THE NOMADS ON THE ROLL.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume III, Issue 654, 5 June 1882, Page 2

THE NOMADS ON THE ROLL.

To the Editor. Sib, —You have “ dragged me from my obscurity.” The sentence is journalistic, one commonly used when newspaper writers want to make some private citizen

“feel small.” It is one of the tricks of your trade, and I use it to prevent you from having the satisfaction. You appear : to me to be silly; either that or your best I efforts are like that clerical philosophy which “ passeth understanding either way the climax is reached. In your leading article of the 30th May you want to make it appear that Mr Ivess depends on • “ mere wanderers ” for his election, and you make me the “ horrid example,” a man forty years a colonist, and five years a resident in New Zealand, twelve months of which was passed in Wakanui. The : way you connect me with Mr Ivess and his election is worthy the intellect of a. chimpanzee. There are 1,799 electors in Wakanui, and you have the following . paragraph:—“As the law now stands a • man has only to rent or purchase a few cottages on the other side of the Belt, and pack them with adult males a month prior to the making up of the roll, and he Venders his election almost acertainty, &o” ■ Jt is not jour fault that nature bas/made but a poor job of you, but surely your shipmates ought to look better after yon periodically. = “ The moon had yet - tilledherhorn ” i.o ***

Of calculation. 1,799 electors scattered over a large district, and a man has but to rent or purchase a few cottages and fill them with male adults ti make his election a certainty !!! There is not another man in Ashburton with a brain so softened as that. You hold me up by direct allusion as a man who has no stake in the district. My stake is my income ; what is your stake? lama skilled artisan, one of the class your betters consider as the most valuable of all colonists ; what are you ? You have singled me out to show me up as a man without means, who has become an elector of Wakanui within six weeks. I lived twelve months in Wakanui, and left the district for my own convenience. Neither the extent or the want of means

has made a fool of me, and my means, I think, equals yours. The Guardian has been whitewashed once, and some of you look very sickly now. I run no risk of such a catastrophe. I see one name on the roll, William Hall Zouch, who claims a vote on the strength of his being a journalist. My ! My ! ! My !! ! A journalist with a stake in the district! I have been a newspaper man for 26 years, but I never knew a journalist with a stake anywhere. They mostly draw their inspirations from borrowed sixpences. If I was a journalist and nothing more, I should look on the Old Man’s Home as my inevitable destiny. Silly people have generally some tact about them. You seem to have none, or you would not attack an old campaigner like me—4o years graduating in printing offices. Luna herself is not such a simpleton, and she is the goddess of the moonstruck. What is your opinion of the Abchurch Lane business of lampooning, and what is your estimate of the value of the column of lampoon doggrel you printed the other day ? 1 know of no similitude so apt as that of a painted manakin complacently surveying his countenance in a mirror, •you attempted too much and broke down. I am not the only li free and independent elector ” who considers it a poor speculation to buy land at ten times its value (by comparison with New South Wales), and a far worse one to borrow money of Joint Stock Brokers on my growing cro;; s. Such a stake would not suit me ; to you it is your vitality. I lived in Natal long enough to see land go begging at three halfpence an acre ; and I lived in Victoria long enough to see two-thirds of the land sold for farms go back to sheep runs again. In ten years more, money advanced on growing crops will settle the stakes of four-fifths of the shareholders in New Zealand, and such stake-holding is your highest estimate of the intelligence necessary to vote for a member of the House of R presentatives. Now listen. I did take a cottage in Wakanui for the express purpose of qualifying myself to vote at the next election, and if such qualification had cost me all 1 could spare, I would hare paid it, only to have one eighteen-hundredth share m voting against a man who would reduce working men and artizans to that abject state which makes slavery the gift of beneficence. It is men like you who are the incubus setting abroad over a whole population—men who write to live, and are paid to mislead. I know your cloth. Z have had half a lifetime behind the scenes. The next time you want a “ horrid example ” don’t select me. I’m too many for you. lam a hona fide resident of Ashburton, and now live in the Wakanui district. Mr Alfred Saunders does not possess that legal qualification at least; By his own showing he has been the Baalam of the Lower House, and now his ass brays from Matson’s store, Ashburton.—l am, &c.,

W. R. Whitbhoen.

[An ancient writer, who was a keen student of human nature, and who evidently had had a deal of trouble with such characters as the self-dubbed “ horrid example,” gives some sound advice concerning them. The paragraph reads somethin'; like this :—“ Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in Ms own conceit. ” The italicsare ours, and as a risk would be run of the same catastrophe attending our correspondent as happened to the fabled frog if we were to reply to his ridiculous nonsense, in pity we spare him.— Ed. G.]