NELSON COUNTIES BILL.

Westport Times, Volume VI, Issue 1012, 11 October 1872, Page 2

NELSON COUNTIES BILL.

Eeferring to the proposed establishment of Nelson Counties, the ' Examiner' says:—"Any one who will reflect dispassionately on the situation of the South-west Goldfields of Nelson, must admit that if local self-govern-is an ad\ antage, and one which the people of this colony have a rijrht to claim in any case, the people of the Grey and Lower Buller Valleys are in every way entitled to it. As much isolated from its provincial centre a"8 Taranaki and Hawke's Bay from Weilington or Auckland, and more so than Westland from Canterbury, or Marlborough from Nelson, the district possesses mineral wealth, and resources for the agricultural settler, which place it ou a rery high rank among

[the natural divisions of New Zealand, lis population is lour or live times as great as that of' Nelson when provincial powers and revenues were first conferred on us, and there is good reason to believe that its prosperity and importance are as yet only in their infancy. The people of the northern districts of the province and their representatives, are for the most part wholly ignorant of the wants of the great southern district in the matter of public works and municipal management ; and let the administration in Bridge street be ever so vigilant in dialing with these want?, it must commit many oversights an I blunders which people on the spot fancy they I could have avoided, and which they resent all tbe more because the authorities who commit them are distant, and as it were foreign. There must inevitably be a growing desire—one which English people generally think respectable —for a more domestic management of home affairs. The day when this must be conceded cannot be far off, for every day makes the proportionate population of the offshoot greater, and the claim of the parent to rale it less. It is then wise to meet the reasonable demand |by concession of all that will be useful, and that can be equitably claimed.