TOLLGATE QUESTION.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XL, Issue 9063, 22 April 1891, Page 3

TOLLGATE QUESTION.

TO THE EDITOR. Sik, — I soe by advertisement in your paper that a meeting o£ the latepayers of tlio Moa Riding is to be held at Inglewood on Saturday April 25th at half -past two to consider the question of erecting tollgates. Why, I wonder, is the meeting called for that hour on a Saturday, a time at which many settlers are obliged to be in New Plymouth? Is some desired resolution to be passed in our absence ? To my mind, the advertisement as to establishing tollgates ought to have been headed ''looking backward." Tollgates 6eem to me a relic of barbarism suited to the times when old ladies were drowned for witchcraft, persons were hanged for any robbery exceeding thirteen pence, and suicides were buried in cross-roads — with stakes through their bodies. When as Hood says, "They buried Ben in four cross-roads, With a stake in his inside " ; but in the present day tollgates seem what the French term "passe" or behind the time. Tollgates and fibs are in some respect alike, if you set up one fib, you have to set up two or more others to protect it, and if you set up one tollgate you must set up some more, or people will go round and avoid it. Of all the unsanctified nuisances that were ever invented a tollgate is one of the worst. You come along on a wet day, say after having driven ten miles, capillary attraction has drawn about a bucket full of water up each of your sleeves, you have been nodding your head every minute or two to discharge the water from the brim of yonrhat, the water that runs down the back of your waterproof is finding its way on to your cushion where it forms a litte lake under a portion of your anatomy which shall be nameless, and lo ! a tollgate. You shout " Hoi ! Hi ! Hoi ! " for three or four minutes, and then you hear some old man about , 90 years of age finding his crutch in the back part of the toll- house, and by the time you have had your purse open long enough to get it full of water the patriarch appears. You give, him a shilling, he feels slowly in all his pockets, and then goes in for change. You hear him shaking coin about in old teapots for 3 or 4 minutes more, and then be comes out again and says he " Has'nt enough change, and will give you threepence as you come back." When you come back, yon see him at the bottom of the garden, and, as you have been soaking wet for hours, and know it will take him 10 minutes to get lo the toll-gate, you let the 3d slide. I wonder the advocates of toll-gates are not consistent, and do not call a meeting to get " dog tax gates" also erected on our roads, and so collect " dog tax" from the | owners of dogs as they go about with i them. This would " catch the Maoris," j which is a favorite argument for tollgates. I wonder they do not also advocate j erecting a gibbet and the stocks in the I Moa Riding. Our roads certainly want some money spent on them, and the whole road system wants overhauling and putting upon a sensible basis, but tollgates are not a move in the right direction. Surely there is some " Yankee" who can be found up in some part of Taranaki who can invent" a better plan of collecting half-pence than through the medium of a legalised highway robbery. There is to 5 much of the " your money or your life" idea about a tollgate. " Toll, falls almost entirely upon farmers, but there is no more reason why a farmer should pay it than anyone els& ; When he goes about the selling of his cattle, sheep, fruit, cheese, eggs or butter, is" he not doing a useful act for the benefit of all. Do not the town-people reap the benefit of his produce, and his journeyings? It is no more right to tax his horse and vehicle by toll, than it would be to tax the grocers' scales, the blacksmith's bellows, or the market gardeuer's wheelbarrow, and do not foot passeagers also use the roads ? Then why not tax them also. Every householder reaps the benefit of the roads whether be has a horse or not. His sugar, j tea, bacon, coals, firewood, furniture, everything he has, has been conveyed over them. If road tax there must be, it ought to fall npon all alike, and be collected in some inexpensive way. To my mind a tollgate is an invention about worthy of a Sioux Indian. — I am, &c, Thos. Drake. P.S. — A tollgate is very unfair also in its operation. A farmer on one side of it can get to his town all the year round •without paying ; the farmer just beyond the gate has to pay eveiy time there is a little family errand.