New Zealand Times. (PUBLISHED DAILY.) SATURDAY, AUGUST 5.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4796, 5 August 1876, Page 2

New Zealand Times. (PUBLISHED DAILY.) SATURDAY, AUGUST 5.

Mr. .Rees last evening gave evidence that the descriptions we have had of his powers of vulgar abuse were neither overdrawn nor highly colored. It is to be hoped that the Parliament of this colony will not be frequently treated to such a specimen of utterly coarse, ungentlemanlike personalty as that to which Mr. Rees treated it last night. He spoke for some four hours, and we have necessarily been compelled to condense his speech considerably. Indeed, had it not been that our exclusipn of his speech might have given him an opportunity to set himself up as a martyr, we should have felt inclined, for the credit of the colony, for the character of our Parliament, nay even for Mr. Rees’s own sake as a representative, to have kept his utterances out of our columns. As it is, if we filled every column of the New Zealand Times we should be unable to get in a tithe of the virulent and characteristic scurrility with which heassailedthe Government and all belonging to them collectively and personally. We are safe in saying that no previous debate in the New Zealand Parliament can show a speech comparable, for all that was low and unbecoming, with that uttered by Mr. Rees last night. His accusations were from beginning to end so unfounded, couched in such language, and delivered in such an offensive manner, that they formed their own best refutation, and really are elevated into an importance they do not and should not possess, by even the brief notice we have taken of them. It would have been better perhaps had we passed them by unnoticed, and so we should have done were it not that having given them a certain space in our report it behoved us to point out that the only sentiment they excited in each member possessed of proper feeling was that of unmitigated disgust and contempt. He was indeed reminded more than once by the loudly expressed disapprobation of the House that he was speaking as no man pretending to feelings of common decency in language should speak. Mr. Rees last night drew one or two historical parallels between characters described by Homer and contemporaneous New Zealand public men. Homer fortunately gives us a parallel to Mr. Rees himself. He is the Theesites of Sir George Grey’s camp, and for some of his unmanly remarks such punishment as Homer tells us Theesites received would not be inappropriate.