TOWN EDITION. The Daily Telegraph. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1881.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3196, 26 September 1881, Page 2

TOWN EDITION. The Daily Telegraph. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1881.

Ministers, when taunted with having been compelled to bold back or to withdraw their most important measures, or when found fault with for rushing their bills through the House at the close oi the session, threw the blame upon those who wasted the public time in useless discussion. Ministers might have quoted a portion of a speech delivered by Mr Disraeli (the late Lord Beaconsfield) in the House of Commons in the session of 1848 : —" The waste of public time is a great public evil—it is more, it is a great national calamity, because what is the nature of the charge which is proclaimed ? It is this, that the system of government which prevails in this country is a system incompetent to pass those laws and carry those measures which are necessary for the public welfare. I cannot imagine a state of circumstances more grave or more perilous." Like causes produce like effects, and it is wonderful how applicable the remarks uttered thirty-three years ago by Mr Disraeli are to the late session of our own General Assembly.' He attributed the breakdown of the Ministerial measures and the barren result of the session to party disorganisation. The " political incompetency of the institutions of the cointry," " the waste of the time which in these days ia as valuable as public treasure," he attributed to the substitution of the " conceits of the illiterate, the crotchets of the whimsical, and the violent courses of a vulgar ambition " for " the disciplined array of traditionary influences and hereditary opinions." Surely when we have night after night of the valuable time of the House taken up by professional talkers, who talk, apparently, for talking's sake; when we have the time of our Parliament occupied mainly in listening to the everlasting oratory of such as the Seddons, and Speights, and Reeves, and others, we may well lament the existence amongst our politicians of that " vulgar ambition," the'aim of which is to air what may well be termed " the conceits of the illiterate, and the crotchets of the whimsical."