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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume IV, Issue 127, 2 June 1869, Page 2

JNew Zealand Campaign. — In the House of Lords, on February 2G, Earl Granville said that it might be interesting to their lordships Jto hear that a telegram had been received from Melbourne, stating that the war in New Zealand was considered to be at an end ; but he could not, of course, say how far this latter opinion was to be relied on. The Pall Mall Gazette, of March 3, observes : — " It is as well to remember amid present gratulations over the New Zealand telegram that the conclusion arrived at in Melbourne, and adopted here, that the war is at an end since the Poverty Bay massacre has been avenged, is one thafc the circumstances, as far as now known, do not warrant. The insurrection did not commence on the East Coast, has never seriously straitened the settlers on that side, andvvould have had no comparative importance there but for the barborous raid of the escaped rChatham Island convicts and their party on the Poverty Bay settlers. The rebellion took its rise 200 miles oif, upon tbe west coast, in the great forest district between Taranaki and Wanganui, where Titoko Waru aud his partisans have actually wrested from the whites the new settlement of Patea, destroyed all the property there, and, then proceeding southward, have driven in the outposts round Wanganui, and forced the country population back upon the town, the active forces having been partly withdrawn to the other coast. Tito has suffered no defeat. His operations have been quite independent of, and unconnected with the Poverty Bay marauders ; and it would be as incorrect to suppose bin? put down by the late victory of Colonel Whitmore as to assume that an insurrection again sf the present Italian Government- in Tuscany would be ended by the defeat of a formidable brigand band in Calabria. Australian Preserved Meat. — A correspondent of the Morning Past writes : — " Touching Australian preserved meat, permit nic to retail my experience. lam tbe possessor of six children, and, not finding my income keep pace with the growth of my family, I am always as keenly on fche look out for economies as is the present Government. Such being the case, I went in for preserved Australian beef. Not a morsel of it would my servants, of course, touch ; it had not cost me enongh. But my children actually clamoured for it, and are always on the look-out for ' Stralia.' I submit, sir that they are unprejudiced and competent judges. As for myself, having eaten much of tha Government preserved provisions on a long voyage, I confess to a preference for Australian meat." The Pacific Railroad.— lt seems that the Pacific Railroad, now approaching completion, is something more than a gigantic enterprise. Ifc is also a stupendous job The eastern division of it is being constructed by seventy persons, constituting what is known as the " Pacific Railroad Ring." Its cost will not exceed £20,000 sterling, but the stock and bonds issued by the " ring" will represent <£fi4,000,000 sterling, and the passenger and goods traffic rates will be so adjusted as to pay a dividend of ten per cent, upon a capital upwards of two-thirds of which is fictitious, while the company — or, in other words, the " ring "— receives a subsidy of £6,000 a mile from the Government, besides a land grant of 12,000 acres a mile, to say nothing of donations of real estate from the cities it passes, or of the. millions of dollars which are earned upon such sections of the line as are already opened, and which are applied for purposes of construction. What is the nature of this ring? It is thus described in the last number of the North American Review: — " The members of it are in Congress; they are the trustees for the bondholders, they are directors, they are stockholders, they are contractors. In Washington they vote the subsidies, in New York they receive them, upon the plains they expend them, and on the Credit Mobilier they divide them. Ever shifting characters, they are ever übiquitous— now engineering a bill, and now: a bridge — they receive money into one hand as a corporation, and pay it into the other as a contractor." When we come to investigate the origin of this "ring," we find it to have taken its rise in fraud and felony. Such, at least, is the accouut given of ifc by the ablest and most high-toned publication in the !.United States. " The paternity of this institution," observes the Review just quoted from, "is currently supposed to be between General Dull Green and the irrepressible George Francis Train ; or rather, to speak more exactly, some intelligent broker is supposed to have stolen from Green' 1 the charter under which the association was organised, and Train applied the stolen property to the purposes of the Pacific Railroad construction." Of all the "rings" which have been organised in the United States for the spoliation of the public or the robbery of the revenue, the Pacific railroad "ring" appears to be the most ingenious, the most comprehensive, and the most efficient in its operations. "As stockholders they own the road, as mortgagees they have a lien upon it, as directors they contract for its construction, and as members of the Credit Mobilier they build it." As these 70 men will share among them upwards of £40,000,000 sterling, the proceeds of bonds issued over iand above the sum actually disbursed or required for the construction of the line, they will eventually become, one of the richest corporations in the world, and, as the North American Review justly remarks,. " will surely hereafter constitute . a source of corruption in the politics of the land, and a resistless power in its legislature."