TOPICAL READING.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8367, 25 February 1907, Page 4

TOPICAL READING.

The Tucker-Forwood conspiracy case, concluded on February 11th, when the Chief Justice of South Australia passed the maximum sentence of two years with hard labour on the two accused, was the longest in the records of the State and probably of Australia. In the lower court seventy witnesses were 'examined, and the proceedings occupied 96 hours, extending over 24 days. In the Supreme Court, 187 hours were occupied, spread over 31 days. There were eighteen thousand "exhibits," and but for systematic tabulation, their examination might have occupied some years, with no other effect than to bewilder the jury. A curious feature of the case, as pointed out by the judge, was, that though some £33,000 had been stolen, Tucker's I liabilities, £2,000, exceeded his assets, and Forwood was himself penniless, his unfortunate wife being hard pressed to find £5 for his travelling expenses. The cases of several Customs officers, whose negligence rendered the frauds possible, are now under investigation.

Complete returns are published in a supplement to the Gazette of the areas under corn and green crops into the colony in October last. For wheat the figures are:—-Area returned for threshing, 21,185 acres; chaffing, ensilage, and feeding down, 905 acres; oats—for threshing, 372,929 acres; for chaffing, ensilage, and feeding down, 260,360 acres; barley for threshing, 33,305 acres, for ensilage and feeding down, 3,383 acres. The land in occupation in 1906-7 is given as 37,408,473 acres, an increase of 241,013 acres, as compared with 1905-6. The number of' stock in the colony are as follow: —Horses, 343,059, an increase of 16,093; cattle, 1,851,750, an increase of 401114; swine, 242,273, a decrease-of 7, *4; sheep, 20,108,471, an- increase of 977,59(1.:

The British movement in favour of women's suffrage (writes the Paris correspondent of the London Times) isevidently contagious. A group of women advocates of female suffrage recently made their appearanc3 at the Chamber of Deputies, waylaid the Minister of Labour, M. Viviani, as he was entering the Palais Bourbon, surrounded him, and refused to let him go until he had promised that they should be formally received by some one of the Parliamentary groups. He good-humoredly arranged an immediate audience with the Socialist group. These ladies, who belong to a society known as "La Solidarite des Femmes," found the Socialist Deputies more than gallantly inclined to listen to their claims, and as an upshot of this interview the Socialist group has agreed to bring in a Bill demanding electoral eligibility for women and extending the privileges of French law to womankind. The campaign has already began, and the newspapers are taking it seriously.

An Auckland business man, who has recently returned from the Transvaal, where he has spent the last four years, states that business in Johannesburg—and Johannesburg reflects the condition of things prevailing in the rest of the Transvaal —is practically at a standstill. This, he said, was particularly marked in the soft goods trade, of which large stocks had been liquidated in the last nine months. This depression he regards as mainly due to the fact that in good times storekeepers took long leases of the premises at enormous rents, and now that there was a general depression they could not afford the rents. Another factor was that storekeepers who had ordered large supplies could not accept them on delivery, and as a consequence they were sold in the open market at about a quarter their value, which naturally had a very depressing effect all round so far as storekeepers were concerned. The gentleman in question states that at the place of business where he worked the rent for a room, 60ft by 50ft, was £175 a month —and that for a building not in the best quarter of the city, where rents were proportionately higher. He thought a good trade might be established between New Zealand and South Africa in woollen goods, dairy produce, etc., but it would require working-up.