THE ‘COROMANDEL MAIL’ GOES INTO MOURNING.

Evening Star, Issue 4294, 30 November 1876, Page 4

THE ‘COROMANDEL MAIL’ GOES INTO MOURNING.

The ‘ Coromandel Mail ’ is issued in partial mourning, though no intimation is given why this is the case. The editor (“Snyder”) leaves his readers to draw their own inference. This is easily done; for between the black columns is an article headed “ The Bank of New Zealand and the ‘ Coromandel Mail,’ in which the editor mourns over the fact that the agent of the bank declines to take the ‘ Mail ’ in future. The editor in his anguish writes thus ; My dear Air Easley,—When you announced to me on Thursday, iu terms of awful import and iu words of terrible emphasis, that the Bank of New Zealand declined for the future to take the ‘Coromandel Mail,’ 1 felt that the eud of all things was nigh unto us, and that there was not to be any millenium, even so much as a very little bit indeed. I have been within gunshot of waterspouts, i have beheld the lightning’s flash and the roar of Heaven’s artillery when a mighty storm was raging, and when 1 hadn’t anything to eat for forty-eight hours. I have felt earthquakes, and have been in conflagration when crossing the raging main ; but neither the sensation of one or the other, of any or either, affected me as did that dread announcement made by you to me on Thursday last. I know that on the evening of that day, when 1 took my little granddaughter on my knee, and she said in Infant lisping, “God bless pa, and ma, and little brother, and all people,” I told her to say, “and God bless Mr Basley, and keep him from all harm, and make him an angel.” Having done all that may be expected from a Christian, I have now to ask are you justified in using your position in order to the commission of what must appear to most people a contemptible piece of petty spite—so petty, that only the very smallest mind, dwarfed and narrowed down to the infinitesimal, could be capable of. You, Sir, a few night’s ago, wanted to crush the clergyman of the church of which you are a member. You, had you been allowed to have bad your way, would have turned that aged minister out of house and home—would have sent him out to the cold mercies of the world and for what ? Because, as a Christian clergyman, in the conscientious performance of a sacred calling, he considered it his duty to gently admonish you from the pulpit. And because I, with a few others resisted such an attempt, and resisted it successfully, you turn round and, in the name of the Bank you represent, you stop the ‘Coromandel Mail.’ Why, Sir, those who know me know that I care nothing for such a matter; not if you had the power, as no doubt you would have the will, to stop every paper issued in Coromandel, would I care one jot or tittle. I think, in the interests of the corporation which you serve, and for which you are paid, it is my duty to lay before your employers a simple statement of a simple fact—that because I stepped iu between you and an aged clergyman, whose days are drawing to their shortest span, and against whom no charge of immorality was preferred, you are of that “ small miserable construction ” that you have ordered the paper which your employers pay for to be stopped. How, my dear Sir, I do not intend the ‘ Mail ’ shall be stopped by your order. It will be regularly delivered at your branch and in due course the bill will be forwarded to head quarters for payment with an accompanying explanation. And don’t you be trying any more of these like little games.— I am, dear Air Basley, yours most affectionately, The Ehitok.