THE HONS. MR. FOX ON" RAILWAYS

Colonist, Volume XVI, Issue 1632, 13 May 1873, Page 4

THE HONS. MR. FOX ON" RAILWAYS

s The following is an extract from Mr. Fox's 1 recent speech to his constituents:— j There aro still person of the fossil order who c believe that railways are premature in New Zealand. Sir David Monro told his constituents the other day that railroads in New Zealand " were as much out of place as a steam plough would be in what the Scotch call a kail yard." He continued that " early settlers in a new country might get along with their wheeled carts, without sixponce being applied to it, and as their means increased, ditches would be dug, and track? made, and in time a good macadamised road t be pot. Unless there was much business to bo done, c it was better to make only ordinary road ." "We '. must creep before we gang," and so forth. I have r known Sir David Monro for thirty years and lived for some of that period in the same place with him, i Nelson, a settlement for which the influence of minds r like his has earned the designation of " Sleepy [ Hollow," I never knew a public improvement prob posed at that time which he did not pronounce a " premature." He is a great admirer aa you may i. gather from his oration at vVaikouaiti, of the " stick-in-the-mud policy," that policy which used to find favor in the eyes of the countrymen of Rip Van Winkle and his oompanioa Dutchman round their , little tea table on Manhattan Island wlrere they . sweetened their beverage by primitively sucking by turns a lump of sugar suspended by a string. Sir David Monro left the old world when railways were in their infancy, and he lias either never had, or never availed himeelf, of opportunities of travel which might have enabled him to appreciate the work that railways have done in new countries by superseding " the old wheeled cart, the ditches and tracks, which , don't cost a sixpence," and to which his memory ' fondly clings as the approved means of locomotion \ in the days of his youth. If he had travelled a few [ thousand miles in Europo and America during the last thirty years he might have becomeaware of the fact that railways are nob only as he imagines " costly luxuries " suitable for old countries where there is a 1 " large transport of goods and passengers," but that they are in new countries the means of developing * t vast resources which could not be reached by the ; " old wheeled cart, the ditehea and tracks that don't cost a sixpence" that they in fact create the "goods ! and passengers," who9e transport contributes countless sixpences to the revenue which not only keeps 1 them in repair, but returns large profits to those who construct them. And he might have learned that even when the railway is not paying commercially in itself, it may yet be a most paying concern to the country by such development of its resources as I have referred to; admirably brought out by Mr. Justice Chapman (a man of great experience and perhaps the soundest political economist in the Colony), in his excsllent lecture delivered two years ago in Dunedin. The particular advantage of travelling on muddy roads " that don't cost a sixpence " in preference to the irou rail of civilisation requires an intelligence of a very peculiar order to appreciate. There are minds with which sixpences have much weight, what we may term "sixpenny understandings." Thore is a story of a Professor at one of the Seotoh Universities who one day found a sixpence in the street; as he was picking it up Daft Jamie the town idiot came by. " Ay, Professor," he says, "ye might give me that saxpence." "Hout mon," replied the Professor pocketing the coin, "ye may find sixpenoes for yoursel!" That Professor had a sixpenny understanding, and Sir David's appreciation of the small coin must be quite as strong as that of his countryman, if the fear of spending it induces him to prefer muddy traoks to the more costly inventions that civilised men use everywhere else. Sir David's political leader, Mr. Stafford, however, has more discretion than to regard our railway scheme from the Scotch Professor and the Rip Van Winkle point of view. On the contrary he claims it as his own, and declares that we stole it from him, rogues that we were. The only evidenoe that he brings in support of this petty laroeny allegation is, I j believe, some allusion which he made in a speech at ! Timaru to the desirability of bridging the rivers of the Colony from Auckland to Dunedin, and the fact of his having moved for a return to show the number of persons drowned in crossing the rivers in New i Zealand. But it may well be asked why if he really ever entertained any idea of such plnns as ours, he never during the many years of profound peaoe in which he held office, proposed anything of the sort, and when once his colleague Mr. Fiizherbart maie a small step in that direction, the latter met with anything but encouragement at the hands of his chief. However Mr. Stafford, with more tact than Sir David, now adopts our offspring and calls it bis own darling child; you know what the plan is, and I therefore need not go into its details. '