New Zealand Spectator AND COOK’S STRAIT GUARDIAN. Saturday, March 8, 1851.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VII, Issue 584, 8 March 1851, Page 2

New Zealand Spectator AND COOK’S STRAIT GUARDIAN. Saturday, March 8, 1851.

We perceive that Mrs. Harris, in her last number, has busied herself to very little purpose in recounting all the qualifications which, in her opinion, distinguish her late friend, philosopher, and guide, and fit him for his newly assumed office of agent for the persons calling themselves the Constitutional Association.” As Miss Carolina Wilelmina Skeggs, another celebrity, discovered that “ virtue—virtue is worth any price,” so Mrs. Harris is disposed to rate very highly the public virtues of her political agent. Of course it is very irksome for us to be obliged to dispel these illusions, and to damp the spirit of her eulogy by crying out fudge at the conclusion of every sentence • and yet there is no other alternative left us, since it is impossible to reconcile facts with her illusions. When Mrs. Harris talks of the "unlimited confidence

placed by all classes of the community” in Mr. Fox, how can we reconcile this devotion with the scanty attendance at his farewell dinner, when, though tickets were to be had for the asking, when they were ■ positively given away, all that could be mustered by the Faction for their parting demonstration, including strangers and masters of vessels, barely amounted to eight and twenty persons? How is this unlimited confidence to be reconciled with the fact of the absolute silence with which Mr. Fox has been passed over in all the late public meetings at Nelson, where he lived for nearly six years, and where the settlers, from long experience of his character, must have formed a proper estimate of its worth? How, we say, is the coldness, almost bordering upon contempt, evinced by the Nelson settlers towards Mr. Fox to be interpreted as showing their unlimited confidence in him? But still more difficult is it to reconcile the pretensions to integrity and disinterestedness put forth by his advocate with the jobbing of which Mr. Fox stands convicted, and which he has only more completely established by the miserable failure of his attempt to vindicate himself from the charges that have been brought against him. No man who has mixed himself up in public matters has left a community with so damaged a reputation as Mr. Fox has done, while he has contrived to give it as it were the coup de grace, to tear to shreds and tatters the little remnant of character that might be left, by the unaccountable infatuation and suicidal perversity exhibited in the course he has adopted with reference to the plans and records of the New Zealand Company, delaying indefinitely the issuing of the Crown titles to the landowners of this settlement, and at the same time entailing a heavy expense on the community. In the face of all these facts it is to little purpose that Mrs. Harris, in each successive number, talks of victories, unanimity of purpose, public opinion, and all the other delusions which seem to possess her. Like a bad player ill versed in his part, however he may strut upon the stage and split the ears of the groundlings by his ranting, his vehemence of gesture only provokes laughter and contempt; so Mrs. Harris finds the more violent she becomes the less she is attended to, and all her vehement protestations in favour of Mr. Fox only excite ridicule while the facts, which have transpired in connection with his conduct as Principal Agent, are so fresh in the minds of the public.