The New Zealand Times (PUBLISH DAILY.) SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1879.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5586, 22 February 1879, Page 2

The New Zealand Times (PUBLISH DAILY.) SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1879 .

“ How much money would it take to ruin “ tho Press Agency ?” This is .the mysterious inquiry which is said to have been the prelude to the Ministerial job known tofameas “the special wire.” A gentleman who has since been handsomely rewarded by a well-paid mission to England was induced lastyear to enter into secret, or we should perhaps say private, negotiations with the Government on tho part of three public journals, the “ Auckland Morning “Herald,” “Lyttelton Times,” and “ Otago Daily Times,” for the use of a special telegraph wire. The actual cost to the Colony of a special wire was shown by the General Manager of Telegraphs to be over £4OOO a year, and it was shown that its earnings at ordinary rates would be over £SOOO a year. Nevertheless the Premier agreed, privately always, to grant the use of a special wire to these throe papers, all out-and-out supporters of his Government, for the sum of £2OOO, that is for £2OOO a year less than the estimated actual cost of the service to the people, and for £3OOO a year less than the estimated earnings of tho wire in the ordinary work of the department. "When tho plot was discovered >sir George Grey made a beautiful Pecksuiffian speech, full of lofty sentiment and abounding in assertions of great principles, in which he expressed his solemn conviction, figuratively, that in doing battle against Captain Holt for tho liberty of free printing, he was

doing exactly as Milton did 209 years ago against the tyrants and oppressors of the time. The little game was spoiled by the premature exposure, but the evil consequences of the “ nefarious ’attempt wore not wholly obviated. The system has now boon long enough in operation to show that the upsotting of the arrangements by which the New Zealand Proas Agency received interprovincial, intercolonial, and European telegrams, and distributed the information contained, has not been an uumixed blessing, either to newspaper proprietors generally or to the people. It has, in the first place, entailed the unnecessary expense of two special wires at a cost of £2OOO a year each to the respective agencies—Messrs. Holt and McCarthy’s and Sir George Grey’s. If Dr. Lemon’s calculations were right, which we cannot

doubt, the people lose £4OOO a year, the cost of the maintenance of the two wires in excess of these payments, and £2OOO a year more as the estimated earnings of these wires at the ordinary rates over and above the actual expenditure. Secondly, there is a double payment by the agencies for the “ Melbourne “ Argus” special European cablegrams (£250 a year for each), in addition to the cable charges amounting to one shilling per word for exactly the same message to each agency. Thirdly, the cost of sub-agehoies throughout this colony, which cannot be less than £6OO a year, must now be pa'd by each of the two agencies, instead of byone, as before. Fourthly, the interprovinoial wire charges may be fairly said to be, practically, doubled, because the news sent by one agency from a particular place is so similar to that sent by the other,—and must necessarily be so if the news is true, —that it might, without loss of any valuable information, bo sent by one and the same person or agency.

The amount of work thrown upon the telegraph department by those duplicated Press messages during the busiest hours of tho day, must seriously interfere with, and delay, tho despatch of the regular business, whether Government messages or messages sent by ’ private individuals. All who have much telegraphic business to transact keenly feel this inconvenience. A very large and very useless expenditure has been thus, as wo see, imposed upon newspaper propriutors as a class, and as is usual in all such cases the charge will be transferred, in some shape or other, to tho consumers, tho people. But directly and indirectly, as we have seen, the public now pay, or rather lose £6OOO a year by tho use of “ this new “ instrument for the education of men,” as Sir George Grey phrases it, and it is certainly difficult for an impartial person who wades daily through the columns of what is facetiously called intelligence, increased i» quantity as it is, without improvement in quality, by the rivalry of the several purveyors,—to discover anything like an equivalent in value for the money expended, and the labor wasted in collecting and distributing it. It is impossible, we think, to believe that Milton himself, if ho wore “ hero at the “ antipodes in the nineteenth century,” or that any of tho “great minds” ofEurope, could uphold Sir George Grey in his attack upon Captain Holt with the “special “ wire,” nor will tho people themselves, we think, be long content to be saddled with the heavy cost of this “little war.”