The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, MAY 4. GOLDMINES AND FARMERS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 380, 4 May 1910, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, MAY 4. GOLDMINES AND FARMERS.

The large drop in the price of Waihi Goldmining Company shares has caused a flutter in sharebroking circles in the Dominion, and it is likely that the flutter has extended to London, where most of the stock is held. A noted expert (Mr. 0. Gore Adams) has lately given a complete literary view of the Waihi mine in the ''Lone Hand,'' and shows pointedly that the miners" employed earn fifty per cent, more wages by contract than they would do under Arbitration Court wages. That, of course, is why Waihi itself is a prosperous community, although its benefits are not widely diffused. The writer mentions that the great stampers at Waihi pound out £2 a minute for the shareholders, and that tunnelling costs £GGOO a mile. This is cheerful news for miners and shareholders, but not necessarily so for the people who try to earn a living from the soil in the river district. Mining operations 011 the Upper Thames are, to put it mildly, a blight. Every year the officers of the Government Forestry Department and Lands Department write ■blue-books which 110 one ever takes any notice of. They point out that the silting of rivers by tailings from the mines is a national evil. Only ten years ago the Ohinemuri river was navigable from Te Aroha to tiie sea, but it is now so full of sludge that navigation is now out of the question.' The farmers in the Thames Valley rubbed their hands in glee when the great mine made Waihi, ■because it brought a lqrge population. The enormous amount of tailings, however, that came out of the sixteen reefs being worked, and which was thrown into the river, soon changed their tune from oue of joy to one of sorrow, for every year the floods were more severe and the farmers prevented from sending their produce by boat down the river. But even worse than this is the fact that hundreds of acres of good land on either side of the "sludge channels" are covered with crushed quartz, and so spoiled for ever, for mining tailings will grow nothing. Tney are, indeed, highly poisonous, so that nothing lives in the rivers down which they are washed. The "harbor" at Thames itself is a desolate expanse of tailings, and at low water the Auckland-Thames .boats are •left liigh and dry on pounded quartz. The farmers who live on each side of the sludge channels have repeatedly petitioned the Government for compensation in respect of land poisoned by cyanide tailings. Many months ago the Government promised to set up a Royal Commission to deal with the claims of the farmers, and incidentally to find out if it was good ousiness to allow any private corporation to poison agricultural land, stop river navigation, kill fish, silt up harbors, and kill the farmer. In the future it is certain that the Government must order the discontinuance of Upper Thames waterways as sludge channels. Shareholders in great mining concerns are concerned only with the product of the mine, and not with the damage the working of it may cn.we. Such damage is the concern of the State, and the State, of course, is not the servant of shareholders of private concerns, whether the shareholders live in Auckland or London. The immense importance of the mining industry in New Zealand is recognised, and there ■is, perhaps, no concerns that are more valuable to a number of people than the mines that use waterways for sludge channels. Of course, tiie Government, in its natural desire to assist a great industry, gave the necessary power to use the rivers, not. however, foreseeing the damage that would inevitably result. They are now faced with a grave difficulty, and at present seem to be making little effort at solution. Protecting private corporations at the expense of the public is a common condition, and the riches gained by a for are too frequently taken as evidence of the prosperity of a country. Every goldmining company whose valuable property was distant from a waterway would necessarily have to dispose of its poisonous tailings in some other way. There is no. reason .why the Upper Thames mines or the mines' in any other part of 'Xew Zealand should be permitted to poison the earth and kill agriculture, for agriculture benefits more people than mining, and is of the utmost national importance. The rise or fall of mining shares are of less importance than crops, for all the gold on earth is valueless if there is no food to expend it on. At bedrock gold is only useful for the food it will buy, and it is therefore illogical to kill' foodgrowing country for the saxe of gold.