SHAREBROKER AND PROSPECTOR.

Auckland Star, Volume XLI, Issue 274, 18 November 1910, Page 6

SHAREBROKER AND PROSPECTOR.

(To the Editor.) Sir, —Compare these two pictures:— '• The broker sleek and trim, welldressed and hard-faced, sunning himself these fine mornings outside his commission warehouse, with fat bank account, fine home, nice wife, trip to Europe, everything that makes life worth living. On the other hand, the poor-prospector, with his rough and dirty clothes, floundering through bush tracks, up to his boot-tops in sluob and mud, iwet to the skin half his time, a nikau whare for, a home, no wife, a sack-bed to sleep on, no money, in debt to the storekeeper, a trip to Auckland once a year. Look ye, my hard-hearted dealer in shares! It is to thetse latter men, whom ye apparently despise, that you owe all your present affluence, yes, every shilling that you take in commission-. They, in past years, found and were the means by which all the mines now working on the Coromandel Peninsula rose to their present high position. You had no say in the making, you were too incompetent, you had no technical knowledge, no engineering ability, you have none now, you only know how to sell shares and collect commissions. In your grandmotherly way of dealing with every mining proposition you see only one side. When a reasonable proposition was made for fair treatment of the prospector, which for years he 'hasbeen denied, you outvote it 19 to 1. What treatment, I ask, do you deserve from the public?—l am, etc., BILLY TEA.