Ar the special meeting of ratepayers held on the 11th of March last, an amendment to the Land Regulations giving the Municipal Council fuller powers for acquiring land for new roads, the extension and widening of existing roads, ete, was passed ne mine contradicente, For years the Council have been trying to get these powers, the most urgently required improvements being often fatally blocked by the obstructiveness of absent landowners, and some twenty years ago the British Minister, Sir Thomas Wade, promised the then Chairman of the Council that he would do everything he could to get the Council these necessary powers. The Council is still hoping to get them, The "minutes published in our columns yesterday morning of the Council's meeting on the 22nd alt, contain some correspondence in which the necessity for these powers" is most plainly demonstrated. On the 20th of April' Inst, Mr. Mayne, the Municipal Surveyor, wrote to Messrs, Dowdall, Hanson, and McNeill, who had applied for a permit to rebuild the houses on Cadastral Lot 276, that the Council was: anxious to acquire a strip of the land to widen the Foochow Road, one of. the-narrowest.and: most crowded roads in the Settlement, 'I'he piece required measures 374 square feet or one-twentieth of a mow, and the Council offerred for this the sum of is. 1,055, which is at the rate of over £17,000 sterling an acre. 'I'he land belongs, it appears, to Mrs. Cowie, widow of the late Mr. J. G. W. Cowie of Shanghai. Mrs. Cowie is now a resident in Eugland, avid her interest in Shanghai is confined to receiving an income from her property here. Messrs. Dowdall, Hanson, and McNeill write to the Council that they " wrote fully to Mrs. Cowie, advising her to accept the terms offered, but have received her answer by telegraph declining." Thus Mrs, Cowie, an absentee landowner, is able through the defects in our Land Regulations as they stand to permanently block an urgently demanded public improvement, even though her agents on the spot, who are more fully conversant with all the circumstances than she can be, have advised her to accede to the Council's request, t is monstrous that this should be possible, and this is only one instance of what occurs too often, Absentee landowners cannot be altogether suppressed while Society remains constituted as it is, grumble as we may at the way in which they fatten on our labour; but they should not abuse their legal rights. Legally, no doubt, Mrs. Cowie is justified in refus sing to consent to the improvement the Council wish to make; but morally nothing can justify her obstruction the income she receives from Shanghai is dependent on the continued prosperity of the port; she ought to be anxious to do her best to further that prosperity, not to obstruct it.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.