some qualified Board of Examiners. The
certificate of such Inspector that the property was as represented,
should be given before the prospectus was issued. It is arguable whether
even further oversight might not be properly be taken by the State and
the report of a qualified officer be compulsory that the property was
reasonably worth the value placed upon it in the prospectus.

Probably it will be contended that such restrictions would be an undue
interference with private rights, and the old aphorism about a fool and
his folly will be quoted. There are doubtless fools so infatuated
that if they were brayed in a ten hundred-weight stamp-battery the
"foolishness that had not departed from them" would give a highly
payable percentage to the ton. Yet the State in other matters tries by
numerous laws to protect such from their folly. A man may not sell a
load of wood without the certificate from a licensed weighbridge or a
loaf of bread without, if required, having to prove its weight; and we
send those to gaol who practise on the credulity and cupidity of fools
by means of the "confidence trick." Why not, therefore, where interests
which may be said to be national are involved, endeavour to ensure fair
dealing?

Then with regard to the men who are to manage the mines, seeing that
a man may not become captain or mate of a river steamboat without some
certificate on competency, nor drive her engines before he has passed an
examination to prove his fitness, surely it is not too much to say that
the mine manager or engineer, to whose care are often confided the lives
of hundreds of men, and the expenditure of thousands of pounds, should
be required to obtain a recognised diploma to prove his qualifications.
The examinations might be made comparatively easy at first, but
afterwards, when by the establishment of Schools and Mines the
facilities have been afforded for men to thoroughly qualify, the
standard should be raised; and after a date to be fixed no man should be
permitted to assume the charge of a mine or become one of its officers
without a proper certificate of competency from some recognised School
of Mines or Technical College. The effect of such a regulation would in
a few years produce most beneficial results.

In New Zealand, whose "progressive" legislature I do not generally
commend, they have, in the matter of mine management, at all events,
taken a step in the right direction. There a mine manager, before
h