The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and Echo. FRIDAY, APRIL 18, 1890.

Auckland Star, Volume XXI, Issue 91, 18 April 1890, Page 2

The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and Echo.

FRIDAY, APRIL 18, 1890.

For tlio cams that lacks aasietanoo, For the wrong; that needs resistance, For the future m the distance, mi tha good that we can do.

We have many times cautioned New Zealand miners against being led away too easily by alluring reports from distant goldfields. The warning was especially applicable to South Africa, be. cause a Stock Exchange boom, almost unprecedented in its magnitude, had been got up on the strength of the admittedly encouraging returns/from some of the reefs in the Transvaal.

To New Zealand and Australian miners it is scarcely necessary to describe the process that has been going on. It is the old story: An area of ground taken up on some supposed line of reef, a flourishing report without a single pick being driven into the ground, a plausible prospectus, a liberal issue of scrip, and a confiding public.

Rarely has the bubble' been kept afluat so long with so little that was substantial to sustain it. Not that the Transvaal is an unpromising field for goldmining. On the contrary, very rich returns have been obtained from some of the mines. But the working of a mine is about the last thing that many goldmining speculators care anything about. They want too big a percentage in promoters' fees, preferential scrip, and other commissions, to apply much of the capital which they succeed in extracting lrom the pockets of their dupes in tunnelliDg the earth for the purpose

of winning its hidden treasures. On the Transvaal goldfield good mines have been outrageously over-weighted with dead capital; while in the case of many other companies, the original promoters having bagged their plunder and quietly s.'id out, their dupes among the investing public were lelt to pay the liquidating calls that were necessary to bring the affair to an end and liberate the barren areas of ground in which the hopes of the deluded investors were for so long centred.

But even in the wide field of Great. Britain, a game of this kind must, sooner or later, become played out, and the recent tumbling down of Atri'Can stock should, perhaps, not be taken any more as an adverse indication of the gold-bear-ing capabilities of the field than the extravagant price 3 which formerly ruled were a guarantee of its extraordinary richness. There are, however, more substantial objections to the Transvaal as a field (or English miners. It has not been shown that the mineral areas of the Transvaal are any richer in the precious metal than those which lie still only very partially developed in Australia and New Zealand. And if they were, enterprise is weighted with enormous disadvantages. The Government is obstructive and rapacious. An English journalist at Johannesburg lately was thrown into gaol on the charge of " treason and sedition," for attacking ihese abuses. Addressing President Kruger, this journalist wrote: " Sir, we starve. Our mines, that have poured three-fourths of their wealth into your coffers, are about to be shut down because of your greed} exactions and obstinate refusal to expedite the means by which they can thrive and afford to pay you." The writer proceeds to ask, What does the Dutch Government give in return in the direction of sanitation, education, safety of life and property, and equal representation of taxpayers ?

Probably the recent admission of British subjects two years resident in the Transvaal to electoral privileges, may ultimately lead to reform ; and the Boer rule is doomed to go down before the advancing tide of AngicSaxon immigration. Meanwhile, however, the government of the country is inimical to British enterprises of every description, and does everything in its power to thwart them.

To the working miner a still more serious objection exists in the presence ot coloured labour. The reefs require capital for their development, and capital will employ cheap labour, of which there is an inexhaustible supply. The miner who forsakes these colonies to seek his fortune in the Transvaal, abandons the certainties of a temperate climate, free institutions and government, cheap and good food, conditions under which a man may establish a happy home and rear lii;; family. It: exchange for these sacrifices he receives nothing which is not equally open to him upon the colonial goldfield.

To the trader, however, the African goldfield affords a promising field. Danish butter h;>.s been selling there at 4S 6d a pound, and Baltic and American timber command high rates. New Zealand, not merely because of its better supplies, but its greater proximity, is in a position to compete with advantage for the supply of these wants. And we shall be very much surprised if the returning produce vessels do not come crowded with miners who have gone far afield to discover how very well off they were in Australasia.