QUALIFICATION OF ELECTORS BILL.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4532, 29 September 1875, Page 2

QUALIFICATION OF ELECTORS BILL.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW ZEALAND TIMES Sir-Respecting the BUI for extension of the suffrage now before the House. I want to ask this question, viz.. Why is it that I, a person who have more than seventeen years acquaintance with New Zealand, haveneyer been able to record a vote for the Parliament of the colony ? I am forsooth, a lodger. That is to say. I have spent some thousands of pounds in qualifying myself to be a person of Information-a person trained to think. X have both spent and have been spent m this process. I have seriously injured my health m thus qualifying myself, but I have committed the great crime of being stiU “a lodger." Ido not squat in some miserable shanty or raupo whare on a sheep-run, and thus become “ a householder," but live, like a modern savage, amongst my books in a lodging, and for this I am punished. I want to ask also what in the world living In a lodging has to do with the matter one way or other * In virtue of the money and the time and energy I have spent in my education, X claim to have a voice in the representation of the colony. With what feeling am I to regard the legislation which has withheld it from me ? In virtue, too, of the qualification which education brings tor the exercise of political functions. I claim this right, and I have not much respect for the mteUigence which cannot perceive that the circumstance that my body finds shelter in a lodging is a pure accident, hating nothing at all to do with the essential question. I have a very strong feeling that educated men should, as such, be specially represented in the Upper House, but as this is presently impracticable, I claim that X shall not be disfranchised because I have spent my substance and my life in qualifying myself to be an enlightened and capable member of the State. Mr. Kolieston alone appears to have seen the real point, for which I thank him. Once more let me say that since the fact that some persons whom it is at once stupid folly and cruel injustice to disfranchise live in lodgings is a pure accident, let the franchise be directly given to them in virtue of that, and that only, which constitutes their claim to it. To enfranchise them on the score of the accident is folly and stupidity just as crass as the otner. will English people ever cease to disfigure and render unintelligible their Statute book through piecemeal and empirical legislation? Will they ever be . able to see a principle and meet it strictly as a principle ?—I am, &c., | POLITICO'S.