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benefit to us to have a limitation of six months within which we could take any steps to recover moneys due to us, or to settle any disputes in the contract, instead of the full time we should have under our contracts. The whole tenor of your letter under reply, as well as of all previous ones upon the subject, has been to defend the course taken by the Government in passing the Act, and to show that they hail not insisted upon the limitation-of-time clause. According to your present reasoning, you ought to have claimed great merit in extending fourteen days to five (six ?) months ; but of course the two matters are not analogous. The fourteen days relates only to progress payments (as is explicitly stated in the contracts), and the other to a final settlement of the accounts; and we have dealt at length on this matter only to show what a strained interpretation of the contracts you have to put forward in order to appear to justify, in the smallest degree, the passing of the Act and its effect upon the contracts. You are obliged to admit that section 31 was not in the " revise " sent to Mr. Travers, neither was the alteration limiting the operation of the Act to us alone, nor any of the other clauses named in the letter of Mr. Reid, to which we have previously referred as being set out in full in parliamentary paper E.-3, 1878. Nor is there any inconsistency in our referring now to these clauses in particular, and not to the whole Act, as we have previously done. We should weary with repetitions if on every occasion we went fully over all the objectionable features of the Act of 1872. Nor were the alterations made on the passing of the Bill through the House of Representatives, but they were made before the Bill was submitted to the House, and appear not to have been the subject of remark or explanation by any one, and certainly were never submitted to Mr. Travers or ourselves, or any notice given of them. With regard to our having quoted and made use of certain sections of the Act in the pleadings in the petition on the Waitara and New Plymouth Contract, we confess ourselves surprised at the views you put forward. That petition was granted and obtained with the object of trying the question as to whether we were obliged to proceed under the " Contractors Act," or could recover, as our contracts provided, in the ordinary Courts of law. It was the Government who pleaded the Act of 1872 as a bar to our proceedings; and we, in reply, endeavoured to show that the Act was only optional, and had ceased to have any operation or effect. To do this we were obliged to refer to the Act and its clauses, and cannot be said to have made use of it for any other purpose than to show that we had only our common law rights to rely upon : no ingenuity can construe it into anything else. Without making any charge of breach of faith, or saying harder things than are absolutely necessary, we think we have disposed of all your facts and arguments; and that the honor and good faith of the country are involved in correcting the injustice which has been caused by the passing of "The Contractors Act, 1872." We have, &c, John Beogden akb Sons. The Hon. the Minister for Public Works.

Messrs. Beogden and Sons to the Hon. tie Minister for Public Works. Sib,— Wellington 18th March, 1882. We have the honor to reply to letter of 15th instant, signed by the Assistant Under-Secre-tary, crossing ours of same date. There is obviously some mistake in reading our letter of 15th February, as we have never stated that the Government, as well as ourselves, were ignorant of the passing of the Contractors Act. One letter expressly says that the Government were not ignorant of the passing of the Act. Nor have we entered upon a discussion as to the merits or validity of the deductions made by the Government, although we are quite prepared to do so. Our letter pointed out that the Government had ignored all the provisions of the Act, which Mr. lieid says was equally binding on them and us, and that they had acted as if no such Act existed. As to the alleged refusal to proceed with a reference on terms proposed by us and assented to by the Government in 1877, we beg to refer you to our letter of the 15th instant, in which we have supplied quotations omitted by you from the letters of Mr. Ormond, Mr. Beid, and Mr. Travers, which show distinctly that we had not the opportunity of an investigation into our claims, except under the disability of having our claims barred by the clauses of the " Contractors Act." We find, too, that from July, 1877, to August, 1878, Mr. Travers was in frequent communication with the Solicitor-General as to the withdrawal of the purely technical objection to the Waitara petition without being able to effect its withdrawal; and a reference to the letter from the Undersecretary of Public Works Department, dated 17th October, 1878, shows that we were at last informed that we must depend upon the petition granted to us in the Invercargill Contract. We observe that you repeat the statement that we have been paid for all the works we have done . for the Government. If that statement be true, there can surely be no reason for refusing the investigation, and if it were so established we should have to bear the costs; but your continued refusal to have the investigation, and the very tedious and costly process you force us to take in order to compel it, are suggestive of a different conclusion. We do not criticise too narrowly the accuracy of the figures you have quoted, in which you endeavour to make it appear that we have been paid a large sum for extra works. There is an error in. the view you put forward, which we would point out, viz., that the reduction of the contract sum, estimated by you at £65,900, must be taken off the £131,523 (about one-half), the amount of the extra works —many of which are in substitution of the omitted works —and your arguments and inferences are proportionately diminished. All the statements as to contingencies and management and profit could be equally answered if necessary. The sums estimated for contingencies were more than absorbed by the rise in wages and materials in the colony, owing mainly to the numerous contracts put into work at one time; and the management over works scattered in small lengths in different parts of the colony, and at that time, was necessarily very' costly and difficult.