Honours to Whom Honours are Due.

Feilding Star, Volume XV, Issue 206, 4 January 1894, Page 2

Honours to Whom Honours are Due.

1 Amongst the recipients of New Year's Honours are Mr justice Williams, of Victoria, and Mr F. W. Webb, Clerk to the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales. These names suggest an enquiry as to the principle, if there be any, on which such honours are conferred. Mr Justice Hartley Williams is no doubt a very excellent Judge, but his claims to a special mark of Her Majesty's favour cannot for one moment be put in competition with those of, say, our own Mr Justice Richmond. Mr Justice Williams is known as a lawyer only. He was appointed to the Bench in 1881. Mr Justice Richmond was a pioneer colonist, and took an active and honourable part in colonial politics, filling high offices in the State with much advantage to the colony before he became a Judge in 1862. He has been 19 years longer on the Bench than Mr Justice Williams, and we can unhesitatingly assert that in ability and all the qualities which should grace the judicial Bench, Mr Justice Richmond is oertainly not inferior to any Judge on the Bench in Australasia. How is it, we should like to know, that Her Majesty is advised to coufer a title on a junior Victorian Judge while a Judge like Mr Justice Richmond remains unnoticed? Of Mr F. W. Webb we know little, but again we are confident that neither in length nor quality of service can his claims to honourable distinction be compared with those of Major Campbell, so long Clerk of Parliaments in New Zealand, or Mr George Sisson Cooper, the late UnderSecretary for this colony. If any officers in the Public Service of any Australasian colony deserved some mark of Her Majesty's favour in recognition of long and honourable service, these gentlemen did, and it is not creditable to those who are responsible for the advice given to Her Majesty as to such rewards to her colonial subjects that Mr Justice Richmond, Major Campbell, and Mr Cooper should have been passed over time after time while much less disi tinguisbed men on the Bench and in i the Public Service in other colonies have been publicly honoured by the favour of the Crown — Post,