O’BRIEN AND FIJI.

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 13 August 1901, Page 3

O’BRIEN AND FIJI.

The Ex-goYernor Denounced.

(PER PRESS ASSOCIATION.)

Wellington, This Day. The Rev. Mi - Glade, Chairman of the Wesleyan Mission in Fiji, has sent a letter to the Premier expressing his satisfaction at the suspension by Chamberlain of the last ordinance passed by the Government of Fiji, and hoping that Seddon’s efforts would procure its complete cancellation. Glade claims that the missionaries know the natives better than Government Officers, and that Governor O’Brien knows nothing at all of the natives. He justifies his speech at Wainibokasi by saying that the federation party in Suva had sent emissaries to persuade the natives not to pay taxes. At that moment the mission synod was sitting, and particular enquiries were made whether they had heard of these emissaries and none had heard of them, so D’Brien’s allegation of probable trouble, in Glade’s opinion, was just as groundless as the discontent there was caused by the irksome system of Government, under which a man has to ask official permission to sell a basket of yams. Had O’Brien sat less on his dignity, and moved freely about the colony, he might have learned something of what the natives really are, and been less likely to be influenced by recklessly inaccurate reports of his own officers. That the condition of Fiji calls for ordinance so unEnglish as the one just suspended is as gross a libel on the Islands as the Wainibokasi speech was on New Zealand. Glade recrets, in conclusion, he is unable to visit Wellington and confer personally at length with the Premier on Fijian matters.