THE DUPPA COMPENASTION JOB.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VII, Issue 576, 8 February 1851, Page 4

THE DUPPA COMPENASTION JOB.

[Reprinted from the New Zealand Spectator, Jan. 22,185) j When, a short time since, we mentioned Mr. Fox’s proposal to the Governor-m, Chief to be allowed to proceed with the conveyances from the Company to their land-purchasers, which, he suggested, were j afterwards to be rendered legal by an Ordi. I nance to be passed by a Nominee Council I it might possibly have been surmised by some of our readers that this sudden anxie. ty on his part for the interests of those who had been so long neglected by the Com. pany was prompted by some other feeling than a desire that the engagements of the Company should be completed, a suspicion might be generated that there was lurking in the mind of the Company’s Agent some arrilre pensee which led him to consider it g convenient to withdraw from the scrutiny of f the Government many of those arrangements I which, under the name of compensation, I had been sanctioned by him. Whether such | surmises were correctly founded, whether : an investigation of some of these arrange. I ments might not prove conducive to the | best interests of the colony, and to the pre. I vention of land-jobbing, our readers will | best be able to determine after considering | some of the facts which we propose briefly | to lay before them. Soon after Captain Fitzroy’s recall, when f from the altered relations between the Go. I vernment and the Company, it appeared I probable that the claims of the latter to compensation would be favourably enter, tained, the land-purchasers in the different settlements considered, not without reason, that, if the Company was entitled to com. pensation from the Government, they were in a still higher degree entitled to compen. sation from the Company for the losses and injuries they had sustained. This claim, strenuously urged by the land-purchasers in the different settlements, was at length admitted by the Company, and attempt! I were made in each settlement to adj'is.t these questions according to the peculiar I circumstances of the case. The principles > admitted by the Company were, that each I purchaser was entitled to the actual posses- I sion of his land with a legal title to it, and I where this was not practicable, to a just | equivalent in land elsewhere. At Welling- | ton each resident holder of landorders (except f in a few special cases which were assessed se-1 parately) was allowed to throw up such sec-1 tions as he had previously chosen, and with I which he had reason to be dissatisfied, and | to exchange them, under certain conditions, for town acres belonging to the private es-1 tate of the Company, or to re-select an | equal quantity of land in other districts spe- f cified, so that each purchaser might have | the opportunity of obtaining a hundred acres I of available land or its equivalent for his I landorder; and a compensation in most in-1 stances was granted of one hundred and | fifty acres additional in respect of each land-1 order, and land'scrip for that amount of| land was accordingly issued by the Com 1; pany’s Agent to the resident landowners, | the compensation lands being selected in [ J the Wanganui and Rangitikei districts. & Nelson the peculiar circumstances of the p* settlement prescribed a somewhat different | course. The original Nelson scheme em-| braced eleven hundred landorders (including the tenth appropriated as Native Reserves) | each landorder entitling the holder to one | town acre, fifty acres of suburban land, and b one hundred and fifty acres of rural land, so g that eleven hundred acres of town land, and g 220,000 acres of available rural land, fifty* B five thousand acres of which, as the name || suburban implied, should be contiguous tog the town, were required for carrying out th® g scheme. While the original price of in Wellington was fixed at one pound per || acre, at Nelson the original price of the land g was fixed at thirty shillings per acre, and ft | certain proportion of the purchase money B was to be set apart as Trust Funds, f° r | founding a College and educational purposes, p. for local steam communication, and for re* | ligious and other specified objects. It soon found, however, that the “ physical cha* L racteristics of Blind Bay” to use Mr. F° x , 3 1 words, "were such as to render it imp° sSl ‘h ble to carry into execution what was con* ? ■ templated by the Prospectus of the Settlement,” that it was impossible to 0“ | tain the required extent of available I® U | within the limits of the settlement to satis J L the claims of purchasers, a good deal of the land laid out as suburban secti