants, but I see that the latter are by no means satisfied with the verdict, but are anxious to spend a little more money over the,,>>#air, and thatXthey yesterday rnojp^or a fresh trial. Thß Judge, however, considerately refused their request, a kind act on his" part which no doubt they will one of these days fully appreciate. The Australian papers which reached us by the Alhambra are full of the great case recently heard iv Sydney, in which oneLorando Jones was tried, found guilty, sentenced to imprisonment for two years, and fined £100, for making use of blasphemous lauguage in a discussion on the orthodoxy of portions of the Old Testament. I think that every one who has read the .indictment on which he was arraigned -must have felt, on hearin*jhe>.sßver& sen- ' tence passed upon him, that M& Ldsando Jones has by a judicial mistake beeu elevated from his normal position of a low vulgar blackguard, to the rank of a martyr. His punishment has, not unnaturally, been looked upon as religious persecution, the more so that he is said to have been-tn-veigled into impugning the authority and morality of the Bible by an itinerating tub-thumper, by whom he was challenged to enter into an argument upon the subject. The possible results of the sentence passed upon him are very clearly put by the^irgits which says : — " His punishment t^kes the shape of a religious persecution, aM those whom he repelled by his doctrines, will be induced to espouse his causfe out of respect for the principles which are imperilled by his imprisonment." \ I think that everyone must be glad to l\ear that the Government have determined unon releasing him, and we may now hope that the matter will be allowed to sink into oblivion, and that Mr. Lorando Jones and his vile scurrilities will soon be forgotten. We are beginning to get anxious for the arrival of the Phoebe with the English mail, and the guns from the Signal Station that will announce her arrival off the lighthouse will be heard with considerable satisfaction. I don't know whether lam singular iv my opinion, but I certainly do not think very much, of our present Californian mail service. In the first place, we can never look for the arrival of the steamer until five or six days after her due date, and, in the second, we are always at a loss. to know how, much to believe of the jumbled medley of news that filtrates through the American wires before it reaches us. The Suez line gives the most complete satisfaction, and everybody, grumbles at the Californian, and still we adhere

to the latter, and now propose to subsidise large American boats at a heavy cost to coast along the shores of New Zealand between Auckland and Dunedin, because all the big provinces want to be made the ports of call. We have a Government in favor of protection, but they don't seem to cure much about protecting our colonial steamers, at least, the paying of foreign boats to do their work is a strange way of showing it 0 However, unless we wish to court disappointment, we must not expect a New Zealand Ministry to lean too much iv the direction of consistency. While on the subject of steam communication, I mny casually observe that it is exactly a fortnight to-day since we had a steamer in from the Southern provinces. There is something peculiar in the arrangements of our coasting boats. We are occasionally ten days or a fortnight without seeing one from Wellington, and then all of a sudden two or three of them come bustling in within a few hours of one another. Not to meution the question of convenience, would it not pay the owners to despatch their boats separately instead of trying to cut one another's throats by running them together ?