The Waikato Times. TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 1879.

Waikato Times, Volume XIII, Issue 1119, 26 August 1879, Page 2

The Waikato Times.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 1879.

Equal and exact justice to all men, Of whatever ntate or persuasion, religious or political. Here shall the Press the People's right maintain, , # N Unawed by infliwnofl and unbribed by gain.

Drspitb the undue proportion of public expenditure which has been lavished, by a partial government, on tho South, the depression which has, more or leas, affected all these colonies, and -New Zealand amongst them, seems to have been tav more severely telb in the South, than in this part of New Zealand. Nay, Auckland, excepting so far as the district has been affected by the stoppage of the influx of Southern capital, has snffered very little from the commercial crisis. Money has been tight, but the fourth of each month has been tided over safely, and while bankruptcies have been the order of the day in Wellington, Canterbury aud Obago, and fire-raising in the two last Provincial districts has become so common, that the Insurance Companies have had to unloose their purso-strings almost in proportion as the banks closed theirs, Auckland has remained commercially sound. It is not, however,i in mercantile centres that this state of things is so remarkably noticeable, as in the country district*. There is another test of the monetary soundness of a community, besides th© bankruptcy list. It is impossible to take up a Southern paper, without finding a long list of country properties brought to a forced sale. We open, as they come, a Canterbury paper of recent date, and find no less than j ten forced sales, either under bill of salt- or by' order of the mortgagees. A.Hawkes Bay paper furnishes nearly as many ) and so round the Colony. We do not find anything of kind, however, in tbe North. Although speculation in land has been seriously interfered with, and Canterbury immigration into Waikato checked, not a single forced sale has taken place in Waikato. Sett'ers may have felt some of tho force of the storm, but tbey have held up against it, and the district is financially souud arid thriving. And these causes, in both instances, are not far to seek. While settlers in the South have been paying twenty and twenty-five pounds per acre for their land, as good soil with afar better climate has been procurable in Waikato, for from four or five to twelve pounds per acre ; and, when x the pinch came, the Waikato settlers were neithei mortgaged up to the hilt, nor in ths hands of the Banks and Loan Companies; as were their fellow settlers in tho South. We know, ; indeed, of instances where Southern men who had parted with properties in the Middle Island, and come North to settle in Waikato, ha7e had to throw up their new ventures, to return South, and make the best ; of their properties, over which they still held a lien. They were, however, enabled to clear out of Waikato without loss, their land realising as good a price as they gave for it. The work of improvement, too, is going steadily forward. We are glad to learn that, iu many districts, a considerable breadth of wheat ha* been sown. This is notitbly the case in the Bakerimu district, where a considerable number of settlers have, this winter, made trial of this crop.. by planting nearly as large a breadth of wheat as has of late been grown in the Waipa district