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New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4537, 5 October 1875, Page 2

Elsewhere will be found printed the report of the select committee on the fraudulent issue of miners’ rights at Ohinemuri, and a precis of the leading evidence taken by that committee. The report is a disgrace to the records of this colony, because it is a disgrace that the state of affairs which justified the report should have happened here. It was impossible that the committee could have reported otherwise than they have done. The facts before them could have pointed to no other conclusion than that at which they arrived, and the sorrow and shame with which the report will be read will have its origin in the feeling that such a report had to be furnished in justice. However, the worst as regards the Ohinemuri miners’ rights is now out, and though regret will be general that the worst should have existed, still, as it did exist, there can be no regret that it should now be made known, and the authors of the mischief afforded a desirable publicity. If the Tairua Committee’s report discloses as bad a state of affairs as this, then indeed it will become evident that under the very cloak of Government authority transactions which can hardly be described by too strong words, have been effected to the detriment of the people of New Zealand. Mr. Edwin Torrens Brissenden will, it is to be feared, find few to agree with him in his view that his actions are prompted by quixotic notions of benevolence and an abstract principle of If he would have this believed, he must manage to efface from recollection the history of his connection with the fraudulent issue of miners’ rights at Ohinemuri, and if he would found his claim to a fine sense of the abstract principles of justice on his connection with those practices, he must either be very foolish or possessed of that consummate impertinence which deems all others but its owner fools. As for Mr. Gerald O’Halloran, Mr. Mackay’s clerk, who has a happy knack of doing things on the spur of the moment, as Mr. Brissenden has of making little statements, he seems to have been especially fortunate in possessing godfathers and godmothers who in his baptism bestowed upon him quite a catalogue of Christian names, enabling him, on the advice of his friend Hennelly, to take out miners’ rights for indifferent combinations of those names. There can be little doubt that to Sir George Grey is due the credit of having exposed a scandalous state of affairs which, but for his persistency and influence, might have been smoothed down and glossed over. As for Mr. Brissenden’s statements with regard to his benevolence to the Thames diggers, the Thames newspapers will very soon settle that, and until they do so, little need be said upon the subject.