THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1901.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11823, 28 November 1901, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1901.

Parliament having adjourned, the Government is freed from the slight restraint exercised over its arbitrary actions by the present legislative contingent from Auckland Province. There is rapidly increasing reason to believe that the first use to which its escape from direct legislative "criticism has been put is to abandon even the pretence of pushing forward the Main Trunk Line—at least as far as the /Auckland end is concerned. That men are being largely discharged from the construction works has been repeatedly asserted during the past few days. The Government has endeavoured to allay the disquietude thus engendered by various plausible statements, the sum total of which is that there is no intention whatever to relax the energy which it claims to be displaying on our behalf. That the telegram which has been sent to the Minister for Public Works by Mr. Napier, M.H.R., puts into a very concrete form the somewhat vague reports which have been afloat. Its gist is that eighty men are now in Auckland City who have been discharged from the Main Trunk Construction Works, that two hundred more men were to be similarly discharged last night, and that five | hundred more men will follow them this very week. If our information is correct, and we have the gravest fears that it is unfortunately accurate, all construction work on the Auckland end of the line, excepting only culvert and bridge work, ceases with the approaching close of this present month of November. What reply Mr. Hall-Jones will make to Mr. Napier we do not know. But we do know that no explanations or extenuation can reassure the public mind in the face of these actual discharges and of the apparently wellfounded statement that a still more general stoppage of work is about to take place. That nothing is heard of any stoppage of work at the Wellington end of the construction only emphasises, the amazing treatment meted out to this city and province" and justifies us in saying that only the complete resumption of work atOngaruhe and elsewhere will convince the people of the North of the good-faith of the Southern Administration.

For this latest development of the Main Trunk question is entirely in keeping with the purely sectional policy of the present Government. We are at last to have a daily mail service between Auckland and the capital, this improvement in our means of communication being instituted by private shipping companies who attempt to meet thus the pressure of our ever-increasing transit and traffic, -which the Government makes no attempt whatever to encourage. The settlement of the North and the increasing interests which make improved internal communication imperative progress in spite of the Government; which neither gives us a through train nor assists in giving us a daily coastal service. The four-times-a-week trains from New Plymouth to Wellington have often been crowded to the utmost limits of their capacity. Now that the daily service has been commenced a wise Government would make provision for its unbroken continuance, but the present Government grudges every facility to the North and only takes an interest in the development of the South. If we look at the railway map of the colony we see the South Island gridironed with lines and the great bulk of North Island mileage converging into the hothoused city on Cook Strait. Thus it has long been and thus it still is. Such energy as may be shown in Main Trunk building is to be from the Wellington end, so that the country opened up may be made to feed the Wellington trade and the support of Wellington be thus assured to the Seddon Administration, which has reduced the holding of power to a fine art. Meanwhile, Auckland is left armxl its roadless and locked-up regions, the strong and .patient Issachar of our colonial tribes.

Auckland is accused by Mr. Seddon and his favoured coterie of the tsrribie crime imputed to Oliver Twist by the immortal Bumble. They say that we always want more. It is probably as a corrective to this alleged failing that they invariably make our Government gruel as thin as possible. We get nothing thick excepting promises. Arid of these promises the one that the Main Trunk shall be completed in four years from 1900 has been repeated so often that Mr. Masse}'—judging our rulers by his own sense of honour—has felt himself compelled to accept it. But though Mr. HallJones may be still able to persuade the members for Wellington of the coming event of 190-I—those gentlemen being reputedly indifferent to the linking of the lines so long as their city is assisted to encroach upon the trade of Auckland country—he should find it harder to convince the members for Auckland that the discharge of construction hands is a vigorous forward policy. What is the Government policy towards the North—its railway policy and its land policy alike—but a Machiavellian scheme to impede in every possible manner our natural and inevitable growth and prosperity. For many years we have been waiting for railway connection with Wellington and for the opening up by the Main Trunk Extension Northward of our magnificent northern peninsula. We wait still and are likely to wait as long as the Southern Administration rules at Wellington. For many months a great to-do has been made about the approaching unlocking of a few thou-

sand acres in the King Country, but this is a mere cloud of dust to cover the deliberate withholding from settlement of half-a-million acres in the North of Auckland and quadruple that vast area in the south of the province. The North is being overrun by Southern settlers seeking for opportunity to take up our unused land, with expert farmers from Otago and Canterbury, with skilful dairymen from Taranaki and Wellington, not to mention Australians and Britishers, with occasional uitlanders from Africa and landseekers from America itself. Why does the Seddon Government not make an effort to satisfy their wishes, so advantageous to the colony as a whole 1 Why does it notadvance a broad and intelligent landpolicy, opening up a million acres where now it opens up a few thousands, giving to every man able to take advantage of it opportunity to win wealth for himself and for us all upon land which is utterly valueless until it is ably and intelligently used 1 Need we seek the reason 1 Do we not know that Northern railways remain unbuilt and Northern lands unsettled because the present Administration is a Southern Administration pure and simple and regards every step forward made by the northern province as a step nearer the time when the establishment of just government will deprive the South of a dominance on which it has fattened at our expense.