OVERLAND COMMUNICATION BETWEEN NELSON AND CANTERBURY.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume XVIII, Issue 79, 1 October 1859, Page 2 (Supplement)

OVERLAND COMMUNICATION BETWEEN NELSON AND CANTERBURY.

[From the Lyttelton Times, Sept. 3. j Great land sales have been going on at Nelson; large tracts of the Amuri district have been passing into the hands of a few capitalists for a' few shillings per acre. Cheap land regulations have done their work for that district with a vengeance. Now that most of the good land in Amuri Ua9 been frittered away, there is little use in lamenting the past. The treatment of the waste lands in that district is certainly a warning for the future, and a proof of the short-sightedness of those who faucy that cheap land is a boon to the small farmer and the labouring man.

We don't want to recur now to the absurd arrangement whereby the Amuri district was severed from the province it naturally belonged to, and handed over to Nelson. But as Amuri has but few means of asserting its rights in the division of provincial wealth, we

beg to urge upon the Nelson Government and Council the justice of spending a fair proportion of the revenue derived from that district in opening it up and in improving the communication between it and Nelson. When we consider the amount of money that has been raised at Nelson within the last year from the sale of Amuri lands, it is, with some surprise that we notice the silence prevailing as to any great works for opening up the Amuri district. No paltry vote of 361,000 or can shelter Nelson from the accusation of a most unjustifiable centralism, if no real attempt be made to open up the communication between Nelson proper aud the Amuri district. We hope, however, to see that our neighbours will take a just view of the case, and will giye a fair share of the Amuri land fund to the opening up of Amuri.

When we ask them to do this, we are convinced that such a work as a road between Nelson and the Southern frontier would be of as much advantage to the whole province as any other they could undertake. Canterbury has opened up a cart road to her Northern boundary; surely, out of all the funds that have flowed in from the Amuri district, Nelson can afford to vote a handsome sum to make Amuri less of a foreign possession, and to improve postal communication with the South. If Nelson looks forward to the advantages to be derived from her central position in New Zealand, she will not be unmindful of the wisdom of connecting herself more closely with the rapidly growing Southern provinces of the Middle Island.

If were spent on the road through the gorges, post-houses and stables built along; the line of road, and facilities afforded for overland travelling all the year round, the interests of the Middle Island would be far more firmly knit together than they are at present. Our Nelson friends will see the necessity of such union as forcibly as we do in Canterbury.

PREJUDICES OF THE ENGLISH FARMER. — In Young's time farmers very rarely ventured beyond the boundaries of their own locality. The market or the fan* were their chief opportunities of intercourse, and then there was too much eagerness to sell or buy, too much excitement from beer to enable them to discuss anything of an improving kind. Besides, the farmer was a man of prejudices ; he would scarcely look over a hedge to watch the progress of an experiment. When the father of Mr. George Turner, of Barton, Devon, the well-known breeder of Devon cattle and Leicester sheep, who had learned something in his visits with stock at Holkliam, began to drill turnips, a well-to-do neighbour looked down from the dividing bank and said to the son, " I suppose your father will be sowing pepper out of a cruet next ! " A Mr. Cooper, who went into Dorsetshire from Norfolk, could only get his turnips hoed by working himself year after year with his labourers, and refusing to be tired out by their deliberate awkwardness for the purpose of defeating his design. After he had continued the practice for twenty years, and all the surrounding farmers had witnessed the vast benefits to be derived from it, not a single one of them had begun to imitate him. Mr. Cooper, with two horses abreast and no driver, ploughed an acre of land, where his neighbours with four horses and a driver, ploughed only three-quarters of an acre ; yet not a labourer would touch this unclean implement, as they seemed to think it, and no farmer, with such an example perpetually before his eyes, choose to save on each plough the wages of a man, the keep of two horses, and the e^tra expenditure incurred by the diminished amount of work performed in the day. No longer Bgo than 1835, Sir Eobert Peel presented a farmers' club at Tamworth with two iron ploughs of the best construction. On his next visit the old ploughs with the wooden mould-boords were again nt work. " Sir," said a member of the club, T we tried the iron, and we be all of one mind, that they made the weeds grow." When Young recommended the Dorsetshire formers to fold their ewes, they treated the idea with contempt, saying that " the flock, in rushing out of the fold, would tread down the lambs." Jethro Tull said that the sowing of artificial grasses was so long before it became common amongst farmers, that though Mr. Blith wrote of it in Cromwell's time, yet thirty years ago (about 1770), when any farmer in the country was advised to sow clover, he was certain to say, " Gentlemen might sow if they pleased, but they (the farmers) must take care to pay their rent." And now the case is so much altered that, although rents are increased, and the profit of clover is less since it lias become common, they cannot pretend to pay then* rent without sowing it. The innovations of new systems caused deep regret to the minds of some men who were wedded to their prejudices. "Not many months ago, " said Mr. Donaldson, in 1775, " I was much pleased to see a heavy-laden waggon pass through Turnham-green, in its way to Herefordshire, drawn by six oxen, with one horse only as a leader ; " and he was so delighted at this "picture of a team," that he added, "If my family could have spared so much of my fortune, I would have franked the owner through every toll-bar he should ever pass!" Examples of the old kind of intelligence still remain. We know a farmer, residiug within twenty miles of London, who despises even Markham's " chaulked trencher," and measures his profits and losses by keeping money, silver and gold altogether, in a wooden bowl. He estimates the results of the year by the rising or falling of the money in the bowl. If he finds it sinking, he becomes irritable, and gets up a series of brawls with his wife, winch generally continue until the I bullion in the wooden bank appears to be again on tlae increase. Anotkerj & grassier, Imcl honrdctl a considerable sum of money, »nd at laßt he resolved to put it into a country bank, which he did. He had been hi the habit of going into the bank, according to his need, and paying in money, or asking for such sums as he wanted. But he had never commenced the use of a cheque book 5 and when one day a clerk of the bank told him that he thought he had better have a book, and so keep his account properly, he thought it was a mark of suspicion, flew into a passion, demanded liis money, aud left the bank, declaring that he had " zev'r'l round hundreds that they knawed nothin' aboot."— Philp's History of Progress.