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Oamaru Mail, Volume IV, Issue 1319, 12 August 1880, Page 2

Me. Vincent Pyke carried out his published determination of making ail onslaught upon the Railway Commission last night in the House of Representatives. This he did by moving certain resolutions condemning the report of the Commissioners. We are not surprised at this, for Mr. Pyl>e .is the author of the Scratn-Taieri railway project, and haying got the job through Parliament he feels aggrieved because the prying Commissioners have exposed the fraud. He does not, however, appear to have adduced much in the way of sound argument in favor of his. pet sphere. It is a remarkable fact that none of the supporters of the job are capable of making at)y show of reason for spending over a million of money upon the construction of the line. Mr. Pyke and hjs friends all content themselves with declaring that the line will "open up thousands of acres of Crown lands," but they fail to answer the statements of the Ota«o Commissioner for Crown Lauds that very little of the land to be opened up by the line is fit for cultivation. They fail also to answer the remarks made by a member of the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce that were the line completed to-morrow the Government would not be able to sell even a small portion of the land at anything like a decent figure. They fail further to show that were it possible to sell the whole of the Crown lands thatwill be tapped by the railway that a sum would be obtained even sufficient to pay a tithe of the cost of the line. They treat -with silent contempt the fact that the line from Oamaru to Kaseby would place the Maniototo Plains within 53 miles of a good port, while that via Strath-Taieri would extend the journey to over 90 miles. They also omit to make any reference to the fact that the line via the Maerewhenua Pass can be made for about one-third of the sum that the Strath-Taieri line will cost. The Public Works Minister, we observe, joined with the admirers of the least useful and most expensive line. He adniitteij that he was interested in the StrathTaieri line, but what surprises us more than this is that he deemed it necessary to deny that he was " the owner of any land that would be benefited by the OaniartiNaseby line." Why he should have deemed it necessary to make such an explanation we fail to see, bur we are pleased that he did make the statement, as it affords some clue to the reasons which actuated him in so flagrantly departing from the recommendations of five independent Commissioners. Mr. Oliver is interested in the Strath-Taieri line, and he therefore proposed to waste over L3f,000 more of the public funds on a work which the Gomnxiasioners gondemn without mercy. Mr. Oliver is not personally interested in the Onmaru-Naseby line, and he therefore declines to entertain the recommendation of the Commissioners that a careful survey of the route should be made. This is what the explanation amounts to. Mr. Oliver was more truthful in this portion of his remarks than he was when he said that the Maerewhenua route had been sur- J veyed and proyed impracticable. We have: asserted over and over again that the line was never surveyed, and we shall reiterate the statement to the end of the chapter, until justice is done to this district and reparation made for the great wrong perpetrated by interested persons. We shall await with some degree of interest the j remarks of Mr. Wright with reference to i the Strath-Taieri line, for in addition to having beep. a member of the Railway Commission, he is a practical engineer. j