THE RANGITIKEI ELECTION.

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 2, 5 July 1892, Page 2

THE RANGITIKEI ELECTION.

IO TIIK KIJITOK OF Till STAH. Sin, — I have read in one of your recent issues the publication of your account of my Parliamentary anticedents, which it must be assumed is for the purpose of enabling the electors to impartially judge whether or not my conduct in Parliament was such as to again entitle me to their confidence at the present election, or whether they should give their support to my political opponent, Would it therefore be unreasonable if I were to suggest that you should kindly publish Mr Bruce's Parliamentary career in tjie same truthful manner in which you wish the electors to believe that you have done in the instance to which I refer. I, as one of the large majority of the public who read tbe newspapers of this colony, believe that those papers are published for the purpose of supplying us with true accounts of "public questions and therefore can hardly believe that you in your high and important public position, would wilfully attempt to mislead the public by publishing that which you know to be untrue under the assumption that tbey would believe it and act upon such advice in the exercise of their votes. I shall therefore be more charitable than to believe that you knew the publication to be grossly false. If you did not know it to be so and published it with that knowledge I am sure that the public will join me in the belief that it has been an unwarrantable outrage upon their ordinary intelligence, because the press is supported by the public for the purpose of supplying truthful information, and not for the purpose of falsehood and deception. I have no desire to pose as a protector of the public against the injustice of newspapers generally, but in tbis instance claim the right to say that the publication which has been so exulfcingly ottered to the public is false, and the person who compiled it bas wilfully omitted parts and portions of sentences and paragraphs, and thereby making it appear that I supported tlfe measures which I strongly opposed while representing this district in Parliament and vice versa, and I therefore ask the electors to say whether under such circumstances, your publication of the compilation, to which I have referred, is the kind of information upon which they will b? satisfied to form tlieir opinions as to the merits or demerits of the two candidates who are now seeking their suffrages. I am, etc., John Stevkns. [The above letter is dealt with in another column. — Ed. F. S.]