best of this; not to mar it. Such contrasts as we are talking of are absurd. Manchester has advantages over us; but should we try therefore to make Hastings a manufacturing town? Dover has advantages over us; but do we wish to lose our best visitors by making Hastings a garrison town? Every place has its advantages, and each place should turn its attention to the improvement of whatever natural or artistic good it has; but what is a good in one place is not in another. Nature and Art have given us a character which is quite sui generis; and, if we are wise, we shall improve, and not spoil it. One gentleman (not a Hastings man) asserted that every sensible person must see the need of a harbour here. That it would be serviceable for some things is, of course, true; but we deny the correctness of this gentleman’s modest assumption; for, we know many sensible men who, on weighing the arguments on either side do not see that the need of a harbour is so great as the need of a total absence of whatever would interfere with the comfort, taste and health of the people from whom we get our living. One of the speakers, in referring to the good of a harbour, confounded certain places having harbours and some having only piers. We submit that there is confusion in the logic here. The ‘nonsense’ is not ours, but the speaker’s. it is perfectly conceivable, surely, that a watering place might be improved by a pier, and yet not be benefitted by a harbour. The places named at the meeting proved this fact clearly. Ryde, for example, has a good pier, and thrives as a resort of visitors; but some of the other places, with harbours, can bear no comparison with such a watering place as our builders and townspeople are properly trying to make of this borough. We cannot have every advantage combined in one place. We have our choice, and shall do quite as well if we make that choice independently of the counsels of the promoters of pet schemes, and of strangers who talk as if those of our townsmen who don’t agree with their views are fools. Capt. Caxton expressed a belief that for every £1000 raised for this project, Government would give £2000; and yet Government has only promised £10,000 for experiments all along the coast, and Lord Harry Vane very caustiously(sic) advised the meeting not to be too sanguine on this head. One proposal is to raise the money by a rate. We are sorry to state that our conviction in regard to much that was said about the help a harbour would be to the 2,000 persons depending on the fishery is that it resembled too much the ad captandum vulgus style of oratory to prove anything to the point. We know, moreover that many of the fishermen and merchants in whose behalf the -
