While the Government, in the name ot re trenchment, are docking tea per cent of the few shillings earned by their most poorly paid employe's, it is outrageous that they should waste a large sum of money in printing vast quantities of perfectly worth less so-called scientific reports, which, as our Wellington correspondent pithily observed the other day, are not even adapted for butter paper. These publication'l, the list of which we published in our Saturday's parliamentary news as laid upon the table of the House last week, and which occupy 2000 pages ot printed matter, although published at the cost of the colony are not for public information. Our reporter made application for copies for the Star and was informed that they were private papers intended merely for mem bers of the House. One of these useless publications could not be brought out at the Government office owing to pressure of work, and it was given to a local firm to print. Yet the Government printer says in hia annual report that he had been obliged, during the recess, _to 'put married men on half time. To such indefensible waste as this the parliamentary pruning knife should be unsparingly applied.
Accounts of Saturday's football matches, and the meeting to form a French Literary Club appear on the fourth page of to-day's issue.
Telegraphic communications with the South was interrupted this, afternoon.
