The New Zealand Herald. AUCKLAND, TUESDAY, JUNE 18, 1867.

New Zealand Herald, Volume IV, Issue 1121, 18 June 1867, Page 4

The New Zealand Herald.

AUCKLAND, TUESDAY, JUNE 18, 1867.

SPKCTEJVIUK AGENDO, Give every man thino oar, but few thy voice : Take each mail's consure, but reserve thy judgment. This atove all,—To thine own self be true And it must follow, as the night the day, Tlion caiiitnol then he r al*f» to any man."

Tue address read by liis Honor the Superintendent, at the opening of the present session of the Provincial Council, yesterday, refers to several very important questions which are exceedingly closely connected with the advancement and general welfare of the province. Wo may arrange the topics alluded to in the address under the following principal heads: —Land laws and immigration, dry docks, the railway, peace, the financial state of the province, and retrenchment. It would, of course be impossible to dwell at length on all these subjects in one article ; we propose, therefore, confining our remarks principally to the first mentioned topic, viz., the land laws and immigration, and only cursorily glancing at the other questions. Of the importance of internal peace and security we need say little. All parties will agree with his Honor as to the great desir-

ability of securing both these. No country can progress which is in a chronic state of sedition and rebellion. Civil war, in all times and in all countries, has been a powerful engine that lias dislocated society, thrown all tho machinery of social progress and advancement out of gear, demoralised both conquerors and conquered, and left scars and wounds deeply indented iu tho body politic, and feelings of dislike and distrust rankling in the minds of tho combatants, to be transmitted to their descendants with all their baleful conscquences. We must have, if possible, both peace and security in its fullest and amplest sense, for capital is so shy a creature that it instinctively recoils and ilees from any spot where full security for it cannot be obtained. This, even in old countries, where mere | rumours of war rapidly send down the funds aud tho pricc of securities, much more than in a new country such as this northern part of New Zealand, where war means, not only depreciation o:E property and increased taxation, but danger to life. Peace is relatively a vast deal more important to us than it is to older countries, for their wars are generally foreign wars, ours aro domestic, and their evil effects are all the more intense. Tho announcement as to the financial i state of the province, and to the efforts made

to retrench, has not taken the public by I surprise. Of course, if the income, and therefore the expenditure of the individuals of which a nation is composed be reduced, the income of the nation must also be reduced, for it is dopendent generally on the expenditure of the people on the principal luxuries and necessities of life. What the reductions are which have been made will soon be known, as a notice of motion has been given, seeking the desired information. We presume the public works department will be reduced Tory considerably, and we hope that those two very great causes of expenditure, the police and the gaol, will also be carefully considered, with a view to a reduction in these departments. In fact, as we have before advocated, so we now reiterate the great desirability of making the expense and management of our prisons a special and careful study, with a view to economising expenditure, increasing the amount of work done by the prisoners, and, at least, cutting off to some extent the sources of crime by our treatment of crimi-

nals. "With respect to the railway and drydocks, we can see no chance of the railway carried to Onehunga paying its working expenses even, if it were ready for traffic tomorrow. It is the universal experience we believe in England, that short lines between two towns, of some importance even, are very unproductive. Our views as to the great desirability of dry docks have been so frequently put forth that we need not recapitulate them now. Wo will only premise that we advocate no narrow views or auy pet scheme. "We do not care what may be the modus operandi by ' which the benefits that would accrue to Auckland from having every facility for cheaply and quickly repairing vessels are secured to us. "We do not either offer opinions as to cost, or as to the engineering : portion of the question. "We go on the broad principle tliafc we want the means of " repairing ships of all classes, and thus - securing a large amount of labour for skilled artizans of all classes, and we are quite ready to defer to skilled and professional opinion as to whether a dry dock, or some of the means referred to by Mr. "Wrigg, be determined upon. A rose to us : will smell as sweet by any other name as dry dock, only, if possible, let us obtain the advantages to which we have referred, and '' yet at the same time we must not " pay too " dearly for out whistle." The railway nrust be a beacon warning against undue haste in the final adoption of any plan. "We are very glad, however, that his Honor is really having the subject thoroughly investigated with a view to action being taken in the

matter. The land laws and immigration are a kind of Siamese twins. They are naturally united. The reference to these in his Honor's spccch we consider very important indeed. Our own views as to the alterations necessary, and the principles which we ought to adopt, have been repeatedly put forward. We start with this general principle, 1 hat the cultivation of the waste ; lands of the province is of primary importance ; first, to increase the production of " real wealth among us, in the shape of food and wool raised from our land, and so decrease the necessity for buying certain articles of food from other countries ; and ; secondly, to increase our exports, to give in exchange for our imports, and so turn the ! balance of trade more in our favour; and i thirdly, the settlement of a large population on the waste lands. Such a population will ' be the most effective standing army we can possibly have to obtain and preserve peace, and the security to life and property. ' The peaceful battalions of energetic country settlers, quietly pursuing their work of reclaiming the waste lands of the province, ' will be our best and our cheapest " defence . " force their steady increase in numbers and in wealth, and are surest guarantees for • peace, are consequently for prosperity. These arc " the colonial forces" that will maintain a bloodless and costless peace; numbers will be their strength, aud, combined with the peacefully inclined Maoris, they will be able to nip disaffection in the bud, and to prevent its ripening and doing harm.

We liave, on broad grounds, advocated tlie policy of making settlement of population on the land the great principle we should adopt in disposing of it. As we recently said, the money accruing from the sale of land ought not to be our object, but the monev which successful settlers will contribute" toward the public burdens, so as to lighten their pressure generally—the produce they will raise from the land on which they settle, and the labour they will put upon that land, either of their own or hired. Thus, a machine is set in motion which causes every limb of the body politic to move. Our material wealth, our means of giving labour to those who require it, our trade and commerce, are all increased by successful country But the mere purchaseof laud does nothing of this kind. The speculator buys the Provincial talent and wraps it up in a napkin until he thinks fit to use it. He holds the raw material of wealth closed in his own grasp ; he neither enters in and improves it himself, nor does he allow any one else to do so; and he too oftoa prevents those who axe man-

fully Leaving the burden and heat of the day of early settlement from reaping the full reward of their labors, and so checks in a variety of ways the advancement of the country. ~We trust, therefore, that the measures to be submitted, or alterations to be made, will have the Tjonafidc settlement of population on land as their great object. All restrictions as to giving land only to persons who arrive in the province from England should be abolished. The time is passed for any of the Australian colonies to exclude the inhabitants of any of their number from advantages offered to people from any other part of the world. Let any man, come from whence he may, have the opportunity of selecting land, on the sole condition that he will go and occupy it. And let a certain term of occu-

pation of that land—not merely of residence in the province —be his title to receive a Crown Grant for it. And whatever general country land„tho province has should be open for selection immediately it bccomes provincial property, so that the man who desires a thousand acres can have it, and we shall not have the land cut up into small lots of 50 to GO acres at a great expense, and prevent capitalists who desire an estate from obtaining it by the foolish system we have pursued of cutting up each block into small lots. By a clause in the Amended Lands Act certain land can be left unsurveyed, and the purchaser can select the quantify he desires to have, and have it surveyed after. This should be generally applied and acted upon, and so the expense of surveys would be greatly reduced, and persons would get the land they required. But as a further inducement to have that mixture of capital and labor in our settlements which is so desirable, we would give to the immigrant a quantity of land in proportion to the amount of cash he brought with him into the country. It is some months since we advocated a plan of that kind, and we still believe it would be found to work well. A few resident capitalists in our various settlements would be a vast gain. They would do a great deal toward turning the scale in favour of success of neighbouring settlers by the employment they would give, and they would be of great use in raising the tone of society in their neighbourhood, and inviting their neighbors

to improvement in various ways. We think this is of very considerable importance ; and for various reasons we would treat the capitalist already in Auckland who would go occupy and cultivate land, in precisely the same way as if he had just arrived in the country. "We must give facilities for men to acquire landed estates of fair size that they can hand down to their children, and f.o have a happy mixture of grades of wealth among us, A dead level of uniformity is no'j good, it is not in accordance with the usual workings of nature. As the various subjects mentioned in the address are brought bofore the Council, we shall be prepared to ditscuss them fully and frankly on their merits, and also the views which may be put forth in the Council respecting them. "We must not omit to mention the announcement made by his Honor, that a tender lias been accepted for leasing the Kawakawa coal mines. "We consider this of very great importance to the province, knowing that the coal brought to Auckland as a sample is of very superior quality, and we believe it will prove a source of very considerable wealth to the province. They will be worked immediately, we believe.