The Evening Star FRIDAY, JULY 30, 1875.

Evening Star, Issue 3879, 30 July 1875, Page 2

The Evening Star FRIDAY, JULY 30, 1875.

Ministers will do well to bring on the serious business of the session as early as possible, for the longer it is delayed the more abundant opportunity is afforded to the Opposition, both in the House and in the country, to damage their position by petty indirect attacks. Nothing has yet transpired to create want of confidence in their measures. They have met all adverse questions fairly anti courteously, and their opponents have taken care that they should not be idle. The busybodies of the House, conspicuous among whom is Sir George Grey, have been very ingenious in devising motives for returns on little matters. He is the great Parliamentary gun—the heavy metal of the Opposi-tion-destined to be the leading figure in the battles to come. He has been trying his powers with small shot, which he has scattered very profusely in various directions, and with no little bluster on Parliamentary practice. Where ordinary men would have been satisfied with ministerial answers, Sir George Grey is not. When told that the public interest requires that certain correspondence and papers should be witheld from presentation to the House —an arrangement that the leader of the Opposition at Home would have at once acceded to—Sir George sees in the plea put forward something behind, and will have the documents produced. He has no faith in the Government. True, he ultimately calms down, and is content with a private peep and a voice in selecting what should and what should not be made public ; but evidently in thus graciously conceding to waive a portion of his demand, he is actuated more by the feeling of his surrounders than by his sense of propriety. He is not alone in these attacks. Were it left to him, little harm could be done. Experienced, scholarly, and gentlemanly as Sir George is, with the prestige of having been formerly Governor here, and consequently up to a thing or two that less privileged persons are ignorant of, he has laid himself open to grave doubts concerning his competency to deal with constitutional subjects. His extraordinary petitions and correspondence have weakened his influence. He has shown that he cannot adapt his ideas to circumstances, and that he lives in the past more than in the present. This is said to be one of the signs of advancing years. The pet notions of youth have more charms than the ideas that have been gradually weaving themselves into realities under the less appreciative observation of age. We can easily believe that Sir George Grey has no sympathy with our present Colonial development. Just as old men can scarcely realise maturity and self-reliance in their children, Sir George fails to understand the difference between New Zealand in its infancy and in its advancing growth. He has set himself to preserve the clumsy, cumbrous forms of government of the past, I

n which local legislatures hare clashed in opinion with the central. He has not earnt that steam, rail, and telegraph have made possible and created unity of interest and one-ness of practice in relation to chief Colonial matters. He evidently cannot comprehend the constantly recurring complications between local and general legislation ; nor does he see, what should be self-evident to everyone, that local government should be that of administration merely, for which local legislators are not needed —but prove costly and cumbrous hindrances to.