MINERS' PROTECTION LEAGUE.

Westport Times, Volume III, Issue 541, 12 August 1869, Page 2

MINERS' PROTECTION LEAGUE.

A Miners' Protection League has been established at Spring Creek, in Victoria. Its manifesto is as follows : —" We have formed ourselves into a league for the protection, furtherance, and surveillance of our rights and interests, which have been encroached upon of late by a despotism of a most dangerous character. The despotism referred to is tho daily growing tendency on the part of the Government and Administration to favor monopoly, and unless this despotism receives a decided check, it will neutralize all our democratic institutions, and convert them into as many dead letters. In calling upon you to join in our movement, to act with us against a common danger, to strengthen our hands in a struggle for the common good, we deem it our duty to place before yon, in simple, unmistakable terms, an account of our grievances, and also how we intend to proceed to obtain remedies for their speedy removal. Our political rights are crippled. The system of voting by electoral rights has, in fact, disfranchised thousands of us. "We do not hold a secure tenure of our claims under our miners' rights, while speculators and capitalists obtain leases for considerable tracts of auriferous lands with the greatest ease, to the prejudice and detriment of the bona Jlde miner. Our representatives, whom we sent to the Minister of Mines to ask for redress of our grievances, have been snubbed and treated with contempt.

"We have been called " potterers and fossickers;" we have been told to move back from the rich resources which have been opened and developed by the sweat of our brows, that a set of speculators, who never intend to do so, may sneak into our inheritance. We have been fleeced and robbed by a mob of unscrupulous lawmongers, because the existing mining laws are unintelligible and unworkable."