PASSING NOTES.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume I, Issue 1, 9 June 1887, Page 2

PASSING NOTES.

We would particularly invite correspondence from our readers on all subjects of local and general interest. A newspaper should reflect all shades of opinion on political and social topics, and we want to make the Standard a genuine reflex of popular thoughts and ideas. Send along your letters therefore; let them be brief and to the point, and kindly don’t forget the old rule, write on one side of the paper only. Don’t be scurrilous or personal, we don’t want any £5000 libel suits in the Standard Office, but we do want to be “in touch” with our readers, and by allowing them the free use of our columns, to assist them in ventilating grievances, redressing abuses and working generally for the good of the Bay. P.S.—Don’t forget to write on one side of the paper only. Otherwise your effusions, be they smart or dull, effective or stupid, will be ruthlessly consigned to the Gehenna of the waste paper basket. Just another word or two about the report that the Standard is connected with the Herald. Once for all it is sheer nonsense. As well say that Gladstone and Lord Salisbury are sworn allies on the Home Rule question, or that Messrs Gannon and McDonald intend to canvass for each other at the forthcoming elections. The report is utterly false, and we wonder that people can be found to swallow holus bolus such a stupid invention of interested opponents. ******* A lot more reports about 30oz. nuggets at the Kimberley Goldfields are current. Don’t you believe them, New Zealanders. Surely enough poor beggars have left their bodies to rot and their bones to bleach on the hideous plains of that terrestrial Hades, Northern Australia, already. A good alluvial goldfield, a “poor mans’ field,” would be a grand thing indeed, not only for Australia, but for

New Zealand, but we are afraid the days of poor men’s fields are over. Put not your faith in telegrams and in the bogus reports of interested storekeepers; when Kimberley really turns out “a boom” go there, but for the present, £1 a Week and tucker in New Zealand is better than a whole continent of Kimberleys. There can be no doubt whatever that the Protection movement is growing. Down at Wellington, old Jock Anderson, a veteran inkslinger, is to start a Protection weekly, (in one paper we saw the name prophetically printed (weakly) which is to be called The Sentinel. Ballance, Vogel and Stout are to contribute signed articles, and of course, so long as the subsidised "dibs” hold out, the Sentinel and its veteran progenitor will do well. We intend devoting a series of articles to this important question of Protection and Freetrade in future issues, and trust to be able to put the relative merits and defects of each clearly and succinctly before our readers. Bravo for the Salvation Army. They get sneered at by every pettifogging would-be wit, but they do a lot of good. Of course with their howling and yelling and generally making of night hideous with their cries, we have no sympathy, but when they show their devotion to the true tenets of the New Testament, going forth into the highways and byways and bringing practical help and comfort instead of dealing out sappy tracts and evangelical treacle, we are heartily with them. They are the true friends of the poor and needy, and as such are hardly deserving of the many hard raps they get. In Auckland they have shamed the older denominations by their care for the fallen and the destitute, and now we see that in Wellington they intend to “joolibrate the celebree’’ by giving a really good feed to a thousand poor children. And there are poor children in Wellington, any amount of them, although perhaps the Wellingtonians would not admit it.