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Wellington Independent, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3977, 13 December 1873, Page 2

The editor of the Dunedin " Guardian" assumes on all occasions to lecture all and sundry upon every possible and impossible subject. The other day our contemporary complacently assured his readei'9 that the Province of Wellington was in such straightened circumstances, that it could not produce the wherewithal to grant a bonus in aid of sugar beet cultivation. Our contemporary did not eniighten his readers as to how he obtained this interesting morceau, but left them, if they, pleased, to imagine that the editor possessed some occult means of penetrating into the innermost recesses of the Provincial Treasury of Wellington, for their peculiar edincation and profit. With the same complacent oracular air, our contemporary now aspires to the position of a kind of New Zealand Metternich. Ho thinks Wellington city " should be made a Federal territory," the telegram says. Bless his inventive mind, does he ! And if the seat of the Provincial Government be not removed to Wanganui, " the disraption of the Colony must inevitably ensue." Of course, the editor having triumphantly announced this, ordinary mortals have nothing left to do but to bow in all humility as unto the decrees of fate. Knowing the unutterable woe and pertubation of mind that this dread prediction would cause, the editor might have spared our harrowed feelings by giving some definite information as to the precise date when we may look f . r its fulfillment. But on this mysterious'y awful subject we are left to grope in the dark. There is a most tantalizing reticence common to all great modern prophets. They permit us to peep beneath a corner of the veil of the future, and when our curiosity has been fearfully aroused, abruptly pull it down, and shut up the book of fate, leaving it for our own excited imagination to guess the horrible things concealed behind. However, very fortunately, we retain a special prophet on our staff, who, in the extraordinary accuracy and horror of his prognostications, deems himself quite a match for the seer of Dunedin, if not a cut above him. This gifted genius has cust the horoscope with his customary exactitude, and confidently assures us that the terrible event predicted by his Dunedin compeer, will come to pnss precisely at that time when the moon shall turn to green cheese. We feel considerably reassured, and our readers need not be alarmed in the slightest.

News of the death of a Maori through a too liberal \ise of intoxicating liquors comes to us from Wairarapa. Patrick Panekeneke, the d.-ceased h d been supplied unlimitedly with drink by the landlord of the Lake Ferry Hotel, and

shortly after leaving the place he fell from his horse and was killed. At the inquest the jury returned a verdict to the effect that the deceased was accidentally killed while in a state of intoxication, to which was added a rider calling the attention of the Government to the bad condition in which the hotel was kept. With commendable promptness the Provincial Government, acting upon the presentment of the jury, and the information supplied by the police, cancelled the license of George Douglas, the landlord of the hotel, on Tuesday last. The frequency of fatal occurrences of this kind ought to lead to a more rigid supervision of the country houses, and to the rejection of all applications for licenses except in cases where the respectability of the applicant in well attested. The great convenience which a well conducted accommodation-house affords to travellers in sparsely populated districts is unquestionable, but instead of proving a benefit of this kind, it is only too true that many houses of accommodation situated on the confines of the settled districts are little better than drinking dens, where the station hands may drink themselves into a state of hopeless degradation. Most of this dishonest traffic is carried on under a system of seclusion, which is favored by the isolated position of the houses, but it is just to the police to say that no opportunity is lost to stamp out this class of sinning publicans, who are dealt with in an equally unsparing manner by the Provincial Government. There are still one or two houses in existence of the Lake Ferry Hotel sort, but the brand of the authorities is set upon them, and before long we may have* to record the pleasureable fact that the accommodationhouses throughout the province have been improved up to the standard of those to be found even at the uttermost limits of the Province of Canterbury, and that is aaying a good deal.