Untitled

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 8413, 12 January 1899, Page 3

Sutherland put up a New Zealand cycling record for the mile at the Tiniaru Caledonian sports last week, doing the < distance in the fast time of 2min lO^sec. At Armidale (N.S.W.) recently the manager of a boot store drank some sheepdip in mistake for castor oil, and died soon afterwards from arsenical poisoning. The Queensland Government is offering £1000 reward and a free pardon to any | person concerned, not being the principal offender, for information leading to the conviction of the Gatton murderers. Official figures just to hand show that the population of every European conntry goes on increasing rapidly ; and that during the past len years this increase has been at the rate of nearly 10 per cent. The means of maintaining tho people are not increasing in like ratio. At the beginning of the present century the population of Europe was put by Levasseiir at 175,000,000. In 1830 it waa 220,000,000. In 1&60 it was 290,000,000, and in 1890 it was 350,000,000. It is now 380,000,000, and the continuance [of the present rate of increase will make it 385,000,000 in 1900, 10 per cent increase over what it waa in IS9O. Complaints continue to be made, )vrites a Wellington correspondent, regarding the arrangements for tourists at Mount Cook, and especially of the charge of 10s a day for Hying in the tin huts in the Tasman Valley, it is pointed out that in no other part of tho colony is a charge made for staying in the Government lints on out-of-the-way tourist routes. The red-tape regulations with which Mount Cook is being hedged around must, he thinks, be the result of leaving the arrangements to some obstinate official who is neither aware of the circumstances nor the importance of the matter he has in hand. Already he knows of t.wo parties that have been abandoned in consequence of the charges made for using the huts. For the last two seasons tourists from Great Britain and the Continent have gone away utterly disgusted with the arrangements at Mount Cook. If, on the other hand, things were well managed there every one of these tourists would prove a walking advertisement for New Zealand, and in time we should have a tourist traffic that would be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds per annum. The Post, referring editorially to the matter, says : — " The complaints seem to prove, if further proof were necessary, the fact that departmental officialdom often caunot be trusted with matters of a purely business nature out of its own groove. Our scenery, with the rapid modern improvement in travel, is likely at no distant date to be one of our chief colonial assets. The tourist traffic of Switzerland and Italy result in an enormous yearly expenditure that is of vast benefit to those countries. It is a serious matter, then, at a time when our scenic attractions are becoming widely known that a bad impression should be produced on the minds of tourists from abroard. Yet there can be no doubt that during the past two or three years such an impression has been created in the minds of many visitors from the old world by the arrangements and vexatious charges at the Hermitage, Mount Cook."