THE Mount Ida Chronicle FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1876.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 390, 1 September 1876, Page 2

THE Mount Ida Chronicle FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1876.

Sib Geoege Ghet's position in the eyea of the people of this Colony at the present time is peculiar. He is at once the most popular and the moat hated public man of our day, By the young men of all parts of the Colony, and by the whole people of the Province of A uckland, be is idolised. Un the other hand, by a large section of the community Sir George Grey is persistently representented as a disappointed man, whose whole public career has been a failure, and who now is actuated by a strong feeling of revenge against some person or persons unknown. The detractors of a great man do not stop here. Forgetting they deny, to him whom they malign, any public career at all of an arduous nature, they go on to say that, worn out by a long life, he is now in his dotage, and if he ventures as a representative into the arena of public life he must be made to find his level. In plain English Sir George Grey is said to be a lunatic, whose craze is the Colonial Secretary. It is hardly to be expected that in the South we can at present completely understand the state of public feeling which has grown up around Sir George Grey's re-en-trance into public life. To understand this we have to get rid of our prejudiced judgment created by the persistent eiforts made during the last twelve months or more to malign and accuse one who had no means of defending himself, and who, far from - thinking of either accusation or defence, has been engaged in the hopeless task of trying to mitigate some of the evils which have arisen during the last few years in his Province of Auckland—once so fair and promising—with an empty treasury—providing in ; many instances, it is to be feared, out; J of his own means for charges which j should "have been borne by the Colony, : rather than play the beggar at the feet j of the Colonial Dives. | Sir George Grey's services at the present juncture of public affairs will be better understood and appreciated in a few years' time than they can hope to be now. We venture to say that the sacrifices he has made, in the hope of no reward except in the gratitude of the people, are almost unequalled in ancient or modern times. The historian of the future will relate of our day that the people were sun kin apathy; that they cared little or nothing tor their freedom to control and provide for their own good government; that in their eyes good government meant spending money in the place, and that bad government meant an empty treasury. He will, we think, go on to say, that so long as money could be borrowed, so long could any Government go on increasing its majority by bribing members through their districts, and in Borne cases by the promise of individual preferment; that the people —sunk so low in their appreciation of the privileges their ancestors would have died for—were tamely about to submit to the establishment of an ironheeled autocracy of the worst shape, which, through its nominee agents in all parts of the Colony, was intended to build up a so-called great nation ; that in orde* to accomplish thia Auck-'

land, in common with the weaker Provinces, was to be starved into acquiescence, while a ministerial agent—alternately a civil servant and minister at the whim of Sir Julius Vogel— was allowed to inault and trample upon the dearest feelings and traditions of the North, treating the European population exactly in the same way as Sir Donald M'Lean has been allowed to treat the natives ; —that is, rewarding the treacherous and grasping, while ignoring and despising the virtuous and the honest. In addition to this, that taxation upon the working classes was increasing to an extent unknown m England, in order that the rich and wealthy might go untaxed, or at least pay. no more than if they were only merely earning enough upon which to subßißt. At such a time an old man, ; who had had more than his share of responsibility in high places—who for those services had been thanked by leading English statesmen; who had contributed in no small degree to &ave Bombay in the time of the Indian mutiny; to whom New Zealand itself stood indebted for obtaining a free i Constitution from a Conservative Government at such afc'me Sir George Grey left his retirement, where calmly, in the evening of his days, he hoped to find such solace as is possible for the close of a well spent life, in the surroundings of family affection, and of all that is beautiful in the natural world. This man, it will be said, left all this to become once more the target for every unprincipled man in New Zealand, with no hope »f nt immediate success, but only that the people would in time, by his example, be stimulated to preserve their own Constitutional freedom, and to hand down that freedom unimpaired to their children after them. In the South we know nothing of the bribery of some of the districts in the North, and starvation of others, indicated by those two words, "Dear "Pollen"—the facile tool and adroit civilian, who never had the confidence of any constituency, and probably never * will. There is no slavery so insinuating or so binding as that which grows up out of the self sale of its victims to an autocratic head for the expenditure of public money in the place. Prom this Sir George' Grey, and those that follow him, are willing to save us.