The Westport Times. THURSDAY, APRIL 15, 1869.

Westport Times, Volume III, Issue 491, 15 April 1869, Page 2

The Westport Times. THURSDAY, APRIL 15, 1869.

A coxstdeeable portion of the space of our present number is occupied by a reprint of the petition which has been prepared in this district for presentation to the General Assembly, on the subject of separating the Gohlfiolds from Nelson Province, and of constituting these Goldiields a County similar to that of the sister district of "VVcstland. The petition is the product and the climax of the proceedings initiated some time ago by the Progress Committee, and carried through to their present stage by the public and by the special committee which was by them appointed. To all those who favor the proposal of Separation—and they are by many degrees in the majority in this district—the petition will recommend itself as an ample, if not exhaustive, expression of the reasons for which such Separation is sought. It is by no means an elaborate production ; nor can it bo accused of being full of sound, much less of sound " signifying nothing." Its features are its terseness and its temperance. It is, in fact, in greater part, a simple statement of figures, and let us hope that they are, as we believe them to be, figures representing facts, and facts which "winna ding." The remaining sentences are certainly no figures of speech, but dry deductions with which it would be difficult to find anyone, in this district at least, to disagree. Its compilers, we presume, concluded that Truth, like Loveliness, " needs not the foreign aid of ornament." As a whole the petition must be admitted to be a sufficiently satisfactory embodiment of the opinions of the many who have interested themselves in the question, and, being so, it will no doubt be numerously and readily signed, for those who have not lately interested themselves in the question more or less are few and far between. To the few who have not done so we especially recommend its perusal, and we do so with the faith that it will tend to their conversion—we shall not say in favor of a County System as a system inevitably superior to Provincialism, but to their conversion at least to the extent of believing that Nelson, in its relations with the Goldfields, has not been the pattern Province which it has pretended to be, and that in these relations there must bo a change, if it is not infinitely preferable that, as the petition proposes, there should also be an absolute severance.