The Globe. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 17, 1877.

Globe, Volume VIII, Issue 802, 17 January 1877, Page 2

The Globe. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 17, 1877.

So after all Provincialism is really dead and buried, and all the efforts of our senile friend, the Lyttelton Times, to reanimate and revivify the corpse, have proved utterly futile and ended in smoke. With the assistance of the versatile Mr W. T. L. Travers it managed to drag the body out of its shell, but no new breath of life did these two resurrectionists succeed in generating within it. A late Gazette Extraordinary, published a few days ago at Wellington, contains under the heading of “ Proroguing the General Assembly,” a proclamation from His Excellency the Governor, which puts an end to those hideous proceedings by relegating, once and for ever, the defunct institution to its final resting place. The proclamation to which we refer, further adjourns the next meeting of the Assembly to the 13th day of April next, and, under the Governor’s signature, does so in the following terms : —“ Whereas on the thirty-first day of October last I thought fit to prorogue the General Assembly of New Zealand to the sixteenth day of January instant, at which time you were held constrained to appear: Now know ye, that for divers causesand consideration I have thought fit to relieve you and each of you of your attendance at the time aforesaid, hereby further proroguing the said General Assembly to Friday, the 13 th day of April next, and convoking and by these presents enjoining you, and each of you, that on the said thirteenth day of April you meet in Parliament, at the city of Wellington, there to take into consideration the state and welfare of the colony of New Zealand, and therein to do as may seem necessary.” Is perhaps to be regretted that the Gordian knot, which the Lyttelton Times and its legal ally have been so zealously endeavouring to ravel, should have been suddenly severed when bidding fair to afford them so invaluable an opportunity of riding a favourite hobby-horse to death. The Times , of course, will soon unearth some other mare’s nest for the amusement if not the instruction of its readers. But poor Mr Travers may have to wait some considerable time before Dame Fortune does throw another such windfall in his way by the aid of which his name and reputation may be kept dangling before the public. We have heard of, and even read a voluminous correspondence on this vexed question of the legality of the late prorogation. It appeared in the New Zealand Times, and afforded ample food, for the time being, to those whose hopes and fears hung in the balance, weighing Provincialism and Abolition. Few people outside of this limited political ring cared one iota whether the country had completely divested itself of Provincial trammels, or whether some legal loopholes or Jesuitical quibblings could be discovered, whereupon to build a structure of facts sufficiently powerful to overthrow by one stroke of a Judge’s pen the abolition fabric, erected at such cost by the Legislature. The veriest tyro in matters political cannot help

remembering the ancient adage, as old indeed “as the hills,” that for a given consideration, a lawyer could always be found to ferret out means wherewith to drive a coach and six through any given Act of Parliament. In this particular instance, we are prepared to go so far as to admit that Mr Travers and the Cathedral square oracle had really succeeded in procuring the coach — and a fine ponderous vehicle it was too —but no animals could they secure to enable them to drag the unwieldy machine along. They had got hold of the shadow, had a firm grip of it, but —the substance was far away and out of sight. Theorising is all very well if practice goes hand in hand with it. But here the needful connecting link between the two was absolutely wanting and nowhere to be found. Mr Travers, in the correspondence to which we alluded, made a lapsus laying bare the fact that the premises started upon by him were indeed —like thin air—of a somewhat impalpable nature. He said that he would be prepared to advise a client, under certain stated circumstances, to commence proceedings against a County Councillor for ouster of office. Yet, shortly before, he had put it on record in the columns of the New Zealand Times that he was firmly convinced that the Counties Act (under which such case of ouster must necessarily be conducted) was not in force as Parliament must be—legally—still in session, the statute in question not becoming law until the day after the last day of that session. How could he then be prepared to try and persuade the Court to give judgment for that client under an Act which, he previously contended, was not law ? And again would he have gone so far as to afford us the sight of his calling upon the Supreme Court to oust a man from an office to which, he argued, the man had never been elected? Upon the horns of a somewhat unpleasant dilemma we very much fear, Mr. Travers has managed to impale himself, and perhaps, for the sake of his reputation, it may be as well that the Grovernor appeared on the scene and nipped in the bud a controversy, the effects of which have only been to show how, at times, clever men and excited journalists will flounder about in depths unknown when overreaching themselves. With our contemporary the Lyttelton Times, as well as with the puny offshoot that so dimly reflects it, this floundering operation has become quite chronic. People have got used to it, and it no longer excites any but feelings of commiseration.