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Oamaru Mail, Volume I, Issue 370, 30 June 1877, Page 2

The. Ringarooma arrived at the Bluff with the English mails, via Suez, on Wednesday afternoon, and the steamer was, from some unknown cause, delayed 24 hours at that port. The Oamaru portion will not reach us until this evening, and, with our knowledge of the bungling that usually occurs in the management of our mail arrangements, we are not perfectly sure that we shall be in possession of it even then. The Ringarooma arrived in Port Chalmers two hours previous to the sailing of the Waitaki yesterday, and we understand that it would have been practicable to have transhipped our letters and papers to that steamer, so that we might have been put in possession of them shortly after mid-day yesterday. We do not know, of course, whether this would have been possible under the existing postal arrangements ; but if it is not, the sooner some change is made the better. We presume that the mails for the various Colonial ports are sorted on board the steamers by a mail agent. If this is the case, we suspect that to the superfluous fussiness, red-tape, and consequential obstructiv.eness of some official connected, remotely or otherwise, with tbe postal department, are we indebted for the unnecessary delay; or the meanness and carelessness of the Government in matters, of public importance, which have become its most prominet characteristics, may be at the bottom of the whole affair. This is not all. As if to increase the inconvenience, the Suez mail closed early this morning, so that our commercial firms will be compelled to wait for the San Francisco mail by which to reply to the correspondence they will probably receive to-night, and which we would not be surprised now to find did not arrive till tomorrow by the Samson, in which case they would not be sorted and delivered till Monday morning. Indeed it is, now that the Suez mail has left, a matter of small moment whether a few more days' delay occurs or not in the receipt of our European correspondence. Now, the question is—Will this serious matter be allowed to subside without any further notice being taken, and the adoption of measures to prevent a similar recurrence? We think it will, unless measures be taken by some of our representative men to apprise the Government of the circumstance. Why the Waitaki was not detained until our portion of the mail was transhipped is a question that requires a little explanation.