Our Wellington Letter.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1985, 23 April 1906, Page 5

Our Wellington Letter.

(From our own Correspondent") WELLINGTON, April 20. At the present moment there is not —so far as certain quarters are concerned—a more grievously unpopular personage than Mr Seddon. He, it appears, committed the crimes of interfering with the shipping ring, j

whose privilege it is to bleed this country for its sole use and benefit, and of announcing that the time has come for putting a stop to the waste going on in the fish markets of this country simply because certain fishmongers are not enterprising enough to find a market for all the fish their boats bring ashore. No one ever had a conception of the awful character of the Premier until the gentlemen whose philanthropic promptings took them unto the shipping and fishing trades let themselves loose about his misdeeds. Both his moral character and his physioal condition have been destroyed beyond hope of repair. It is now quite clear that there could not be a crime worse anywhere under the most diabolical provocation than these two crimes committed by the ruler of this country. Human nature was never supposed to be quite so evil as the dreadful picture given to the Street by those infuriated gentlemen. The fact is that they are hard hit. The freight war which began last Tuesday has startled the dovecotes of old established privelege very roundly. It is not so much the reductions of freight which are to be noted—they are important, certainly—nor is it the rates for passages which are to come down, as it is anticipated, to £25 for the saloon passage round the Horn to London. The important thing is the through rate to any port in the United Kingdom and the United States. This meets the rivals on the ground they had made their own. Nobody, of course, would care a straw what their ground was had they but been mindful of the interests of their customers. But they have ignored the f acf t'lat by pushing the trade in the West of England they would have incalculably increased the gains of the shippers. So long as they could make their comfortable profit in London, the trade for the rest might go bang. With Americans outselling the British merohant through their trade concessions to the foreigner, and the meat trade stagnating for lack of the best outlet for the best brand of mutton, it was high time to do something. Mr Seddon talked of a Stateowned steam line as the remedy for this state of things. The ring denounced the idea with vehemence. But before they heard half their story the first ship of the Federal line arrived, and here we have the. freight

war. It is, of course, not unlikely that before the freight has gone very far there will be a Government subsidy out of gratitude for the service done to the shippers of the countrty. That will be even better than establishing a State line. But it will not please the ring any better. Hence these tears. The Street laughs consumedly. As to the fish, there is no doubt about the fact, which is that vast quantities of fish are thrown away by men who will not accept a low price for them. If they only had common sense they would see that the more they sold the more money they would make, If, however, they are short-sighted that is not a reason why the people at large should pay more for their food. It is quite logical, the Street thinks, for the Government, which has been doing its best to cheapen house rents—has a great scheme on the Statute Book, in fact—and has brought down the price of money, and is bringing down the price of coal, quite logical for that Government to take thought for the high price of any commodity which can be purveyed at less than its present cost. " My Lord, I thought you were a fishmonger." And why not, pray? With the wages rising on one side through the State policy, and the cost of living doing ditto through the lazy fishmonger and the unenterprising shipowner, it was high time to stem the tide. The country is not going into a vicious circle simply to please the gentlemen who level choice Billingsgate at the powers that be because they insist on their doing a fair thing or taking the consequences. By the way, the suooess of the coal experiment does not seem to be fully assured just yet. We read that the Westport Company's output last week was 11,000 tons. Now, we all know the coal is first-rate. But the coal in the Seddonville Mine has to depend on the briquette process, and as for the coal of Point Elizabeth, the melancholy fact is that it is not a bitumenous coal at ail. How can it compete in the retail market with the better sort? That is the question in every mouth in the street just now, and has been for some time. Once more it is announced that negotiations have been opened for the purchase of the Otekaike Run. We shall believe when we hear a little more. There have been too many slips of the oup to allow too much hope at the present stage of negotiations being resumed, The cry of the back country is for roads and bridges. That of the miner is for aids to prospecting. A crumb of comfort for the latter is the determination announced to send for some powerful boring plants. It is a question for the experts to solve. Science has long ago come to tb e

conclusion that the alluvial gold of the South Island did not come from the quartz reefs, which as a rule, so far as that Island is concerned, have earned the name of being the very worst in the world. No one can make that fine old geolpgist, Mackay, whose pen is never idle, believe that the 24,000,000 millions of gold that have been yielded from first to last by the southern goldfield* have come from that wretched * collection of quartz duffers. He thinks the chief source of the alluvial gold, so rich for forty years past, is the vast deposit of quartz drifts in combination with the coal formations. Here is a case for scientific prospecting. Moreover a vast area of country has never been prospeoted at all for lack of means on the part of the prospector. Better to spend some of that surplus in decent prospecting.