OUR WELLINGTON LETTER.

Marlborough Express, Volume XXXIX, Issue 89, 18 April 1906, Page 1

OUR WELLINGTON LETTER.

(Own Correspondent.)

WELLINGTON, April 14

At the present moment there is not —so far as certain quarters are concerned — a more grievously unpopular personage than Mr Seddon. Rle has, it appears, committed the crimes of interfering with the shipping ring, who.se 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 nre 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 the fishing trades let themselves loose about his misdeeds. Both his moral character and his physical condition have been destroyed beyond hopes 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 these infuriated gentlemen. The fact is that they are hard hit. The freight war which began last Tuesday has startled the dove-cotes of old established privileges very roundly. It is not so much the reductions of freight which are to be noted. They are to be important certainly. Nor is it the rates for passengers, which are to come down, 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 fact that by pushing 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 hang. With Americans outselling the British merchant through their trade concessions to that 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 State-owned steam line as the remedy for this state of things. The ring denounced the idea with vehemence. But before they ended 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 fight has gone very far, there will be a Government subsidy out of gratitude for the service done to the shippers of the country. 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 shortsighted, that is not a reason why the people at, large should pay more tor their food. It is' quite logical, the street thinks, for the Government, which has been doing its besfc to cheapen house rent—has a great scheme on the statute book for the purpose, 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 success of the coal experiment does not seem to be absolutely assurred 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 i*j, not a bituminous coal at all. How can it compete in the retail market with the better sort? That is the question in every month 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 that cup to allow'too much hope at the present stage of negotiation resumed.

Returning to the fish-shops, of course no one expects to see a Government fish-shop with a member of the Civil Service weighing out the succulent Wareheu or the pleasant sole, or the delectable crayfish, best of curry stuff. But there is nothing to prevent the establishment of municipal markets, and perhaps a State subvention. Nothing is definite, however, except the feeling that the Government is bound to do something, as it has a knack of doing something every time it opens its great big mouth to threaten the lieges of this somewhat conservative country.

The developments in connection with the maritime war are of the strangest. Once upon a time the New Zealand Company was the leader in the attack upon monopoly, and the Shaw, Savill Company was the big trust: though in those days, the early seventies, the word was not known to the world. Now the two are the big trust denounced and attacked as the ring by the jiew competitor. It is in this way that the honest producer comes to his own in time.

For the present, however, the honest producer is in the hands of the trusts. He trusts without trusting, in fact. It is amusing to hear the representatives of the middleman declaring to the press intent on exploiting the news about the tariff war that the interests of the producer are quite safe. Of course, they ought to be safe; for when the purveyors in the middle fall out, the man who pays everybody must pay everybody less when everybody is falling over himself in the attempt to give him cheap freight. But then you see the meat is promised by forward contract up till the year 1911, and the dairy produce till some date that has not transpired. How can the producer be said' to be completely protected under such untoward circumstances? Developments promise to be interesting.

Great is the surprise! It is like Diana of the Ephesians. The secret was out as I hinted in this column during the month of January; and the secret is thai; the surplus cannot be less than three-quarters' .of a million sterling. It is the last of a long series which has given nearly five millions of money to the Public Works Fund of this country. Let us not, says the street, boggle about the manner of the getting: enough that the balance is on the right side again. Jf tho Treasurer is always underestimating his revenue, the country gets the benefit anyhow. These surpluses are a very pleasant concomitant of political life. They are, in fact, the result pf the selfreliance policy inaugurated by the gieat men of old. We took on the native trouble in the old days, and all troubles have been as nothing ever since.

The trouble which is particular is a matter of the tariff. The Industrial Association—lndustrial Ass—conceived the idea of asking all possible manufacturers to write down on their little tablets just exactly what sort of tariff concessions they would like to have made during the coming session of the Parliament. The replies were overwhelming, and the cry is "still

they come." In one respect there is unanimity: all .agree that the present tariff of the Customs is such that its framer ought to he locked up for the rest of his natural life in an establishment known to tlie sensitive modern spirit as a mental hospital. For the rest, the attack on the purse of the thoughtless producer is substantial. The street, being a town population, is not much concerned, but all of us therein hope that voice of the country has not been heard as yet. One thing is certain: if that voice wants to be heard, the owners of the same ought to lose no time in preparing a counter for the ambitious schemes that have been let loose for the robbery of the public by the Industrial Association. There will be sneering and snoring galore during the coming session. But if the country does not wake up it will find itself taxed up to the hilt of everything. 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 vie 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 the 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 geologist, Mr Mackay, whose pen is never idle, believe that the 24 millions. of gold that have been yielded from first to last by the Southern goldfields 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 prospected at all for lack of means on the part of the prospector. Better to spend some of that surplus in decent prospecting.

Vesuvius is a long way off. Nevertheless, it is making incursions of disturbance into the quiet retreat of the street. The newspapers, always up-to-date in their omniscience, told us the whole story of Vesuvius from the earliest times as soon as the news of the first recent eruptions was made public here. Now the story, in brief, is this: before the eruption which destroyed Pompeii in the year. 59 there was nowhere a suspicion that the beautiful mountain had ever been active. A thousand years passed, and men forgot the fate of the buried cities. Villages grew up around the mountain in time, and vineyards even found their way into the crater itself, and great was the reputation of the crater vintages. In a- moment, after the thousand years of quiet, the mountain broke out again, and there was an end of the crater vineyards. Time went by again, and man began to approach too near the mysterious fires, and the fires always kept on warning him. Today he has to fly for his life again as on that awful night so well told by the great novelist who has printed the most weird and wonderful picture of the same. Now, there is a very large and wide extinct volcanic region m this colony, and there is not a thousand "in the record of years. The Maori is our only chronicler, and his story does not go back further than 600 years, as science agrees. What about Banks Peninsula P What about Auckland, where any fine morning you may see eighty extinct volcanoes looking at you with placid eye? What about Mount Egmont with his beautiful miracle of form and colour, and his sixty named streams that make the fortune of the dairy country round his feet? None of these are dead, so far as we know, 1000 years. What, indeed?