The Oamaru Mail. THURSDAY, JUNE 3, 1880.

Oamaru Mail, Volume IV, Issue 1297, 3 June 1880, Page 2

The Oamaru Mail. THURSDAY, JUNE 3, 1880.

We have been favored with a letter by Mr. W. H. Williams, the manager of the Shag Point coal mine, in which that gentleman points out that we were under a misapprehension as to the extent of the Shag Point coal trade. With pleasure we received the correction, and willingly publish the fact that we had under estimated the importance of the foremost coal business in the Middle Island. It is fortunate for the Colony that its coal measures are being opened up. The development of our coalfields and other resources will be the only antidote to our present financial malady. We have made expensive railways. Let us use every endeavor to open up onr natural treasures so that those railways may be made reproductive, and so that the burthens of taxation may be rendered less oppressive by retaining the wages of labor in the Colony. Thanks to the Grey Ministry and Mr. Commissioner Conyers, the coal of the Shag Point mines and other mines have been brought into use on the railways and in connection with our railway works. It has been loudly proclaimed by political agitators that the Grey Government endeavored to perform acts which would have been damaging to the interests of the working classes of the Colony, This cannot be proved ; but it can be proved that the saving consequent upon the substitution of colonial for Newcastle coal, for which we are indebted to the Grey Government, is no less than L 30,000. Then, we must also take into consideration that the example set by the Grey Government has had the effect of popularising our colonial coal, mines, increasing their general business, and enabling their proprietors to employ a> large number of hands to work them vigorously and profitably. No one can estimate the great good that will accrue from this one

act of the Grey Government, and for which Mr. Hall took credit in his speech delivered at Leeston the other day, for he had the assurance to include this item of L 30,000 in the amount by which he said his Government had retrenched. Why, deduct this amount, and there is scarcely any retrenchment remaining as having been effected by the Hall Government. In this matter, as in everything excellent to which the Colony is indebted to the Grey Government, Mr. Hall and his satellites take the credit, whilst they blame the Grey Government for all the misfortunes that have been brought upon the Colony by the Ministries that preceded that Government—Ministries of which the Hall Ministry is the prototype.