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Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3658, 5 April 1883, Page 2

Our space will not allow us to give anything like a full report of the proceedings in the Municipal Council last night. There was, however, very little real business done, although the meeting lasted for more than four hours. If the councillors would talk less and work more borough affairs would, perhaps, have escaped the state of muddle into which they have drifted. But some of the li City Fathers" act in the Council as though their special mission was not so much to attend to public business as to criticise their fellow councillors. One councillor is to another what a red rag is to a bull, and the consequence is that more than half the time of the Council is taken up in puerile personalities. There is no cohesion, .so to speak, in the Council, every member taking a perfectly independent course, his angularities preventing any junction with another. The reason why decisions are arrived at is that the questions to which they relate may be shelved and got rid of, to which end sides ai-e taken and the matter disposed of. There is no friendliness of feeling in such an arrangement, nor probably any sense of conviction that the vote so given is a right one. The fact is every councillor hatt-s with a most refreshing degree of hatred every other councillor. Under'these circumstances there is not, nor can there be, any unity of purpose in the proseculiou of any particular course, and a councillor desii'ing to lead in a well-defined direction is regarded as an insolent usurper of another man's claim. Thus next to nothing is done, and a councillor to think that he can serve any good object in remaining in the Council must be a very sanguine individual.