Barkerville, Williams Creek, Cariboo

"THE CARIBOO SENTINEL"


In presenting the first number of this journal to the public we are called upon by established custom to state the claims which we trust will entitle it to a wide, general, and substantial support. In performing this duty circumstances compel us to be brief, but at the same time we hope the objects and principles of the paper will not on that account be the less understood or placed in doubt. We would despise ourselves if we sought the countenance of any portion of the British Columbian people by concealing our view on any question, and therefore we trust the brevity of the following declaration will not be taken as if we desired to draw a veil over our opinions.

It has long been felt, and by no class more than the mining community, that not only the country's highest interests, but the interests of individuals, have been most seriously impaired and blasted by the notoriously exaggerated and often unfounded reports published about the mines of Cariboo both at home and abroad; and knowing by our own experience in this country that there were good grounds for the reproaches which we have so frequently heard leveled against the ignorant or designing propagators of false reports, we long since formed a determination to establish a newspaper on the first opportunity in the very centre of the mining district, to send forth reports collected from authentic sources, upon which the adventurous spirits of this and other countries might base their opinions and form something like proper and correct views of what they had to expect in coming here.

The long, looked for opportunity occurred not many months since, and we lost no time in carrying our resolution into effect. Our object at first, and up to a very recent period was to publish a journal exclusively devoted to the diffusion of mining intelligence, but since we landed in the colony we have had forced upon us the necessity there is for a thoroughly independent journal, with wider and more extensive aims than we proposed to ourselves at first. The public abuses which exist, the injustice and inequality of the taxation of the colony, and the shameful waste of the revenue in keeping up a standing army of official drones in a depopulated country, demands that those who have a power to wield should do so for the public advantage regardless of every other consideration. Our efforts shall therefore be directed to the eradication of every official abuse, the existence of which now cramps and blights the awakened energies of the people.

The inequalities of taxation, for instance that monstrous and iniquitous Gold Export Tax Bill, passed to drive miners out of the colony, shall be held up by us to the public podium which such a reckless disregard of common justice demands at our hands. had the officials of the colony, aided and abetted by the representatives of Cariboo East and West, passed an Income Tax Bill that would have affected their own incomes equally with the rest of the community, instead of singling out a class for exceptional taxation who are not only the bone and sinew of the country, but from whom the major part of the taxation had been previously raised, those servants of the public would have shown at least a desire to act justly. Until this Act as it now stands is rubbed out of the Statutes of the colony, we shall not cease to call for its repeal. Retrenchment in every department of the public service is not only demanded but will be force upon the Government by the state of the public finances. $250,000 a year for the officials of a colony in which there is not a white population in the aggregate of 6000 persons is an expenditure which the most servile minions of the Government cannot, dare not, offer any justification of.


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