POLITICAL.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 1008, 22 June 1911, Page 3

POLITICAL.

In a letter to Mr W. S. Stewart, under date May 12th, Mr F. W. Frankland, who is at present in London, writes: — “ The mail leaves for New Zealand this afternoon, and I am sorry—more sorry than I can easily express to you —that I can no longer delay to inform you ‘officially,’ my dear friend and helper in the political campaign, that I am unable to carry out my darling wish of contesting the Manawatu seat at the 1911 election. I have been hoping against hope, for the last few weeks, that business might permit of my returning to New Zealand in time, in which case I should have undertaken that thorough personal canvass of the entire constituency which I had promised myself, and of which you had the great kindness, some months ago, to give timely notice to some of my supporters. But it is now, unfortunately, quite certain that I cannot leave England until next January, and it is due to yourself as well as to my other supporters that you should be apprised of this fact at the earliest possible moment. It is to you, as the chairman of my principal committee, that I write ; but I should feel deeply thankful if, without too much trouble, you could intimate the changed prospect to any of those others who have helped in the past and who are entitled to know, and also to any of the local party magnates on the Government side whom, as a good Liberal, I am, of course, anxious as ever to inconvenience as little as possible. From the enclosed advertisement in a leading London financial paper, you will see how engrossing is the work which will keep mein this country till after Christmas. But I can assure you this is by no means the only thing that keeps me ‘ hard at it ’ here. Besides three other New Zealand enterprises (one of them a very big one}, I have got some work to do for Pierpout Morgan’s partner—George W. Perkins, my former chief in the New York Life Insurance Company, which has been so kind in the person of several of its principal officers in helping me over my New Zealand work with American, English and Continental financiers. Then, too, there is my literary work, every copy of my book (fourth edition of ‘Thoughts on Ultimate Problems’) having been sold out inside four mouths, and the publishers (Messrs David Nutt and Co,, of Long Acre, London) pressing me to prepare a fifth edition at once.

We are given further to understand that prior to the last General Election in the Old Country, Mr Frankland was approached by influential personages to stand for a constituency in the Unionist interest ; also by Mr Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., leader of the Labour Party, to contest a seat in the interest of that party; but, in characteristic language, Mr Frankland says : “ Nothing, politically, could give me such keen satisfaction as to serve the Manawatu district, where my heart and my interests are ; and it is a thousand pities, though I say it, that the mutual relations of Mr Stevens and myselt could not have been so adjusted in 1908 that the services of both of us might have been available for the Manawatu and the Liberal Party.”