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Evening Star, Issue 3224, 20 June 1873, Page 3

"NAME! NAME!"

We wonder which Colony claims the honor of the member to whom Mr Trollope alludes in the following descriptive sketch of a parliamentary bore, in his recently published work on Australia and I s ew Zeal nd ? —“ At home we have had terrible bores, gentlemen whom it was hardly possible to keep from a daily performance for which they were qualified neither by nature nor by education ; but at Home the Speaker is powerful, thfe House is powerful, and the reporters are powerful. The bore is silenced at any rate during the choicer hours of debate, and is, at last, after a certain fashion stamped out. The House will not listen when it has come to a general but unexpressed resolution that a certain member is never worthy of be'ng heard. But in the Colonial Legislatures the brazenfaced bore seems to be too strong for any restraint that can be devised for him. Ami then in a small House bis vote is of importance, and the party which is unfortunate in his adherence does not dare to join in snubbing him. Such a man there is in one of the i’olonits as to whom I wondered that the House should endure him even though he could have given a triple vote. That he spoke every day was nothing; many members did so. That he spoke on every sub ject was not much ; for others, perhaps, did so too. That he also spoke a dozen times on every subject was by no means bD heaviest offence; nor even that in all hji l - - he never deviated into sense or spoke a word worfh hearing, either on the spore of argument or from its eloquence or wit. There are offences worse than the offence of stupidity, even when stupidity be joined to arrogant presumption. In every word that this man spoke, he either insulted an opponent or attempted to pander to the prejudices of the multitude. There are tribunes of the people and would be tribunes, fierce advocates of popular rights, as to whom it is often difficult not to think that thrir Desmosthenic strain springs rather from their desire to please than to do good ;

and in listening to them the hearer turns his heart against them. Such men are flatterers and demagogues ; but then they are pro bably capable of flattering, and fitted by nature to seduce mobs. This man only sped the acts of such popu lar leaders, and aped them so badly, was so vulgar, so ignorant, so illiterate so incapable in bis attempts,, so nauseous in his flights of oratory, so blasphemous in his appeals to religion, so impudent to the gentlemen around him, so weak in his language, so strong in his Billingsgate phrases, that 1 could think but little of a constituency which would return him, and marvelled at the patience of a Mouse which would endure him. I felt that did I live in that Cflony and entertain a desire to sit in that House, 1 would certainly stand for the same constituency with that gentleman, so that we might not both sit there toge'her. His continual presence must, I think, be to all those legislators a blistering thorn, robbing their position of all its pleasures and most of his pride.”—“Australia and New Zealand,” by Anthony Trollope, vol. 2, p. 232 -3.