The Railway Commissioners.

Feilding Star, Volume XV, Issue 223, 26 January 1894, Page 3

The Railway Commissioners.

__ — ♦ " " i The editor of Christchurch Truth sums up Mr Maxwell very accurately. I He relates an incident in which he and Mr Maxwell were the actors, and in which he — like many auotlier irate j interviewer before and sinee — came off second best. He begins his story, after a few preliminary remarks about Mr Maxwell, such as :— " Mr Maxwell is, thanks to Mr Seddon, one of the most disliked men in the colony, by those who don't know him. MiMaxwell is a man who would never be loved in a country like this. He is a person with a backbone. He forms an idea for himself of what is his duty and then proceeds to do his duty calmly, quietly, and without fuss, fear, or favour. He is one of those hatefulpersons who will lick no man's boots, whether a Seddon's or a shunter's. In fact lie is a man. Hence these tears ! I don't know Mr Maxwell personally. I only met him once in my life, and then on business. Like a large number of other people, I had imbib. d the idea that he was a cold-blooded, haughty-mannered autocrat. T was deputed by the management of a certain newspaper to interview this Czar in the interests of certain farmers who desired their produce carried at a rate cheaper than that ruling. I was supplied with certain " facts " and instructions not to permit the autocrat Maxwell to jump on me. I was astounded and perhaps a little disgusted— for I had gone armed, as I thought, on all points— to find there was no jump in Mr Maxwell whatever. He was more than civil ; lie was sublimely amiable, he proceeded at one to business. He took my " facts," and, in the nicest manner" in the world, knocked the bottom out of them in two minutes. He showed conclusively that neither I nor those who instructed me knew the rudiments of the particular matter on which we professed to be authorities. He theu proceeded to tell me a lot of things I didn't know. He was never angry, never anything but kind and considerate ; but he was a little tired, because I was probably about the sixty-ninth painful ass who had interviewed him that morning and wlk>, knowing rather less about railway matters than about the integral calculus or perpetual motion, had tried to teach a railway expert his business. Max well forgave me for being an ass, but it took a long time before I could forgive him for finding out that T was one. Seddon has never forgiven him."