The Evening Star TUESDAY, AUGUST 10, 1875.

Evening Star, Issue 3888, 10 August 1875, Page 2

The Evening Star TUESDAY, AUGUST 10, 1875.

Mr Stout’s legal training renders him a first-class special pleader. He knows exactly how for to tell a story, and where to stop. This is an admirable feature in the character of a lawyer, but we take * leave to doubt its being equally desirable in a politician. At the Bar individual interests are advocated as against the claims of individuals, and the right or wrong must be. decided according to the definite provisions of a law. Moreover, in a Court of Law no ex parie statement decides a case, and it is therefore a rule that the advocate on one side says all that can be said in favor of it, leaving to his opponent the task of finding adverse arguments. But the enlightened politician is expected to review both aspects of a question, although on the balance of pros and cans he may arrive at a. specific conclusion. This however is a practice Mr Stout, as a political speaker, has to learn. His peculiar tactics came cut very prominently on Friday night, when he left out of bis history of land legislation in Otago the consequences of the factious opposition of the Provincial Executive in their refusal to sell land under the provisions of the Hundreds .Regulation Act, He does not appear to have told his hearers, of whom he judged many would be strangers, that this land contest was between two classes of users of the soil, of whom the Council is mainly patched up ; and that the foundation of the whole affair was, the agriculturists wanted to have, in addition to thesr freehold farms, the use of large areas on which they might become pasture-ina&tei’S on a small scale, with the privilege of buying up a few acres to add to their holdings as they contrived to save the pounds necessary. Mr Stout did not teli that the refusal by one party to bring land into the market under the provisions of an Ordinance assented to by the Governor emptied the treasury, placed the Province deepty in debt, and led to the necessity of raising money by disposing of large blocks of land to a few .capitalists, in defiance of the remonstrance*? and opposition of hundreds desirous of buying and settling upon the land. He did not tell of the history of the Island Block sales, of the somewhere neat’ 50,000 acres sold to Mr Clarke, of the shutting up the extension of the town of Roxburgh by the fencing in of Messrs Cargill and Anderson’s run, and of other large transactions that created sufficient noise with sufficient reason at the time. He did not tell of the godsend to the squatters in the shape of an unasked privilege of preemption to the purchase of 960 acres each, in addition to a previous eighty acres—thus giving to the vunholders of Otago, through its Provincial Council, advantages that even squatter ridden Victoria had not conferred. He did not tell of the stagnation and ruin that tho absolute cessation of immigration and public works caused through refusal to sell land ; of the empty shops and empty houses in Dunedin; of the exit from the Province of thousands who had money to take them | away, and the bankruptcy and destitution of many who had not. Yet all these resulted from the action of the ; Provincial Council, in opposition to the views of the Superintendent and to common sense, and through the administration of those who now advocate the retention of Provincialism as a system. But Mr Stout was careful to insinuate that through a nominee Legislative Council selected from a class too nearly allied in community of interest, some of tlie.se evils might result from abolition. He neglected to

show the difference between tlie cases. There is no check on the doings of the Provincial Council. Within the limits of their jurisdiction their action tor good or evil is absolute: but it is not so iu the General Assembly. Allowing to the full the evils of nomineeism, there is a check upon their doings in the popularly elected House of Popresenta fives. The nominees may be prepared to do all that is charged against them; but if the members of the Lower House remain faithful to their trust the upper crust may obstruct—it is their fashion to do so—but they are. powerless for positive evil. So far as they are concerned their power will be neither increased nor diminished by Provincial abolition. If there is danger, it exists to the full as much now as in the future. The nominee (Jpper House has only the power of negation; past experience and Mr Stout’s account of how our Provincial funds were frittered away last session by the jealous Southland members, show that the action of a Provincial Council is positive, and may be for evil. We are far from saying that in Otago the Provincial Council has done no good. It has done much for education, for settlement, for immigration, and for public works. What is done is apparent, and deserves commendation ‘ } the question which can never be solved is, how much more might have been done with the same means. There is something specious in the theory of Provincialism ; but anyone who carefully sifts its results must feel satisfied that it works unequally, tends to weaken Colonial efforts, is only calculated for federations of isolated territories like tlie kingdom-like States of America, and contains in itself, in the form in “which it exists in New Zealand, an absolutism inconsistent with progress.