The Nelson Evening Mail. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 1871.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 141, 21 June 1871, Page 2

The Nelson Evening Mail. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 1871.

It appears to be one of the laws of Nature that in every community, no matter how small it may;, be, there shall always exist a certain nußiber of individuals who conceive, it tcfcwf a part of their mission upon earth to be. constantly wielding the pen. So Jong as their scribblings are confined to their own perusal/ or are only inflicted upon a select circle' of personal friends who, from sheer politeness, do violence to their feelings by suppressing the smile which involuntarily risesvto their lips, such literary efforts may be looked upon as comparatively harmless, but unfortunately, the unhappy victim of the mania for writing does not stop here,; he is not eatiefied with making his friends miserable,

but is consumed with a desire to inflict his lucubrations upon, the public through the columns of a newspaper. By dint of his persevering; importunities he finds a good-natured editor who consents to publish an occasional letter, which is punctually delivered at the printing office, and, after the grammar ami spelling have been carefully corrected, is converted into something like readable matter. It contaius, it is true, an immense arnouut of rubbish, but this is so intertwined with the facts which the writer desires to make public that it is impossible to sepnra'e the one from the other, aud consequently it is necessary to publish the communication in loto or to leave it out altogether. The former alternative is adopted, and the writer, when he sees his letter in print, is so astonished to fiud that from his brain has sprung such a production that he is tempted to repeat, the operation again and agaiu, always — thanks to the good-uatured editor — with a like satisfactory 1 result. But after a time, ! a higher ambition seizes him, and he is no longer content with relating certain facts, accompanied by the occasional embellishments that are excusable in the outpourings of the novice's pen, but he must set himself up as a critic of the writings of others. His comprehensive faculties are not sufficient to enable him to take in the meaning of more than balf-a-dozen words at a time, and con.°equensiy he lays hold of the first expression that conveys to his mind an idea with "which he does not altogether agree, and immediately proceeds to twist and turn it about, and to tear it in pieces with all tho . ardour and delight of a youthful member of the canine species that has surreptitiously obtained possession of some article the real use of which it is incapable of understanding. Utterly regardless of the context, he picks out the three or four words iD themselves objectionable, and bases upon them a violent attack on the writer, from whose miud nothing was further than the ideas attributed to him by his self-constituted but thoroughly i incompetent critic. When the disease arrives st such a stage it is time to put | some check upon it. j In another column will be found w j letter from Mr. James Grove, in whom the mania we have alluded to lias developed itself to au alarming extent. On the present occasion he boldly accuses us of "holding forth in behalf of 'bad roads aud no roads at all ' " in an article we had written on the settlement of the .country. In order to thoroughly deceive 'his readers, aud to iuduce them to believe that we had advocated that which he j accuses us of doing, he places the three or four words that have roused his ire between inverted commas to show that they are actually quoted from the article in question, and in this he is perfectly right; we did make usaof them, but not in the sense in which alone he has been able to view them. We will quote the sentence from which Mie has made his selection in order to show how completely be has misinterpreted our meaning. In alluding to the obstacles that at present exist to the colonising of our back country we stated that the great difficulty to be overcome was, not so much the want of communication, as the disinclination of the settlers in the Waimeas to undergo the hardships of a bush life^ and went on to say : — If any considerable number of those who are now leading a life of dependence in the Waimeas and our other settled districts, could be induced to make up their minds, or, still better, would voluntarily determine to move further back with their wives and families, if they have them, and, if not, with a view to creating homes upon which they could, after a few years labor, take to themselves wives, all such difficulties as may now appear to exist in the shape of unsuitable land laws, and bad roads, or no roads at a'l, would speedily disappear. The one would soon be amended to meet the requirements of the people, and the other be quickly remedied by the pressure that would be brought to bear upon the Government. This constitutes our advocacy of bad roads. Again, he says : — " Backwoodsman goes further, and would have the Government give aid in ratious, &c, and yet you say he has hit the right nail on the head, and at the same time deprecate the making of good roads," &c\, &c. Our reply is that "Backwoodsman" wrote three letters, as Mr. Grove perfectly well knew at the time he penned his remarks. In the first, he attributed the want of anything approaching to systematic colonisation of the interior of the province to the want of inclination on the part of the rising generation to encounter the hardships of a, wild bush life, and, in referring to this, we expressed our opinion that he " had hit the right nail on the head." A fortnight later he advocated the propriety of the Government supplying such settlers as might go back into the country with rations, and because we endorsed his views as expressed in his first letter our readers are told that we approved of what he suggested in his last communication, with regard to which we had expressed no opinion whatever.

Fair and honest criticism we have no desire, to shun, indeed, we rather court it, but to having our words so worried, and their meaning so distorted as has been done by the wriier of this letter we offer a decided objection. We feel that we owe an apology to our readers for alluding at such length to auy remarks of Mr Grove's, but we were compelled either to exclude his letter altogether, or in publishing it to offer some explanations of the gross mis-stalements it contains. For obvious reasons we have chosen the latter course.