N.Z. MAIL PUBLISHED WEEKLY. FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 1891. THE MANAWATU RAILWAY.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 999, 24 April 1891, Page 20

N.Z. MAIL PUBLISHED WEEKLY. FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 1891. THE MANAWATU RAILWAY.

Objection has we observe been taken in more than one southern journal to the State purchase of the Manawatu Railway. The objections are rather of a negative than of a positive character. They come in the guise of counter arguments. On one side we read that if the property tax presses hard on the railway company in question, that is rather a sign that the property tax is a hard thing generally, than a reason for relieving the railway of its pressure by purchase. On the other we learn that if the Railway Commissioners and the Company cannot agree about the question of running power, the Legislature ought to make them, instead of troubling about so extreme a measure as the purchase of the private line. These are the main reasons giveD. They are put forward as counter arguments —a common practice in the game of setting up a man of straw to be knocked down with ease and ability. The men of straw have been knocked down without a doubt. But after all they are only men of straw. The property-tax argument is very grievously misunderstood. Nobody wants to relieve the Manawatu Company of this tax because it is galled by the tax. The opportunity here afforded for making a general attack upon this impost was irresistible to a journal committed to its repealBut the Manawatu Railway Company’s quarrel with the tax is on tho totally different and opposite ground that the tax hurts it in a way in which it hurts no one else. The Company’s claim for redress is twofold (I) because it has to pay the property tax, which other people make their creditors pay, and (2) because it has to pay, unlike anybody else, on the fictitious, not the actual, value of its property. The Company does not say “ buy our line j” the Company says •< make these certain definite changes in the tax to which we are entitled both by the principles of justice and the verdict of a Parliamentary Committee, given after careful and competent enquiry.” In the same way, the running powers are never in question. The Railway Commissioners and the Manawatu Directors do not have any dim*

culty in getting on together. Nobody wants the line bought on that account.

The reasons for the purchase of the line by the Colony have nothing to do with property taxes or running powers. To begin with, the line commands the whole of the railway system between Wellington, Taranaki and Napier, and the commanding position ought to be in the hands of the State. This is felt already, and must be felt every year in increasing degree. The interests of the two lines clash, in spite of the most exeellent dispositions on the part of their respective managers’. No modus vivendi which the Legislature can devise would remove the difference of interest. The question of the through rate alone presents difficulties which nothing short of the purchase of the line can remove with satisfactory completeness. Sooner or later, as everybody recognises, the Colony will have to buy the line ; every day the line grows more profitable ; every day the line must, therefore, grow dearer. That the .Railway Commissioners will manage it well, eveD some of tbeir harshest critics admit, for they are throwing the blame of some of their failures on the parsimony of the late Government. Some one said once that the purchase of the line would lose the Colony L4OOO a year of property tax, but bo forgot that the money would not be lost; it would simply come in as railway revenue. The two lines, moreover, could be managed more cheaply under one management —one staff would do the work of two. On the whole the case for the purchase of the railway has never yet been weakened by the arguments of the other side.