r>.-3

20

D.—4

Enclosure 4 in No. 16. The Managee, New Zealand Shipping Company, to the Agent-General. N.Z. Shipping Company (Limited), Eochester Buildings, Sic, — 138, Leadenhall Street, London, 8.C., 30th January, 1884. I beg to acknowledge receipt of your letter of yesterday's date, enclosing copy of memorial containing complaints from some of the passengers per steamer " lonic " as to alleged ill-treatment during the voyage. It will be sufficient reply to this memorial to say—(l.) That the complaints were fully examined into by the Immigration Officers at Wellington, who decided that there was no fault to be found with the vessel, the food, or sanitary arrangements. (2.) That there was no sickness of any kind on board. (3.) That the Board of Trade officers here minutely examined into the sanitary arrangements, and are prepared to deny the statements of the memorialists about them. (4.) The food was the same to all the steerage passengers, and was surveyed by your officer on behalf of the emigrants. (5.) I beg to refer you to the Wellington newspapers, viz., New Zealand Times of 13th November, and Evening Post of 12th idem, where you will see the complaints were found to be groundless on examination by representatives of these papers. I have, &c, The Agent-General for New Zealand. 0. E. Strickland, Manager.

Enclosure 5 in No. 16. Mr. Kennaway to the Manager, New Zealand Shipping Company. Sib, — 7, Westminster Chambers, London, S.W., 31st January, 1884. I am directed by the Agent-General to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 30th instant, respecting the memorial containing complaints from some of the passengers per "lonic," and to state, in reply, that he will have much pleasure in forwarding a copy of your letter to the Earl of Derby, with a request that it may be referred to the Board of Trade. I have, &c, Walter Keitnaway, Secretary to the Agent-General's Department. The Manager, New Zealand Shipping Company.

No. 17. The Agent-General to the Hon. the Minister of Immigration. Sir, — 7, Westminster Chambers, London, S.W., 31st January, 1884. I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 7th December (No. 26, &f&t), in which you express the hope that, upon my receipt of your letter of the 6th October, containing your instructions on the direct steam service, I may have sent you the report which you have been so long expecting from me on the general subject of emigration. I am well aware of the disappointment with which you will have seen mail after mail come in without that report: nevertheless I think that the Minister, no less than the Agent-General, will have some reason to be satisfied in the long run with the continued delay. In many letters I have referred to the special difficulties there are in the way of initiating any really efficient system under conditions the first of which must be the admixture of Government emigrants with self-paying passengers in high-class steamers : and the sustained attention which I have had to give to these conditions has made it happen, over and over again, that some opinion strongly formed by me had to be given up, and some unexpected impression produced in its stead. Thus, although I might at almost any moment in the last six months have easily completed my report, I should certainly have had to contradict myself afterwards on several important points ; so that any weight which you might have been inclined to give to recommendations of mine would have disappeared when you found me retracting or materially altering what I had said before. I felt it to be the most prudent course for me to wait until the experience to be gained from the first voyage of the steamers, and the means to be thereby afforded for discovering anything radically wrong, should give a stability to my views to which I could not otherwise have pretended. And, as the results of each voyage have come back to me, I have been more and more glad that I waited for the many lessons I had to learn, for I should have had a great deal to unsay which I might have said with confidence only six months ago. I still find myself stopped at every turn by the insuperable difficulties which attach to temporary and make-shift arrangements. During all the time I have conducted emigration from this side I have simply been doing it from hand to mouth, and it is a constant wonder to me that I have not made a thorough mess of it. Of one thing lam perfectly certain, that it has been very badly done compared with what it ought to have been and could have been with a proper and permanent organization of the business in a separate branch of this office. Not a quarter of what ought to be done has ever been able to be done, for instance, in the single matter of answering inquiries. The immigration correspondence belonging not only to the working-class, but (what is of far more concern) to the small-farmer class, is, of course, a matter of supreme importance; yet, in any sense that deserves the name, it simply has not been done at all, notwithstanding the devotion which Mr. Kennaway has given to it. We distribute thousands of leaflets and a great number of Handbooks and other publications ; but the one thing which is really needed, namely, to