SIR BRYAN O'LOGHLEN AND SIR GEORGE GREY.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1291, 9 May 1878, Page 3

SIR BRYAN O'LOGHLEN AND SIR GEORGE GREY.

[From the " Australasian," April 13.] Nothing so much pleases colonial democrats as to tell them that they are slaves, abject victims of a grinding tjranny which tramples their lives and liberties in the dust. Among the unmitigated rubbish and imbecile bunkum which Sir Bryan O'Loghlen has by the bounty of nature been enabled to supply bo liberally to the electors of West Melbourne nothing has been more successful than this. His hearers know that it is untrue, and that he knows it to be untrue. They know that they return a majority to Parliament, make Ministries, shape legislation, bring luxurious civil servants to ruin and beggary, go to the meeting of the opposite candidate, and behavo like unreasoning savages, do just what they like, and use and abuse all the liberties which men can possess. But, knowing all this, they like some unscrupulous charlatan to get up and tell them that they are slaves to an oppression worse than that of the Czar of Russia. Sir George Grey, with his skill in playing on popular passion, and with his keen sympathy with the envy and animosity and jealousy of the unreasoning lower orders, has seen the advantage of this sort of talk, and of course let no scruple deter him from adopting it. He told a public meeting the other day that "in so far as the constitution of our country had not been shattered by went acts, we had the skeleton of a constitution the freest on the face of the earth. .' . . No other part of tho British Empire has such liberty; but now through recent legislation all this has been handed over to the Secretary of State." It is impossible to suppose that Sir George Grey is unaware that when he is talking in this strain he is foisting monstrous, impudent importures on the credulity of his hearers. There is no more foundation for such assertions than for the attempt he lately attributed to English statemen to tax the colonies to support the English rloet, or for the plot between the Governor and the Commodore to bombard the city of Auckland, or for the conspiracy between Sir George Bo wen and the Secretary of State to poison prominent colonial politicians out of the way, or for tho leading English newspapers being bought up by the Atkinson Government to ridicule and oppose Sir George Grey. He knows all this, but he knows also that the people like these declarations and are quite indifferent as to the truth of them, and aB Sir George is equally indifferent, hie supply of wild, eecJr>^: - ■ a^lon 1B in proportion to their demand.