346 Timehri. 
The money for these two places was spent on the purchase of 
draining engines and on sea defences. 
It is interesting to note that the only village which made any attempt 
to repay its indebtedness was Buxton and Friendship, as from 1876 to 
1901-02 it had repaid the comparatively large sum of $38,918. Whereas 
Beterverwagting avd Plaisance, from 1884 repaid the comparatively 
insigniticant sums of £51 and $1,117, respectively. 
The progress of the villages during the first few years of their 
administration under the Ordinance of 1892, which granted to the 
villages ‘themselves a large share of self-government, was slow, the 
Councils being faced with difficulties at every turn. 
Nineteen incorporated villages passed from the administration of 
the Public Works Department to that of the Councils and Central Board 
of Health but in many cases the villages were evidently handed over in 
far from the best condition, as an extract from the report of the Inspector 
of Villages for the year 1892-93 shows. This Officer writes :—‘I think 
it a pity that when the villages were about to be handed back to the 
villagers, they were not put in thorough order while the annual votes 
for Rural Improvements existed. The Central Board of Health, 
recognising this fact, decided at a meeting held on the 23rd January 
last, to make application to the Government for a special vote of 
$25,000 to be expended on works pointed out by the Colonial Civil 
Engineer as necessary to be performed. The application was made 
accordingly, but the amount was not granted.” 
One can appreciate and sympathise with the position of the new 
administration hampered as it was on all sides. The Councils found 
themselves with a large programme of works to be carried out and much 
to do to put their villages in order. 
At Plaisance they had to face the expenditure incurred on the 
recently re-built sea defences, and, added to this, their drainage was 
defective and the draining engine boiler required re-tubing. 
Buxton and Friendship had to provide a new boiler for the draining 
engine ; Golden Grove and Nabaclis had to put in a new slice; Ann’s 
Grove and ‘Two Friends were suffering from absence of drainage; and 
Queenstown was also forced to put in a new sluice. These were some of 
the major works the new Councils had to faee, practically immediately 
on assuming office and are enumerated in order to give some idea of the 
position of aftairs at this period. Matters would not have been so 
difficult for the administration if they had only had to face the execution 
of urgent works. But to make their position more unenviable, the sub- 
stantial Government grant-in-aid was no longer available, and the work of 
the different Councils had to be carried on almost entirely out of the rates 
collected in their respective villages. With rate collections poor and 
uncertainly received, it will be readily seen what diflicult tasks lay before the 
