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New Zealand Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 4154, 14 July 1874, Page 2

The Victorian Government have sent home instructions to place on the English market a four per cent, loan, amounting to £1,500,000, authorised last session for railway purposes. The railways in progress have been paid for by the accumulations of £200,000 per annum from the land fund, but the loan is required for new works authorised last session but not commenced. In Victoria money is rising in value, while in England the rate of discount has fallen to three per cent. The loan is to be floated through the six banks known in Victoria as '• the contracting banks."

We are apt to speak of America as essentially " the land of tho free." That freedom, however, appears to take strange shapes occasionally. The late great war was undertaken for the purpose of putting an end to slavery, but now that it is over, and that slavery no longer exists, the pious, anti-rum crusading North seems as unwilling as ever to recognise the black as the brother of the white man. This much wo may assume from a trial just concluded at Boston, after a protracted hearing, in which a colored man named Alexander Ellis recovered a hundred dollars damages from the Narragansett Steamship Company for refusing him a seat at dinner in the dining-room of the steamer Providence.

The Estimates for 1874-5 were laid before tho Legislative Assembly of Victoria last month, and would be proceeded with although the financial statement would not be made before tho middle of the present month, at the earliest. They provide for an expenditure of £2,313,794—a sum which embraces only the ordinary expenditure, that upon railways and other reproductive public works being dealt with separately. Tho cost of the police-force is set down at £205,591, of penal establishments £61,604, hospitals for the insane £96,647, and £55,780 for industrial and reformatory schools. The following sums occurred amongst the proposed expenditure : Books for Mechanics' Institutes and Public Libraries in country districts, £3000; to aid the building-funds of Ereo Libraries, £2000; a final grant to the Zoological and Acclimatisation Societies, £2500; for schools of design and the promotion of technical education, £750; and for tho observation of the transit of Vouus, £SOO. Tho Bum set apart for educational purposes is £408,681 ; Government Printer,£42,ooo; advertising, £5430; defences, £69,000; gratuities to widows and families of deceased officers, £9773; for Agricultural Societies, £7000; for the first five hundred tons of Victorian-made sugar, £SOOO ; for the encouragement of tho growth and production of flax and silk, to be expended under regulations,

£1000; for the invention 'of a mechanical reaper and binder, £530; for the conveyance of inland mails, £100,000; for cutting tracks and opening-up unexplored areas, £IOOO ; to aid mining-schools, £1500; and to assist the search for coal, £IOOO.