TOWN EDITION. The Daily Telegraph THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1881.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3187, 15 September 1881, Page 2

TOWN EDITION. The Daily Telegraph THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1881.

We are plnd ihnf «jme other jour- •■"■>! titles oni-iiAii ha< hau the honesty and tense of justice to give the Legislative Council the credit to which that body ia undoubtedly entitled. From the first days of the'r existesice Legislative Councillors of N 1 ;? Zealand have been a favorite subject for the thoughtless jibes of satirists, or for the interested declamation of demagogues. Notwithstanding this, however, says the New Zealand Times, the Legislative Council have managed, during the first twenty-eight years of Constitutional government in this country —ttie period, that is to say, during which Constitutional government has been on its trial here—to maintain an attitude which lifts them far above both satire and declamation. A score of times their high principle as a legislative body, entrusted with large and practically irresponsible power, has been severely strained ; but in the moment of crisis they have never yet been found wanting. Many times they have been bitterly accused by those whose purposes they would not subserve of timidity, of class prejudice, of all sorts of unworthy motives; but, in the end, it may safely be asserted events have invariably justified them. They have been found to have simply done their duty with that true courage which arises from a sense of honor, and which takes no account of the passing passions of the hour. It is an historical fact that the Legislative Council may well be proud of, that they never on a single occasion come into colli -ion with the House of Representative?, or thwarted the deliberate will of the people. Again and again they have fearlessly rejected measures—and large measures, too— which they believed to be hastily decided on, or of a character that the people were opposed to. In 1873 they boldly rejected the policy of Provincial borrowing, in epite of the thunders of the most popular and daring Minister who ever held office in New Zealand, and thereby saved the country from a maelstrom of furious extravagance, which must have thrown it up high and dry on the barren shore of national bankruptcy. The Minister blustered, but gave in; and the country thankfully approved of the course taken by the Council. The habit of the strict Constutional propriety, the paramount sense of respon' sibility, or to put it another way, the ever-wakeful regard for the public welfare whjch is the most marked characteristic of the Legislative Council, has always stopped them from committing any false step. The feeling at the end of every session among those who closely watch the course of politics is that, whatever may be said of the House of Representatives, the Legislative Council can always be depended on to do their duty. The country owes a debt of gratitude to the Legislative Council for their public in the pa9t; a debt that is ill repaid by the unworthy assaults upon that Chamber which h::;ebeen made of late years.