THE GLOBE. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1880. THE RAILWAY COMMISSIONERS.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2064, 5 October 1880, Page 2

THE GLOBE. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1880. THE RAILWAY COMMISSIONERS.

A telegram from our own correspondent notifies the fact that the Government have at last come to a decision respecting the interior regulation of the Railway department. The Commissionerships of both islands are to be done away with altogether, and Mr. J. P. Maxwell, engineer-in-charge of the North Island, will be placed in charge of working railways as general manager, while Mr. Hannay, district manager for the Oamaru section of the Ambeiley-Kingston railway, will be assistant general manager. It must bo confessed that the Government have developed their ideas not an instant too soon. The public were beginning to wonder. Either the report of the Civil Service Commission had been pigeon-holed or it had not. If it had been discredited and handed over to the moths and the cobwebs, if totally unjust accusations had been brought against the ruling powers, and if the evidence on which such accusations wore made was of an untrustworthy and partial character, it was very evident that the gentlemen who supplied that information were not likely to work well with their chiefs, to prove a credit to the public service, or to assist the economical and efficient working of our railways. If, on the other hand, the report of the Commission was accepted as substantially true by the Government, why was not some action taken in the matter. And it must be remembered that it was not enough for those who were unfavorable to any change being made to demonstrate that no positive injury was being done by the Commissioners.' The maintenance of these officers was an expensive process, their staffs were considerable, and the existence of the commisslonerships could only be justified on the ground that the work that the holders of the offices were doing was commensurate with the money expended. Their partisans have only acted on the purely defensive. No attempt whatever has been made to prove that the work done was either in amount or quality equivalent to the expense incurred. The title is a high sounding one, the remuneration is large. Surely some satisfactory quid pro quo should have been adduced by those who held that the offices were necessary ones, and that the gentlemen who filled them were well suited to the posts. But since the publication of the report of the Civil Service Commission, no attempt in that direction has been made. That money has been saved op work done that could not have been done by an ordinaiy General Manager, has never yet been demonstrated. To refer more especially to the Commissioner of this island, it has been specially evident for some time, as suggested above, that the present state of affairs could not be allowed to continue. To take the matter of the construction of the defective railway trucks as a single instance, it may fairly be said that the locomotive department in Christchurch could not be expected to work amicably under Mr. Conyers, with the atmosphere in its present over-charged electrical condition. And has anything been done since the issue of the Commissioners’ report to allay the feeling of irritation which must necessarily exist ? Far from it. Affairs from that date have been going from bad to worse, until the Commissioner has lost that power of supremo control which is necessary to true discipline. This of course was inevitable, but noue the less deplorable. The allegations of the Christchurch Locomotive Engineer have turned out to be perfectly correct. After innumerable windings and shufflings on the part of those who wished to discredit the said allegations, the defective trucks have been sheeted homo to those who were to blame, and not a shadow of doubt now rests on the subject. It was evident that Mr. Smith could not possibly be allowed to suffer for tho straightforward manner in which he gave the real facts of the case and upheld the public interests at considerable risk to himself. But his relations with the Commissioner were strained by reason of his action, and had Mr. Conyers retained office, consequences more or less injurious to the smooth working of the department wore sure to ensue. This is but one instance out of many, where the uncovering of tho rotten state of the department by means of the report of the Civil Service Commission has caused a running sore which requires some drastic remedy for its cure,

The “ Lyttelton Times ” in its issue of this morning argues that the Government have failed to grasp the situation, because it has neither absolutely carried out the recommendations of the Civil Service Commission, or of the Railway Commission. It has not, when doing away with the Commissionerships, placed the department under “a man of business with a good organising capacity,” or under “ a Board of Directors placed above the roach of political pressure.” With regard to the latter idea, it is evident that such a thorough Louleversement of existing arrangements could only be done under the direct sanction of Parliament. For a radical change in the present system to be effected in the off-hand manner suggested would draw down on the heads of Ministers the wrath both of the just and the unjust. But as for Mr. Maxwell’s qualifications, it is begging the question io infer that ho is not suited to the post. The Government have chosen the most efficient man it could lay hands on. Our contemporary casts in Mr. Maxwell’s teeth the fact that ho went wrong over a purely engineering question. According to its own theory, such a mistake is neither hero nor there. Mr. Maxwell has had groat experience in the working of railways, ho is thoroughly hard working, above everything he is not a humbug, and, if such a thing is possible in an individual, will work unmoved by political considerations. It has yet to bo shown that ho does not possess the qualifications suggested as desirable for a general manager by the Civil Service

report. The onus of proving that he is not a fitting man lies with those who cannot credit the Government with sound judgment. The Executive have evidently been working on the lines laid out by the Civil Service Commission, and it is but fair to assume that they have adhered to them as closely as possible.