The Waikato Times. TUESDAY, JULY 9, 1878.

Waikato Times, Volume XII, Issue 943, 9 July 1878, Page 2

The Waikato Times.

TUESDAY, JULY 9, 1878.

Equal and exact justice to all men, Of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political. • *■■■♦'* # * Here shall the Press the People's right maintain, Unawed by influence and unbribed by gain.

It will be seen from the letter received by the Chairman of the Waipa County Council, that, in addition to the £500 promised by j the Premier when in Hamilton, towards the Tuhikaramea-Hamilton road, a further sum of ,£6BO has been allocited out of the county's share of the £40,000 grant towards the opening up of the main road from Alexandra to Newcastle. More than half the county's share of the grant has thus been disposed of without the assistance of the Council, but it cotild scarcely have been allocated where it was more needed. The Waipa district has languished for years past from no other cause than the want of road communication. It has lands equally as good and suitable for cultivation as other districts which have rapidly filled up with a busy and thriving population, but those lands were rendered unattractive and impracticable for profitable settlement from the fact that there was naither inlet to nor egress from them. The tide of settlement swept by to. colonise other districts, leaving - the western lands of the Delta comparatively little more advanced in progress than I hey were ten years ago. The expenditure of the sum set apart will do much <o alter this state of things, aud will assist in making a through traffic of the-], Raglan and Waipa road. The £500 grant, too, will open the road from the railway station at Frankton up to the Tuhikarainea block, leaving to the settlers no more than their own internal roads to expend the local rates upon. Whatawhata, however, is another important district, which equally with Tuhi-

karamea , has felt the deadening effects of isolation, and needed quite as much as any other district in the Waikato from the Government. For years past, the settlers, in corning 1 to Hamilton, havo been for; el to cross private lands, the road lino been utterly impracticable ; but latterly the owneis of these lands have commenced fencing them in, and soon communication will be altogether cut off. The question of forming Whatawhata into a seporaie highway district has been seriously mooted of late, but even then it will find itself heavily taxed to make ■nny headway unassisted against the large amount of wtark necessary to be dons to fairly' open up road communication in a'ld out of the district That it would bs to the interest of both the Hamilton Borough and Hamilton Highway district to expend some portion of their funds in giving Whatawhata settlers access in thau direction, we have more than onca pointed out on former occasions, but viMi those Boards, as with local bodies in the North Island, theie is no superfluity of means. Unlike the favored road districts of the Middle Island, they do not caary iheir balances of t3ns of th;uismd(?,.for which they have no use, from one years' balance sheet lo another. And in this inequality of revenue lies the whole cause of the evil. While Whatawhata remains locked up from profitable and progressive settlement for want of means to open up even a highroad from the district to a town, we read of a Middle Island Road Board District carrying over a balance of £70,000, u.. expended, to its uextyeav'saccouut. Yet this balance, to say nothing of the thousands which such Southern Board found means to expend, was in common justice as maoh the revenue of this Lazarus of the North as of that Dives of the South Island. But for the compact of 1556 the land fund from whence such balance was obtained wonld have been colonial revenue and applicable for public works as much in the North Island as in the South ; and so long even as the balance of the land fund, the 20 per cent, still given to the special districts in which that fund is raised, is made local revenue, so long will our highway districts in the north have a claim to and have need for such special appropriations as the .£4OOO granted last session. We would urge not only on our own two repi e sent itives but on those of every North Islaad constituency the justice and desirability of making- the grant of last session a precedent for other sessions so long as any portion of the land fund remains local revenue. The land sales in the Canterbury Provincial District, alone, realised last year the sum of £1,108,90.2. When Canterbury was first settled, its landed estate was twelve millions of acres. It is now little over five millio .s and a half. The balance has nearly all gone to swell the revenue of the Canterbury Provincial Council, and, in later years, the incomes of the local rtoad Boards, till literally many of them which have never raised a penny in rates hive been unable to find a source on which to expend their accumulating funds. It is therefore, not as sturdy beggars, but as seeking justice at the hands of the Assembly that the representatives of such country districts* as Whatawhata, and the Waipa districts generally, will ask of Parliament a special consideration of their claims.