RIVER BEACH CLAIMS.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Volume I, Issue 22, 15 July 1863, Page 6

RIVER BEACH CLAIMS.

To the Editor of the Lake Wakatip Mail.

Sir,—l perceive by your issue of Saturday the 11th inst., a letter on River Beach Claims, signed Henry Chamberlain, reflecting on the Government for making the rules and regulations of the Otago goldfields, and also on the present Warden of this district for carrying them out, attempting a defence of the late Warden for departing from these rules, and concluding by confessing himself in a perfect maze as to their future application. I would not, Sir, have infringed on your space with a reply to the letter did it not purport to be an expression of the " opinion that miners on the Shotover entertain about it," —a long if not wide latitude to take; and the intimation that " his instinct teaches him there is something wrong in the matter." I confess at once, Sir, that my reason raises no difficulty in the comprehension of this question, nor surprise at the decline and fall of the " sufferer." It is one of the received axioms of civilized persons " Law is the first principle of order," therefore I conceive it to be well that until the laws under which we are governed are legally altered or amended, that we submit to,—shall I say insist on,— their administration as we find them.

Presuming that Mr. Chamberlain agrees with this first principle, which I scarcely expect he will dispute, the apparently complex question admits of speedy solution. The law as defined in rule 2 of the present regulations is, " River beach claims snail mean claims situated between high water mark and low water mark on the beaches of rivers, that river claims shall mean in the beds of rivers the course whereof may have been or shall be wholly diverted for the purpose of mining thereon," and in section 2, clause 3, of the same, I find explanation made of the bed of a river to be "as defined by the warden," &c. Well, Sir, I will take Arthur's Point, the place whence your correspondent's letter is dated, and remind him that in February last the then warden defined to the river bed holders what was low water mark, wisely leaving those who, prior to this defini-

tion, held frontages extending some distance into the river, in full possesoion of them. Persons then who were desirous of taking up river bed claims opposite to the places where those claims existed pegged up to the frontage ground, and if they had not considered that they had area sufficient to warrant them in goiDg to the expense of turning the river, then under the circumstances they ought to have abandoned it. If then our late Warden has wandered from his first decision and led for a time his fellow warden with him, if they have conjointly laid down "an imaginary line in the centre of the river," as the low water limit for beach claims, thereby totally ignoring river bed claims, and consequently setting aside the law they were bound to defend, why any surprise at one being a sufferer ? But to imagine that the Secretary of the goldfields' department,— an experienced Victorian,—who I am happy to know was in our midst the other day, should support his subordinates in suborning the law, is certainly not what I would be prepared to expect. Depend upon it, Sir, the new warden has had his instructions, and the seeming discrepancy in his recent decisions is due to the counsels of his chief. I have said, Sir, that I comprehend no difficulty in the solution of this question, and the interpretation I put upon it would be that where low water mark in rivers has not been legally defined, then superiority of right to any ground ought to be determined by priority of its occupation, according to the class of claim the occupants desire to hold. The regulations as they stand, are in my opinion, sufficiently intelligible, and a warden on his appointment to any particular field, by setting at rest at his earliest convenience this low water mark question, adhering faithfully to the rules he has for the time being to administer, which all miners who have claims worth looking after know will discover his work to be materially lightened, and what has been called a difficulty will be found to be a myth. A Voice from a Gorge of the Shotover. July 13, 1863. ♦