SIR GEORGE GREY'S STUMPING TOUR.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5291, 11 March 1878, Page 3

SIR GEORGE GREY'S STUMPING TOUR.

(From the Australasian.) • • “Theyears' which 1 bring the philosophic mind to most men have had a contrary effect upon Sir George Grey, who is sowing his political wild Oats at a time of life in which statesmen usually review the errors 1 of their early career, and correct the delusions of youth by the ripe experience and matured judgment of old age. The Premier of New Zealand is now stumping the Northern Island, and talking bombast to “ the people” as glibly as if he had graduated among the Chartists of Glasgow or Clerkenwell upwards of thirty years ago. At- New Plymouth, on the Bth of February, he indulged in an oration which might have been delivered, with very-few alterations, to a meeting of the unemployed- in Tonipkins-square, New York, or to an assemblage of the Kearney faction, at the foot' of Nob’s-hill in San Francisco. While disclaiming any intention of setting class against class, he held up the landowners of New Zealand to reprobation, because, he said, “they were becoming enormously rich by the labor of others—by money taken out of the pockets of the community. Of course, he thought this was entirely wrong. : He would say, let every man pay for what he gets.” Sir George did not condescend to particulars. This might have been inconvenient. He did not explain that in all new countries, endowed with a fertile soil and a genial climate, nature is the chief factor Of ■ wealth, and that human industry is but an insignificant auxiliary to her “gratuitous utilities.” The natural grasses of exotic herbage of New Zealand, the rain and sunshine, the mysterious alchemy by which vegetation is transformed 1 into wool and mutton, 'are certainly 1 not the products of human toil; and the statesman Who denounces the persons who exploiter these for their own benefit and for that of the community to which he belongs, must .be one of two things which we refrain from particularising. Such pernicious rant is all the more inexcusable in a speaker like Sir George Grey, because he cannot plead, like our own demagogues, the excuse of a defective education, 1 or ®f that envy and hatred of the prosperous classes which actuate men who have taken to politics because they have failed to succeed in the ordinary pursuits of honest industry. ■ The New Zealand Premier assured his hearers that, “if in a.country like their own, they trained up every person to know his political duty, so they would train persons to respect their own judgment and to respect themselves in the proper way, and it they continue to do that from the first in a new country, they could raise up a power infinitely superior to the mass of the population existing in any country in Europe. He had said every man being trained to take part in the affairs of the country would create in him habits of self-respect, but he would say that it would do more than that, it would create habits of morality of various kinds, a man would prize his own home because feeling he was capable of being useful in tho country, and would be ashamed to do anything that would damage him in the eyes of his fellow citizens. By this means they would cease to raise lip in the bosom of a country a criminal population.” These are just the sort of sonorous platitudes which used to be talked in the clubs of Paris in ’B9 and ’lB, and again in ’7O ; but they are certainly not borne out by the facts of tlie case in this colony, where manhood suffrage has now been established for twentyyears, and where it has come to this, that freedom of speech has been violently suppressed in the capital, and in one or two other centres of population, and where one of the organs of the “ Liberal” party, namely, the Bendigo Independent, writes thus respecting the “ criminal population” which we are “rearing up in the bosom of the country” “ Larrikinism is a fact, and a tearful fact, ■ which makes us sometimes stand aghast when -wo contemplate the future of thisi country, and ask in whose hands ;its destinies willhe placed. The enormities of that orimo'havo been depicted in lively terms iby .the newspapers of the colony, 1 And all are nnanimonsdn condemning it.” j Sir George Grey went on to declare that if the present state of things continued they would create two nations—a rich nation and a poor l nation—the 'poor nation' including very few persons, who would rise to comfort and competency ; and that “if .they did not insist upon a fair distribution of thb public burdens, , and, if they did not insist on all the prizes in political life being offered tb every citizen' ifi -New Zealand, they who were poor now would have their children poorer, and their grandchildren poorer still.” Wo have heard some*

thing very like this before, and cannot help thinking that the speaker has been stealing soriie of his stage thunder from -Victoria.'Be’ this as it may, it is rather amusing to read that Sir George considers that 'all such terrible, risks may be avoided by—what - By inculcating habits of thrift, industry, self-denial, sobriety, and forethought. By pointing , out that, in a British colony, every man may be the' architect of his own fortunes! and tbit personal conduct or misfortune, and not political misgovernment, is at the bottom of all social failures ? Nothing of the -sort. A 1 public meeting never wants to hear the truth.- It must be flattered' or cajoled, and' accordingly Sir George Grey solemnly assured .his hearers that the one thing needful. “to‘scatter plenty o’er a smiling land ’’’ was to bestow upon every man, who is twenty-one years of age, one vote, and one vote only. This will transform character: This will make all men virtuous, diligent, prudent, chaste, temperate, and just. This will regenerate the .Individual, purify the community, and' transfigure the State I ' “Every attempt made to keep alive political life throughout the country,” said he, “ did good. Let them-look at England after the Reformation. f What poets, what orators, what states; gelaxy of talent such as England never saw before or since. It was the spur of political life, brought that about. .-Let theinilook, also at the time when the Reform Bill was introduced—Byron, . Shelley), Scott, - ancb pther men of that period. They might see that - the more: they kept alive political life ,in >lfew, Zealand,; so much the more rapid and effectual would be the advancement of the.country.” What shallow fustian .is .this !,; j Another sophist might argue that. despotism must be a splendid thing! because the reign ,of .Louis the Fourteenth was, the' most, brilliant .epoph;; of, French history—the period of Moliere, Racine, and Corneille, of Pascal, Rochefoucauld, and La Bruy ere, of Rendon, Massillon, aud.Bossuet, pf 'Mazariti, Coride, Turemie, and Colbert,, of La Sage, Boile iu, and Malebranche. And a third sophist might contend that it was good: for a! nation to be trampled ,iri the dust by a foreign enemy, because it, was. at that critical period of its existence that Germany produced. the-xpleudid cluster of,men of genius pf jwhopi, Goethe was the acknowledged head and chief. If . Sir George Grey's. knowledge . of. political science is as meagre .as his knowledge of, liter rary history, those who accept him as an oracle and a leader are very much ■ to be commis-, seriated. • 1 ‘‘ " '” '■ ’ '