CORRESPONDENCE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XVII, Issue 2952, 16 October 1891, Page 2

CORRESPONDENCE.

THE AUCKLAND RAILWAY QUESTION.

To the Editor of the Star

Sib,-— As a member of the Hawera Vigilance Committee appointed to watch the interests of our diatriot re railway to Auokland, I would like to point ont a few things. I would first Bay that that committee have now the satisfaction of finding that their views were the only sound ones after the test of time in the unmasking of those viteiated public works reports and sworn evidence, showing the kind of land the central route passed through ; only, if statements made at the Auokland meeting are correct, we put the desert at 70 miles lees than it should have been. Fortunately, progress, so far, interferes very little with what seemed to us the wisest course to take, and tbat was to tap the country inland of Marton by a line for 40 or 50 miles for the present, and take the line from our district to Auokland. I snppose there is some £800,000 of the loan yet to Bpend s and the country, sorely, can make arrangements to purchase the land along the route. If this were done— say 80 miles of country 12 miles wide— and the Government to devote 10s per acre of tbat land as an endowment, and let our stalwart young men make the line and seoure • homes for themselves with the money, the extra harden on the county would be almost nill, and we should then have the satisfaction of making easily possible to eettle that superior country lying at bead waters of the Waitotara and Wanganui rivers, and instead of being bored with blarny about getting money^to put people on the land we should have to get a police force, as tbey had to do in the United States lately, to guard the land offioe and make people file in to the land office in their turn, carrying their valuable money with them. But as a preliminary to this 1 would suggest to the distriot that Mr. McGnire and the other members should be urged co get the country through which the line passes prescribed and no intoxicating liqnor allowed to go into it, and then, instead of the poor blue shirt and white moleskin trouser lot with their blankets on their baok there would be comfortably clad and about two inches taller men from a consciousness of being the respectable owners of well-filled money bag*. All, I understand, have admitted tbat the line frome here is, commercially speaking, the right line to make, and what with coal and lime its paying capabilities will be greatly helped. It is surely idle, helpless business to make a stumbling block of the way Auckland acted in the past. If they have played the part of numb-skulls, it is only a thing of common heritage,and may make them the more determined now, and as far as we and they aw cdn» cerned there should be no hesitation. They have already tapped the central

country— that is of much account, and with the remainder of the loan and (what should be an unmistakeably big thing) the extra settlement value of the land to pay for it, no perceptible harden would be added to our present heavy enough taxes. I therefore hope the movement will be a success.— Tours, &c., M. Htjnteb.