Clippings from Trollops.

Cromwell Argus, Volume IV, Issue 190, 1 July 1873, Page 7

Clippings from Trollops.

OTAGO PROVINCIAL COUNCIL. During Anthony Trollope’s stay in Dun-, eclin, he says, “the Provincial Council was not sitting, but I was shown the chamber in which it is held. The members sit, like Siamese twins, in great arm-chairs, which are joined together two and two, like semi-de-tached villas. I was specially struck by what I cannot but call the hyper-excellence of the room. There has been, in most of the New Zealand provinces, a determination that the Provincial Assembly shall be a real Parliament, with a Speaker and Speaker’s chair, reporters’ galleries, strangers’ galleries, a bar of the House, cross benches, library, smoking room, and a “ Bellamy”—as the parliament refreshment-rooms are all called, in rernem- , trance of the old days of the House of Commons at home. The architecture, furniture, and general apparel of these Houses—such of them as I saw—struck me as being almost grander than was necessary. The gentlemen as they sit are very much more comfortable than are the members in our own House at home, and. are much better lodged than are the legislators in the States of the Aanerioan Union. The Congress of Massachusetts sits in a building which has indeed an imposing exterior, but the chamber itself inspires less awe than does that of Otago.” THE HONORARIUM. “ In one respect the New Zealand Legislatures have preferred American customs to those which they have left at home. They are paid for the performance of their legislative work. The pay of a member of the Provincial Council of Otago used to be £1 a day. It is now 19s. ll|d. When this information was first given to me, I own that I disbelieved my informant, attributing to him an intention to hoax a stranger. But I was assured that it is so. And it was arranged in this way : The legislature, bent on economy, reduced the salaries of various Provincial officers, and with that high-mindedness for which call legislative chambers in free countries should be conspicuous, reduced their own allowance from 20s. to 12s. a day. But, on trial, it was found that the work could not he done for the money. The Otago gentlemen who came from a distance could not exist in Dunedin on 12s. a day—which, if it be considered that a member of Parliament should he paid at all, is surely very low in a country in which a journeyman carpentergets as much. A proposition, however, to raise the sum again to 20s. was lost by a small majority. The rules of the House did not permit the same proposition to be again brought before it in the same session, and therefore, in another notice, the nearest sum to it was named—and carried. The moderation of the members ' vas shown in the fact that a fraction under, and not a fraction over, the original stipend 'Jjis at last found to satisfy the feelings of the house. I think that in Otago a more general respect would be felt for its Legislature if the gentlemen sitting in it altogether repudiated the receipt of the small sum—perhaps per annum—which is paid for their services.” “ NAME 1 NAME ?” We wonder which Colony claims the honour tt the member to whom Mr Trollope alludes ? the following descriptive sketch of a paramentary bore, in his recently published °rk on Australia and New Zealand “ At onie we have had terrible bores, gentlemen oin it was hardly possible to keep from a any performance for which they were qualineither by nature nor by education ; but dome the Speaker is powerful, the House Powerful, and the reporters are powerful. ,i le bore is silenced at any rate during the "leer hours of debate, and is, at last, after certam fashion stamped out. The House not listen when it has coiiie to a general

but unexpressed resolution that a certain member is never worthy of being heard. But in the Colonial Legislature the brazenfaced bore seems to be too strong for any restraint that can be devised for him. And then in a small House his vote is of impor tance, and the party which is unfortunate in his adherence does not dare to join in snubbing him. Such a man there is in one of the Colonies as to whom I wondered that the House should endure him even though he could have given a triple vote. That he spoke every day was nothing ; many members did so. That he spoke on every subject was not much ; for others, perhaps, did so too. That he also spoke a dozen times on every subject was by no means his heaviest offence ; nor even that in all his speeches he never deviated into sense or spoke a word worth hearing, either on the score of argument or from its eloquence or wit. There are offences worse than the offence of stupidity, even when stupidity be joined to arrogant presumption. In every word that this man spoke he either insulted an opponent or attempted to pander to the prejudices of the multitude. There are tribunes of the people and would-be tribunes, fierce advocates of popular rights, as to whom it is often difficult not to think that their Desmosthenic strain springs rather from their desire to please than to do good ; and in listening to them the hearer turns his heart against them. Such men are flatterers and demagogues ; but then they are probably capable of flattering, and fitted by nature to seduce mobs. This man only aped the acts of snch popular leaders, and aped them so badly, was so vulgar, so ignorant, so illiterate, so incapable in his attempts, so nauseous in his flights of oratory, so blasphemous in his appeals to religion, so impudent to the gentlemen around him, so weak in his language, so strong in his Billingsgate phrases, that I could think little of a constituency which would return him, and marvelled at the patience of a House which would endure him. I felt that did I li ve in that Colony and entertain a desire to sit in that House, I would certainly stand for the same constituency as that gentleman, so that we might not sit both there together. His continual presence must, I think, be to all those legislators a blistering thorn, robbing their position of all its pleasures and most of its pride.”