85

not (as I am assured they will not) in any way
interfere with the fulfilment of the premise made by the Government to the Small Farm Association. I urge the Council to make this concession to these brave men strongly, for graves in Maoriland attest their worth. If political agitators they would no doubt have been shifted more serious hold the holders of these runs joined other tapu’d pakeha parties in opposing the settlement of the Queen’s chain.

During your last session, resolutions were passed respecting the price of agricultural and pastoral lands throughout the Province should be raised to £1 and 10s. an acre respectively. It being understood that effect should be given to these resolutions by an Act of the General Assembly. This were prepared, but before the Bill could be passed the General Assembly was dissolved. At the Assembly of the Waste Lands Board, the subject passed over without any legislation on the subject. Within the last ten days the Colonial Secretary has been requested to move the Governor to effect the change by virtue of the power vested in him by the Waste Lands Act of 1858.

Knowing the strong feeling entertained, both by my Executive and a large majority of the Council, in favor of this proposal, I can scarcely expect you to re-consider your decision. At the same time, the more closely I have studied the working of the land regulations, and the more I have considered what may be hoped from them, the more I have been satisfied that they are admirably adapted to the circumstances of this Province. Their chief merit is their flexibility. While they fix the minimum price of agricultural land at 10s. an acre, they do not prevent your raising the price to any amount you please, as has been recently done in the case of the Manawatu, where the land has been put up at less than £1. Without alteration they enable the Government to carry out the wishes and decisions of the Council without recourse to any new legislation, and I have no hesitation in saying, for it is the deliberate opinion of the most experienced land officers, that they are the best regulations of the kind in New Zealand. I do not desire above all things to pass them by, within the terms of a criticism. What I fear is, that if you fix the minimum price of all your agricultural land at £1, you will not merely very materially diminish your territorial revenue, but, what is of far more importance, you will deprive yourselves of the means of virtually closing many public works, but that you will eventually close many districts against settlement. I doubt, for instance, whether land in the Moroa plain, or in any other part of the Seventy Mile Bush, would be bought at 20s. an acre. Yet it is the chief object you have in view is to extract population to establish farming settlements of small farmers. The effect of raising the price of pastoral land from 5s. to 10s. an acre, has already been to reduce the number of applicants, even though the land may be taken at double price without being put up to auction. Really £1 to 10s. and sold as will, I fear, altogether cease. Having, however, laid my own experience and convictions in your proposal, I am far from wishing unduly to press my own views. Parliament will probably be asked to adopt the course I have been taken to carry out the proposed railway to the Waikato; but whenever the hour may find that no provision whatever exists in the minds of the Council to the preliminary expenses that there was no a particle of evidence to show that the work could be constructed for the sum of £80,000, which was the amount at which this Government was authorised to guarantee interest at the rate of seven per cent. But even supposing it had been shown otherwise, and that the sum of £80,000 (excluding a heavy additional expenditure) was calculated to lead the Government to conclude that the work could be carried on, guaranteeing the interest on the larger sum of £300,000, that on the double capital. The argument was that Government would be better assured with their interests. Were it to be shown that the population and the traffic would be best served to carry out the work at the lowest possible cost, the public purse would be saved.

offering, or any Company in accepting the proposed guarantee.

Another proposal, viz., that a new line of road should be formed over the Rimutaka has been pressed upon me, and may possibly be brought before you. When I state that the present road over the Rimutaka has cost £40,000, that the time taken by Cobb’s coaches in traveling the twelve miles is only an hour and a half—time the gradients are so easy that drays carrying four tons are constantly passing over it—I scarcely think that you will consider the necessity for a new road being established, especially when there are still many districts not yet opened up by trunk lines.

In order to enable you to judge how far you are justified in entertaining schemes of such magnitude I transmit a few statements of such matters as I drew your attention to at our last meeting. These statements may be classified under charge headings:

1. The former loan of £27,000, allotted to the Provincial Government in 1856, of £125,000 raised by the Province itself, and of £14,000 allotted to the Province out of the three million loan, has been debited, say £27,000 due to the Home Government, and you had the permanent debt of the Province amounts to £131,000. Your temporary loans comprise the land purchase loan of £30,000, the loan of £55,000 set apart for the purchase of the Rangitikei-Manawatu block, £3,000 to meet the tolls of the Wanganni Bridge, and of floating debts of some £8,000, making the total of your temporary loans £86,000.

Assuming that all these loans, permanent and temporary, were raised at this moment, your indebtedness would stand at £217,000, entailing an annual provision for interest and sinking fund of £20,200.

But this indebtedness is not so formidable as at first glance it appears. Your temporary loans, amounting to £86,000, will be almost entirely wiped out by the course of time or five years. So far as the land sales of the Rangitikei block having been set apart to redeem the land purchase loan, and £3,000 of the loan of £55,000 to meet the tolls of the Wanganni Bridge, it is claimed will be paid off as the land is sold. Moreover, sinking fund is provided for the redemption of all your permanent loans, to the extent of one per cent per annum. In the course of five years the annual charge for these loans will be reduced from £20,000 to £12,000. At the previous time, after defraying the ordinary expenses of government and these permanent charges out of the ordinary revenue, there is still a surplus of some £4,000 available for public works, besides the whole of territorial revenue.

Still, I emphasise, until these temporary loans have been paid, we are not justified in incurring fresh liabilities.

You are aware that Messrs. Kermode, the contractors for the slip, have refused to carry out the contract, and indeed appealed to the Council. As a portion of the correspondence which is necessary I will put before you will see the mode in which I propose to deal with this matter. The work, as you are aware, was undertaken very briefly to call your attention to a few of the main points of the case. When the further papers are before you it will be clearly seen that Mr. Carter did not do more in any sense as the agent of the Provincial Government in this or any other matter. Mr. Morrison was solely employed by Mr. Carter and Captain Vine Hall with a view of the information they represented about the slip. It is their work and not the Government’s. The slip was to be made good at their own cost, and therefore as Provincial Engineers we had to supervise the material which was being manufactured by Messrs. Kermode for the Wharf and Slip. The specifications were prepared by Mr. Doyne that he instructed the Inspector, and the Government. To quote Mr. Doyne were not responsible for the unsuccessful manufacture of the piles and Slip, on more than one occasion I told Mr. Woolley (Messrs. Kermode’s Manager) that in my view he was responsible, and that I would only supervise on the Government’s behalf to give to any contractor a certificate for the approved slip. Mr. Woolley was distinctly told that I stated all