PARLIAMENTARY BORES AND APES.

Grey River Argus, Volume XIII, Issue 1524, 23 June 1873, Page 2

PARLIAMENTARY BORES AND APES.

Moie than one of the Colonies, not excluding New Zealand, can claim the questionable honor of possessing in their Parliament persons who fully answer to the following descriptive sketch by Mr Trollope : —

At home we have had- terrible bores, gentlemen whom it was hardly possible to keep from a daily performance for which they were qualified neither by nature nor by education; but at home the Speaker is powerful, the House is ■ ppwerful, ; and the reporters are powerful) The bore is silenced at any rate during the choicer hour 3of debate, and is, at last, after a certain fashion stamped out. The House will not listen when it has come to a general but unexpressed resolution that a certain member is never worthy of being heard. But in the colonial Legislatures the brazen-faced bore seems to be too strong for any restraint that can be devised for him. And then in a small house his vote is of importance, and the party which is unfortunate in hia adherence does not dare to join in snubbing him. Such a man these is in one of the colonies as to whom I wondered that the House , should endure him even though he could have given a triple vote. That he spoke every day was nothing ; many members did so. That he spoke on every sub- j ject was not much ; for others, perhaps, did so too. That he also spoke a dozen times on every subject was by no means his heaviest offence;, nor even that in all his speeches he never deviated into sense or spoke a word worth hearing, j either on the score of argument or from its eloquence or wit. There are offences worse than the offence ®f stupidity, even when stupidity be joined to arrogant presumption, In every word that this man spoke he either insulted an opponent or attempted to pander to the prejudices of the multitude. There ara tribunes of the people and would-be tribunes, fierce advocates of popular rights, as to whom it is often difficult not to think that their Demosthenic strain springs rather from their desire to please than to do good ; and in listening to them the hearer turns his heart against them. Such men are flatterers and demagogues ; but then they are probably capable of flattering, and fitted by nature to seduce mobs. This man only aped the acts of such popular leaders, and aped them so badly, was so vulgar, so ignorant, so illiterate, so incapable in his attempts, so nauseous in his flights of oratory, so blasphemous in his appeals to religion, so impudent to the gentlemen around him, so weak in his language, so strong in his Billingsgate phrases, that I could think but little of a constituency which would return him, and marvelled at the patience of a House which would endure him. I felt that did I live in that Colony and entertain a desire to sit in lhat House, I would certainly stand for the same constituency with that gentleman, so that we might i not both sit there together. His continual presence must, I think, be to all those legislators a blistering thorn, robbing their position of all its pleasures and most of its pride.'' ;