MASTER HUMPHREY.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 301, 4 December 1874, Page 3

MASTER HUMPHREY.

(From the ' Guardian' Nov. 1874. )

"'Tis sport to see the engineer hoist with his own petard but the sport is considerably marred when a whole community, are compulsory sharers of the engineer's discomfiture. And it strikes us that such 15 the position of Otago in respect' of Master Humphrey and our morning contemporary (' Daily Times.') At any rate, they have both done their best to bring about such a result, and if no evil consequences ensue, we shall not have them to thank tor it. For our contemporary was Master Humphrey's foster-father, so to speak. It first brought him into notoriety by allowing its ..columns to become the medium whereby publicity was given to the unwholesome lucubrations wherein (as our contemporary felictously observes) "he brought his six or seven arguments to bear upon his adversary, and cleverly masked their attack with a cloud of little capitation calculations." True, it is that the foster-parent, with more than step-fatherly cruelty, subsequently, turned upon poor Master Humphrey, and 1 suffered him to leave Otago in disgust. But the mischief had then been done. He had been permitted and encouraged to philander with figures, and patted on the back, and taught to believe that really he was " a very astute financier"—a delusion more easily created than, destroyed, especially when aided, as in this case, by the.. wonderful vanity and supreme self-sufficiency of the victim. Is it surprising that, removed to a wider "sphere, Mr. Fellows " ventures upon a " bolder flight than before "? Having been persuaded that he was successful in the manipulation of the first four i rule's of arithmetic, his crude experiments I in the rule-ot-three, of which our contemn I porary now complains, woulcl follow as a j matter of course. And we are'really inclined to the opinion that he exhibits at least as ijyieli proficiency in the latter, as in other days he did in the minor, branch of arithmetical speculation. (From the. ' Mount Ida Chronicle,' Jan. 31, 1873.) . ; :v

Master Humphrey wrote some letters to the ' Daily Times,' dealing with subjects that very few of his readers had an opportunity of accurately testing. Since then 7 he has thrown his ideas into the form of a pamphlet, and last week we ventured to suggest that the republication of these papers would be the best plan for destroying the evanescent influence they had obtained. On receiving our usual •files, we were astonished to see acknowledgments on all sides—in the laudatory style usually accorded to annual publications, &c.—recommending the public to at once secure copies of this very valuable contribution to Colonial literature ; and all this was written about a work that, in our opinion, is a most pernicious attempt on the part of a morbidly diseased brain to destroy the credit of a young country, that is adjudged by all the rest of the .world to be prosperous in the extreme. If Master Humphrey's statements were honest ones, they could very well be allowed to pass without notice; but when we find, as we do, page 10-entirely devoted to a statement as to a quarterly payment for £52,000 (which had already been paid the previous year by anticipation), which he chooses to hold the Colony again liable for, and in his revised balance-sheet expressly, enters ity. wo get a very fair gage by which'to test the financial honesty of this modern Hercules.