THE NELSON EXAMINER. Saturday June 23, 1866.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume XXV, 23 June 1866, Page 2

THE NELSON EXAMINER. Saturday June 23, 1866.

Journals become more necessary as men become more equal and individualism more to be feared. It would be to underrate their importance to suppose that they serve only to secure liberty ; they maintain civilization. Dv ToaqvMvnxß, Of Democracy in America, vol. 6, 230. Auckland papers of late have teemed with paragraphs — email in compass, but great in malice — in which the principal object of the writers seems to be to convince their readers that Auckland is the only province in the colony which is of any importance, and that all the others are mere second-rate settlements, whose interests must be considered subservient to her own. This description of writing is not altogether new to the papers we refer to. Since the welfare of the colony called for the removal of the seat of Government to Wellington, every hatred and malice, and uncharitableness of a peculiarly wicked character, have been apparent whenever an opportunity ' has occurred to give vent to such feelings. Were it not for the wretched demoralization thus manifested by the Auckland press, it would be amusing to watch attentively the various shifts these journals are put to in order to convince people that Wellington is not fit to become the capital of New Zealand, and that Auckland has been unjustly treated by being shorn of her honours. The shocks of earthquake which have occasionally been felt in Wellington, but which for years have never done any material damage, have been paraded by the Neva Zealand Herald as one strong reason why the General Government should never have been shifted away from the North. The " living volcano upon which Wellington is built," has been " graphically brought under the notice of the public ; everything that splenetic journalists were capable of doing has been done, in order to aid imagination in picturing Wellington a heap of ruins, or perhaps totally engulphed in a yawning fissure — a fate which we are almost justified in saying would give pleasure to some of the residents in Auckland, could it be brought about. Even the blame of the slight delay which has been caused in the construction of the patent slip at the seat of Government has been laid to " the hidden skeleton of Wellington — its earthquakes." The Herald at once seizes upon the idea that the contractors have refused to continue the work because they see that, " however carefully it may be done, and however secure it may be, the work may at any moment be destroyed from beneath, and the blame be laid, not on natural causes, but on faulty construction." But the danger of ever making use of the slip at Wellington, even if it were possible to complete it, is also ingeniously pointed out. The upheaving of the foundation of the patent slip in one place, its depression in another, might have the effect, we are told, either of breaking the back of any steamer that was at the time on the slip, of canting her over on her side, or even of raising the entrance of the slip higher than the other end, and so wedging the vessel in altogether. From these words one would suppose that Wellington generally enjoyed violent earthquakes, at least on alternate days ; and that the Panama Company cannot exist long now that Wellington has been chosen as a trap by which all their vessels are to be backbroken or otherwise lost. As long as the Auckland papers confine themselves to such ridiculous remarks as these the colony can afford to laugh at them. The Panama Company has, no doubt, long before this satisfied themselves that no such danger exists except in the minds of disappointed Aucklanders. When, however, paragraphs such as the following are found in those journals, it may be as well to take further notice of them. The Herald says : — A very great wrong has heen inflicted both on the colonies of New Zealand and New South Wales, which subsidize the company, and upon the shareholders of the company itself, in the forcing of Wellington upon them as the port of call, chosen, in the face of every practical business consideration, for the purpose of effecting certain political results. Sydney might have received her mail earlier by two days, had a more northern port been made a port of call, and with the port of departure fixed at Dunedin, might have had full three days more time for preparing her return mail. The New Zealand provinces might have enjoyed a more convenient interprovincial delivery, and the company would have saved much money, and increased its traffic, by plying between Panama and the real capital of either island, instead of between Panama and a port of little more commercial importance than Guam, or the I Bland of Petropolowski. We are then told that the people of Otago think pretty much the same as the Herald, and a hope is expressed, " that the subject of the port of call for their steamers will be again brought before the Assembly in the coming session, and the undivided pressure of the two leading provinces of New Zealand brought to bear, in order to right the wrong which a few political partisans and the antipathies of those who should hold the company 'b interests superior to the gratification of their own prejudices, have succeeded in \

bringing about." Whatever position Dunedin occupies as a commercial city, Auckland, since the settlement of other far wealthier provinces, has never had any just pretensions to be aught but a second-rate town. (Hutted with Imperial coin for the maintenance of an army of 10,000 men, she may have sprung up into a large and for the time being a wealthy place; but her prosperity declined rapidly when she was compelled "to depend merely on her own resources. . If we are to judge the importance of a country by her exports, we see, by referring to the statistics of 1864, that Auckland, even at that time, was in b most unsatisfactory state, and was merely buoyed up by the enormous expenditure which was being made within her boundaries. In that year the total value of New Zealand produce and manufactures exported from the Frovince of Auckland, only amounted to £134,567, in addition to which she re-ex-ported other Colonial, British, and Foreign manufactures to the value of £43,772. At the same time she exported £175,000 in specie, for which she could find no equivalent in produce. In Wellington, the exports of New Zealand produce and manufactures for the same year amounted to £234,725, and the produce of other colonies and countries to only £2,206, whilst her specie imported only amounted to £20,000. Again, the Province of Canterbury exported New Zealand produce to the value of £385,941; and Dunedin, to the value of £1,947,015. From these statistics, Auckland is shown to rank as a producing province far below Otago, Canterbury, and Wellington. The export of New Zealand produce from Nelson, for the same year, was of the value of £111,370. Since 1864, very material changes in the amount of exports from some of the provinces have occurred, but one thing is certain — Auckland will find herself in a still worse position than she was two years ago, whilst both Canterbury and Nelson will have increased their exports to a very large extent. And this is the Provinceaf Auckland, which must class itself by the side of Otago as one of the two leading provinces of New Zealand, and to whom the interests of the rest of the colony must be sacrificed. Any seeming importance which Auckland has acquired as a province has not been the result of a development of her resources, but the accidental result of her having enjoyed from her first existence a large Government and missionary expenditure, which has prematurely forced her growth, as is now being experienced when the fostering aid of the Government is withdrawn. Even supposing that Auckland were aught else than a second-rate province; supposing that it could be classed in importance with Otago, the reason for having the port of call for the Panama line established midway between the two, would be obvious. But the notion that the importance of Auckland alone is a sufcient reason to induce the Assembly to rob the present seat of Government of'its advantage, is simply absurd. As far as we can see, the only use of the Panama line touching at Auckland at all, would be to give greater facilities for the population to escape from a province, which, under existing arrangements, is being deserted in a sufficiently rapid manner.

By the arrival of the Lord Ashley, from Sydney, we are able to give more fully the telegrams of Englsh news received by the late mail.