The most sanguine legislator could not anticipate anything like order under twelve months with all the pliant machinery of the Native Land Court worked to a certain end. And what then ? Every block would have probably a hundred owners, everyone of whom would have pro prietory rights. Are these the communities from which the member for Waitotara would expect concessions of land? And what would the result be if the score of tribes, multiplied by scores of owners, refused, or if one or two refused? Remember the ex-Native Minister took credit for the route-survey being finished before he left office. If a tribe here or there, or a number of members of a tribe, found to be owners, declined so much as to give a rood, or armed by the law with a title, de clined even to accept the dictum, of a compensption court, and threatened to throw a tomahawk into the scales, what would the Solon do who prided himself on the survey being completed yet wanted not only the land of the line itself, but some of the adjacent country ceded ? Surely the" only thing would be to survey another line round about the* contumacious tribe, or individual. But then the ownership of the outlying territory would have to be ascertained so as to know whether concessions might be obtained, there or not. Then of course mor9 Native Land Courts, more bickerings, more surveys, and then probably confusion again. Some lord of the soil would not sell his midden. The railway muse go elsewhere, probably with much better prospects as to completion be projected to the moon. This is what John Bryce would do, or rather what he suggests should have been done. The proposer of thanks to him said the speech was " simple." There are often true words spoken in jebt. What John was quarrelling with, was the fact that he was not in it. Ihe times were out of joint. The track of the railway has been taken by proclamation, and is now being actually built on, leaving the owners to be ascertained, and their claims, if any, settled as briskly as rival claimants can manage, but as to value only, we apprehend, on the prairie value, not enhanced by the expenditure of public money, but in some sense rendering tribute thereto. But this is mnch too successful for the ex-Minister. 