FEILDING.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5092, 19 July 1877, Page 2

FEILDING.

(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) A meeting of Church of England members was held here last week, Mr. A. F. Haleombe having been voted to the chair. The Chairman, in explaining the object of the meeting, read a letter from the Bishop of Wellington, enquiring what amount the Manawatu District would guarantee to provide for the support of a minister. The chairman said that he had visited Haleombe and Palmerston with the object of ascertaining what those places would contribute, and he was pleased to be able to state that those places would contribute £IOO per annum each, which still left £IOO a-year and a house to be provided for. He said that Mrs. Haleombe and himself would give an acre of land for the parsonage. Subscription lists were opened, which resulted in raising £45 for supporting the minister and £35 for the parsonage. A committee was formed, with instructions to invite tenders for a parsonage. The ladies are taking an active part in promoting the good work, and they purpose holding a bazaar early in November next, and have already a large collection ready for making the bazaar a' success. In reference to the parsonage, there was a feeling among the members present that for a minister to take charge of the churches of Palmerston, Sandon, Feilding, and Haleombe that this place would be the most central until such time as the others will develops sufficiently to support a minister for each of those places—a time that cannot be far distant, considering the progress they are each now making. THE MANAWATU RAILWAY. I am glad to learn that each of the railway locomotives on the railway is to be provided with two cow-catchers (one for each end). As the cattle feeding near the railway have got so familiar with the' trains that they will not now bestir themselves to move out of the way of the trains, it has become slow travelling for the night trains to avoid running into cattle that may be camped on the railway at night, and it is highly cred'table to the engine-drivers on the railway line that they have hitherto succeeded so well in avoiding running into cattle. Thinking it of more eonsequence to avoid accidents than it is to attain high rates of speed in this colony, it is to be hoped that the same prudent care may be taken in other parts of the colony. The cost of repairing damages will fall on all parts of the colony alike, so the effect would not be altogether local. I wish to call attention to a want that should be supplied at all side shunt lines before any serious accident takes place—the want of scotches that should be kept locked when in use, to prevent waggons from being shifted out of the side lines on the main line by a gale of wird or any other cause. To show the danger of being without scotches, I may state that I have seen waggons, loaded with five tons of mineral each, blown up to the scotches on the side lines of a railway by a gale of wind in another country, and there is nothing now on this Manawatu railway to prevent trucks from being blown from the shunt lines out on the main lines by a gale of wind. I do not suppose that the points being locked (as they are now kept since the late accident) would be any safeguard in case of a gale of wind or other cause setting the trucks in motion on any ef the side shunt lines, which are without scotches to stop them before reaching the main line. THE MANAWATU COUNTY. Since writing my last letter, which referred to the Chairman of the Manawatu County’s notice of my statement of the expenditure for roads in the old settled ridings of the county that have roads, as compared with the county expenditure in the newly settled ridings that have their roads to make, I notice a letter from your own Foxton correspondent, in which he tells you that “the Chairman's monthly report alluded very prominently to the proposed separation movement, and takes your Feilding correspondent to task for the gross inaccuracy, or say, the great disingenuity exhibited in his financial statements.” I beg leave to reply to your Foxton correspondent under sense of the responsibility of remembering that we are both, as it were, on the staff of the same newspaper, and, therefore, that it would be unbecoming of me to make any attack whatever on him, except so far as defending myself against the scandalous charges he makes against me. Your Foxton correspondent repeats almost in the same words the assertion of the Chairman of the Council, which I passed over in writing my last letter to you. A Chairman of a County Council

attackin'' a newspaper correspondent for calling attention to the injustice inflicted on an in fan settlement like the Kiwitea by the older settlements near the coast, is an extraordinary proceeding, to say the least of it. 1 Your h’oxton correspondent must have foigotten in writing to you that I am one o yom correspondents, and yet he, another of y°" r correspondents, dares to tell you that I have written my letters to you to gam the sympathy of outsiders, and further the chances of separation being granted. On his own showing the two ridings petitioning for separation hive had more than £550 abstracted from them to ho expended elsewhere; and then he loudly crows, or rather cackles over his incubation by telling you the result of the Chairman’s calculation, showing that Ly one-third instead of two-thirds of the revenue has been abstracted from our new settlement to be expended on the older settlements for the year ; and let me mention that the Chairman, to obtain this result, m addition to charging the maintenance of the whole of the Awahuri-road and quarter of the Palmerston to Bull’s road against ridings that will have nothing to do with them after separation, as they are miles outside the proposed new county, has made a very serious error. I refer to' the item in your Foxton correspondent’s letter, viz., Stoney Creek to the Germ, £IOO. I admitted that item m my last “letter as an oversight on my part ; but since then I find that in the engineer s report to the Council the item is Palmerston to the Gorge, £IOO. So that your Foxton correspondent in, fact, adopting the Chairman s report, substitutes Stoney Creek m place of Palmerston, as if to falsify the result against Peildin<r. As to his statement that I was •wrong °in stating the working expenses of the Manchester and Manawatu Highway Boards as not exceeding ten per cent., which he and the Chairman’s report places at near 20 per cent, C learn that my former statement was correct, and that both the Chairman of the county and your Foxton correspondent have simply been making a reckless assertion about the item ; and it is very bad taste on the part. of my Foxton brother correspondent to say, as he did on the 22nd insi, that “ The fact is that the Highwav Board’s expenses are nearer 20 per cent, than 10 per cent. ; and he knows it, but it would not suit his book to say so.” I have seen reliable figures in reference to tbe matter of the cost of working the Manawatu _ Road District lately in a local paper, and alao in Mr. Macarthur’s letter in the New Zealand Times of the 9th instant, which I think ought to make my brother correspondent blush for the language he uses in writing of a trusted correspondent of the same newspaper that accepts his own letters as reliable. You have the authority of Mr. McArthur’s published statement of information supplied to him by the secretary of the Manawatu Highway Board—- “ Total receipts, £3059 15s. 9d.; working expenditure, £259 13s. 2d., or a fraction more than 7 per cent.;”—and yet the Foxton feelinf is so strongly biassed against anything emanating from this end of the county that my unknown Foxton brother reads with a jaundiced eye any statement published by his unknown Feilding brother. No stronger argument can be used in favor of the claims of this district to separation than this want of sympathy, and want of any community of interests between the eastern and western parts of tbe county, that even on authorised correspondent like my Foxton brother cannot refrain from recording charges of wilful falsehood in a matter of this kind.

Through a typographical or clerical error in my first statement, the working expenses of the county was not clearly expressed in that letter, but as it was £B4O for spending about £3OOO on roads I contrasted it with the expenditure of the Manawatu Highways Board, that can get £3509 expended on a working expenses of £260, and because I pointed to this difference I am taken to task by the County, Chairman in the most unjustifiable manner. I think there is some foundation of truth in your Foxton correspondent’s assertion “ that had another gentleman been elected as chairman of the Council, and had another place been chosen for its meetings, no move would have been made in’ the way of separation" (so soon as it has been). The movement would be retarded, no doubt, by having the gentleman pointedly referred to elected as chairman, as his greater official experience' in' matters of government would, no doubt, have secured greater economy in the working, and his casting vote would also equalise the voting power of the Council, so far as securing fair play to the eastern ridings; and .if Palmerston, the other place referred to by your correspondent, had been chosen the place of meeting and the seat of the executive, there can be no doubt, as there already two local governments meet and have their offices in that township, that those local bodies would be able to co-operate with the Council if it had been presided over by the gentleman referred to, and as be would save the chairman’s salary, so by co-operating with the local bodies he might also effect a large saving of money that now goes to make up the £B4o° that the present executive at Foxton is now costing the county. The result of the unfairness of the majority of the members to the minority in the Council is that the local board district of Palmerston North has petitioned for separation from the county, and has now got it, and is a borough. The two ridings of Manchester and Kiwitea have also petitioned for separation, and more than the necessary number of three-fifths of the ratepayers is attached to the petition, which will in a few days be laid before Parliament. To secure more than three-fifths of petitioners in a scattered community like this shows a great unanimity of opinion in the district ; and it is this result arising out of the tyrannical conduct of the majority in the Council that now makes them angry at Foxton with the separationists here. The separationists only wish to go from them in peace, instead of having a perpetual warfare with their Foxton friends, in order to secure from them a fair share of the money contributed by them. Some remarks I made about the bad'weather having come on before a certain sura of money that was placed at the disposal of the County Council for opening a road to the ICiwitea district has brought the County Chairman down on the members of the Manchester and Kiwitea ridings; but I cannot understand why this should be, as no one but myself is responsible for anything I write to you until you make yourself responsible ; and I see no reason yet to alter anything X have said on that matter. Mr. McArthur, the member for Kiwitea Biding, in his letter of the 9th iust. to you, states how the money came to be so long in being placed at the disposal of the Council. And also, how the Council unanimously agreed “ that it was inadvisable in their then dearth of funds to accept the large sum due, or falling due, to contractors, with the concomitant expense of supervision, and refused the offer of the Government, leaving members to obtain for their respective ridings the smaller sums referred to in his letter. In my correspondence I think 1 remarked some time ago that it was a pity that it was not done sooner, so as to get the money expended before the bad weather set in, and I see no reason to alter that opinion. In concluding this correspondence permit me to append the different estimates that have appeared, besides my own, of the amount taken out of our infant settlement to be expended in the older settlements. The County Chairman’s estimate of the abstraction is £551 13s. 5d.; Mr. Halcombe, the member for the Manchester Biding, estimates it at £BBS 9s. sd. Mr. McArthur, the member for the Kiwitea Biding, estimates the amount at £959 Is. 6d., and in looking at these different estimates and comparing them with the one I first published, I think as each of those making these estimates may fairly receive credit for endeavoring to arrive at a true state of the matter, X also, as being the first to publish a statement, may be absolved from the charges levelled at me by the Chairman of the Council as well as by your Foxton correspondent, as the fact remains on their own showing, that injustice has been done by them a new settlement and also to your own Feilding correspondent.