A COMMONSENSE VIEW OF THE PREMIER’S TOUR.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1265, 8 April 1878, Page 3

A COMMONSENSE VIEW OF THE PREMIER’S TOUR.

The revulsion of feeling against the Greyite theatricals seems to be already setting in, as may be seen by numerous expressions of opinion even in the Northern papers. The following is one such : Sir George Grey’s tour has at length drawn to a close. The mischief he has done will live after him. He will have set an example to Minis* ers who may succeed him, when he has vacated, or is turned out of office, to pursue the same “ high-falutin,” expensive, and most undignified course. If anything can tend to demoralise the people more than another it is the method pursued by our Premier of making what he terms the “ workingman” discontented with his position. lie is most wickedly sotting class against class, and holding up men who have made their way in the colony to contempt and derision. The “ poor man” is the object of George|s idolatry ; the rich ppm the evil genius who is permitted to rule' the destinies of the two islands. If the whole of the speeches made by Sir George Grey during his stumping tour were reprinted and carefully perused, there would not be found a passage in them which, to the reflective and intelligent reader, would indicate the speaker to have any element of the true statesman in him. The inh ( !ibj|,ftuts of New Zealand, with Sir ar« a downtrodden, trampled-on, crushed, ground-down pebple. To be told this in a bolony Where the franchise is the most liberal: where the leas'attempt td infringe upon the rights of men is pet tip pet (pterpM Jo

a colony, too, where there is a free and intelligent Press from one end of the island to the other, we say that to tell men they are serf's, and that they have no power except they break out into open rebellion, is not only mischievous, but such as-ertions are as recklessly wicked as they are absolutely untrue. Had any English statesman, fifty years aeo, been guilty of delivering such utterances, he would have been impeached as an enemy to the state and a subvrter of the British Constitution. Sir Julius Yog<l as a p liticiun had pith and marrow in him. Whatever hisenors, they were those of a statesman ; hut he was no inflammatory spooler, with the ability only to make people discontented with (heir position in Me, and to be envious ot those who are above them. The time will come, we hope, when the sophistries of our Premier will he exposed, and ell his fallacie- laid bare. Now-a-day even the grand stump speeches of a Gladstone carry little weight with them when subjected to the crucial test of intelligent newspaper criticism. Sir George Givy’s ambition seems to be that he should be looked upon as a kind of Liberator who has come forth to champion people’s rights without any regard as to how many or how much others may be wronged by his proposed reforms. Coneede to Sir George Grey the powers he asks for, when the people will not be long in discovering t hat a more arbitrary ruler could not have been placed over them.