The Nelson Evening Mail. SATURDAY, JULY 20, 1867.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume II, Issue 168, 20 July 1867, Page 2

The Nelson Evening Mail. SATURDAY, JULY 20, 1867.

Ouk amiable and guileless comtemporary, the Colonist, having assumed the very creditable occupation of literary spy and detective, bas charged us with the heinous offence of incorporating in our leader of Tuesday last, a portion of an article which had appeared, at all events, a considerable time ago in some English paper, which had certainly been in manuscript in our note-book for the last four or five years, and of the precise origin of which we had not the most indistinct remembrance. Its singular appropriateness to the subjectmatter of our leader not unnaturally prompted the hasty perpetration of this atrocious deed, and this fact will probably plead our best excuse in the eyes of our readers for this act of petty larceny, petty as regards the injury thereby inflicted ou the public, and petty ss regards the mind which could contort so venial an offence into a grievous crime. We may add that those who are cognisant of the varied and complicated duties that devolve upon the unassisted editor of a daily paper will probably be disposed to extend to us a still larger margin of indulgence under the circumstances. Bufc neither our readers nor ourselves will be disposed so easily to dismiss the dull malignity of our bilious contemporary, who, regardless alike of professional courtesy and good-fellowship, seems to regret the brave old days of reckless recrimination aod mutual abuse, when the necessity of thinking was superseded by the facility of misrepresentation, when scold was the sublime of eloquence, and personality its acme. Abuse, at least according to our creed, is no argument, and uncivil language should be left to Billingsgate fishwives ; we shall therefore simply content ourselves with remarking that the charge of plagiarism comes with singularly ill grace from . a journal which has so frequently earned for itself an unenviable notoriety for the unscrupulous and almost verbatim appropriation of local news from the columns of this paper, to say nothing of the singular absence of police intelligence from its columns when, by some accident, none had appeared in the previous issues of this journal, a coincidence which has not escaped the notice of those who are curiously observant of such matters in this city. Indeed it is generally surmised, and not without reason, that but for the daily pabulum of local information supplied, to t! c best of our powers, by this journal, the columns of the Colonist would be far more meagre in this respect even than they are. We have characterised the Colonist's attack upon us as ungenerous, because in the remarks which we felt called upon to make in reference to the suspiciously sudden change which had been wrought in its sentiments with regard to the Railway Scheme — a change which, let us add, was in everyoue's mouth, and provoked no very favorable criticism —we studiously abstained from indulging in allusions, certainly pardonable under the circumstances, to Sir Robert Walpole's celebrated maxim that " Every man had his price," or to the ill-natured inuendoes afloat as to the possible equivalent for so mysterious and

unexpected a conversion. We remembered that such sudden revulsious of opinion were not without precedent in Ihe annals of the Colonist, not to go further back than the last accession to power of the present Premier, and we, therefore, charitably regarded them as amongst the normal characteristics of that organ. In fact the remarks which we penned with reference to i.his topic were of such a character as only to lack some malignity aud bad language, some falsehood and misrepresentation, to fit them for the columns of the Colonist itself. Our readers will, doubtless, have observed that iv the article which our contemporary devoted to our graceless selves ou Friday last, not one word appears in justification of this singular tergiversation. On the contrary, the subject is carefully ignored, no allusion whatever is made to it, and its readers are thus left in total darkness as to the real cause which had stirred the fountains of its wrath. Now we hold that the public have just as good a right to demand an explanation of such apparent inconsistency from the conductor of a public journal as they have irom their representatives in Parliament. Instead, however, of satisfying its readers on this head, thereby, as we should have imagined, relieving its editorial conscience of a heavy burden, it expends all its energies upon malicious but very harmles innendoes as to the "size and weight" of this journal, both beiug subjects to which we should have imagined that any allusion would have proved distasteful in the highest degree to the sensorium of our contemporary, since the " size" of the Evening Mail may have been materially affected by a secession from the ranks of the Colonist's subscribers and advertisers, while it has evidently had very appreciable proof of its "weight" on more than one recent occasion. We submit — and we believe that our readers will bear us out in the assertion — that how muchsoever such meau gladiatorial feats as those iv which the Colonist indulged yesterday morning may entertain the town for the nonce, they are in reality altogether unworthy of a journal which arrogates to itsdf the position and duties of a leader of popular opinion, and which should seek to uphold rather than strive by every unfair means in its power to depreciate the efforts of those who, under heavy disadvantages, are laboring in the selfsame cause aud profession with itself. We trust that the time is yet far distant when the functions of a Vidocq or a Forrester, or any other species of detective, will be held to sit gracefully or appropriately on the editor of a public journal.