POLITICAL NEWS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3771, 16 August 1883, Page 3

POLITICAL NEWS.

[by telegraph.]

[FROM OUlt OWN CORRESPONDENT.] Wellington, This day.

Tho House might just as ■well not have met yesterday at all as meet in tho evening if members were determined to talk. On the Order Paper there were seventy-one different items, mixed more than hash at a third-rate boarding-house, but only three of them were reached, and anything done with them and the others may just as well bo consigned to tlio waste-paper basket at once, for them is no probability of their reaching- maturity this session. I said yesterday the only "plan would have been for silent voting, and them some progress might have been made, but a new factor came in. Certain Opposition members have stonewalled tho estimates on at least two occasions, and as somo of those members had motions which would have come on early the Government determined to play the little game of stonewalling, so as to get their hand in no doubt, that they may be experts when the time comes that they will sit in the cold shades of Opposition to play the game successfully. This was rather mean on the part of a strong Government leading a strong party with a substantial majority, and it is quite on the cards, should Supply be called on to-night, that those members who were last night debarred from reaching their motions may retaliate, and how then will those gentlemen feel who say that tho session closes in a fortnight. I am afraid there are two things that will stop that. The Bankruptcy Bill has to go through the Council, and the I Dargavillo Committee are going to have bushels of evidence, and now this new factor may also trouble tho country. It was good fun to see Mr Dick at the stonewalling business. The horror which he expressed at the very thought of libraries spending money on—he would like to know what sort of books the Government subsidies were spent ou—novels. I am afraid the number of novels purchased by libraries is only in accord with tho wishes and demands of the subscribers. I am

afraid that some learned treatises are not so cargerly scanned by the reading public as arc tho"prolinc productions of Ouida. lam not altogether thin-skinned, but I have been at times astonished to sec the class of readers such books command. The best educated, the most talented, aye and the most modest of our women eagerly devour such romances, because of the sustaining interest of the novel throughout. Well, after the Colonial Secretary had done his stonewalling, and lialf-an-hour after midnight had gone, the vote was amended so that no institution would be allowed more

than £30, and then it was allowed to pass. The Government had their revenge; they had stalled off the motions of some obnoxious Oppositionists, and the House then adjourned.