The Evening Star WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1871.

Evening Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2502, 22 February 1871, Page 2

The Evening Star WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1871.

Our morning contemporary lias an excellent knack of speaking liis mind in a grumble when a thing is dune. He seems very wroth this, morning that Mr Macandrew is elected, and that he described his return as a triumph over “ narrow-mindedness and “ ignorance.” Had not the Daily Times thus openly identified its opinions with what it is pleased so euphoniously to term the “ Conserva- “ tive party,” nobody would have understood clearly what its political faith was. We may henceforth, on its own confession, class it with those respectable but uninfluential journals, the Morning Herald and Bt. James’s Chronicle. We must, however, make an exception in favor of those papers as compared with tire tactics of our contemporary. However mistaken in their views, a very high tone of chivalric honor marked their proceed-

iugs. Their “ Conservatism ” was not a Conservatism of ignorance, but of institutions. If even they opposed the introduction of railways, it was because it was feared they were emanations from a democratic spirit—inroads of a go-aheadism that would ultimately lead to the rooting out of the privileges of the aristocracy, and the connection of the Church with the State. Just as the Conservatives of Otago feared the arrival of immigrants from Melbourne, the Tory journals of England feared the influence of urban intelligence upon the stolid populations of the agricultural districts. In strict accordance with this narrow, Conservative bigotry, they opposed education, railroads, Reform Bills, extension of the Suffrage, and the Ballot, and could see no good so great as an agricultural laborer having a pig in a stye, and receiving seven shillings a week wages, and buttermilk from the hands of his farmer employer or lord of the soil. But whatever hard words they used to vilify their opponents, they were punctiliously correct in not misrepresenting facts ; and herein our contemporary does not come up to their standard. When the Daily Times asserts that “ an infatuated Parliament ” desired “ to place a burden upon the Colony “ which prudent men believe it to be “ unable to bear,” it uses words which, if the writer understands, must be set down to the conservation of ignorance and the spirit of misrepresentation. Supposing the Parliament to have been “ infatuated,” it is at any rate absurd to suppose that its members desired to place burdens upon the country. Mistaken, men in Parliament may be venal, they sometimes arc ; but they must be devoid of all sense of moral responsibility to' desire to place burdens upon the country. The misfortune of the Daily Times is, that its writers, like the class with whose polities it is identified, seem not to have made themselves acquainted with the plans they condemn. They have taken up a cry that is founded upon misrepresentation ; and although they might have counteracted, to a great extent, the intolerant ignorance of the generality of the country Press, by giving sound information, they have aided and abetted in a crusade that, fortunately for the Province, has been foiled. The depression that must unavoidably have occurred in consequence of outside events, through the action of this obstructive party, has been intensified. Why we complain of them is that they have sacrificed the interests of the Province to those of party ; that in the face of Acts of the Assembly providing against the evils that they profess to fear, they have set up a cry that has no foundation save in their own imaginations. We condemn no man for being prudent—but falsehood is imprudence. When the Daily Times says that which is not true about the proposals of the Eox-Y oglu. Ministry, in regard to colonisation, public works, and postal services, it is very pleasant to lay the “ flattering unction to the soul ” by euphoniously terming it “-prudent.” But as to this sort of prudence, people in the Colonies are usually so rough and outspoken, that a very short word of one syllable is used in its stead. When the Dally 'Times points out in the Acts of the Assembly, in the postal arrangements, in the Public Works Act or the Immigration scheme, that it is proposed to apportion any burden unjustly, excepting that which we have ourselves condemned, we shall not have one word to say against the right to draw any conclusion, however shortsighted, from the premises laid down. But when those premises are the mere fictions of ill-informed or party men, set out for party purposes, no matter by what pretty name they are called they are the clumsy weapons of “ nar- “ row-mindedness and ignorance.”