Sessional_Paper_1887-1888 — Page 374

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(d.) The preliminary money deposit coupled with the foregoing guarantees will protect the Government against any liability; the arrangement may of course tend to raise the price of the work, for timid con- tractors especially will charge for these risks, but the increase in the expense will fall on the lot-owners. This cannot be helped. At whatever cost to others the Government must protect itself against liability in any shape or form, except of course in respect of its own reclamations opposite Government lots, and there the Government must accept risks like any other lot-owner.

The foregoing safeguards will do away-as regards the Government-with any speculative element that may appear to exist if the work is done for the lot- owners, but if the Government does the work for itself it must take on itself what- ever risks and uncertainties there may be in the venture, and itself become the speculator.

A printed contract will have to be entered into between the Government and each individual lot-owner by which as already stated the Government must be pro- tected absolutely against any liability.

2. The assessment of values ($7,910,821) of the new lands to be reclaimed from the sea is based on the prices at present ruling in the leasehold-estate market in this Colony, and may be accepted as correct. Each allotment of reclamation has been appraised at the market value of the piece of land immediately behind it. The figures are given in great detail in a voluminous Appendix to my letter to the Colonial Secretary of the 1st of June, 1888. I requested Mr. CHATER to give me his ideas as to the price of land along the Praya, independently of my own appraisals, and I found the discrepancies between us were trifling and limited only to two of the Sections.

sum.

3. If the Government were to carry out the reclamation on its own account, the profit would of course be lessened by the amount of compensation to be paid to the present marine lot-owners; that is to say the $5,764,593 would be materially reduced, though it is certain it would not disappear entirely since it is impossible to conceive that the claims for compensation could amount to anything like this But whatever profits may be left, large or small, after paying off all indemni- ties, the Governor considers such profits might more fitly go into the Colonial Treasury than into the pockets of the marine lot-owners, and on this account His Excellency thinks the work might be done by the Government on its own account and for its own benefit, more especially in view of the fact that the doing of the sections by piecemeal reduces risk and limits the consideration of possible claims to small groups at a time, and thus gives an opportunity to advance or recede as the Government may elect hereafter. As regards risks of injury to the work by typhoons I consider such risks would be the same in either case, for the sections would be quite as liable to be injured or destroyed if carried out one after the other in detail as they would be if done as a whole at the same time.

4. The main advantage would therefore be in the having to deal only with a small number of marine lot-owners' claims at one time, and with regard to marine lot-owners' claims, I do not find in the whole of these papers or in the many oral discussions that have taken place in connexion with this proposed scheme of Recla- mation that the Governor has ever had a legal opinion as to the rights of the Crown in respect of foreshores opposite lands leased to individuals.

5. Briefly recapitulated the Government contention has always been that the foreshore is the property of the Crown absolutely, that the Crown has the right to reclaim the sea, at the public expense, in front of the premises of any marine lot- owner and to interpose fresh building sites between those premises and the sea, subject to the payment of such compensation to the lot-owner as may be due him for losses or injury accruing by the interposition of such new lands and of buildings

erected thereon.

6. As set forth by Mr. FRANCIS, Q.C. the contention of the marine lot- -owner (doubtless put into his head by Mr. FRANCIS himself) is: that in granting him a marine lot-lease for 999 years the Crown has invested him for that term with an indefeasible right (by way of easement), of direct access to High Water Mark, from which access the Crown has no legal power to cut him off. He