AS OTHERS SEE US.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5518, 3 December 1878, Page 3

AS OTHERS SEE US.

(From the Australasian.) At the end of the session of the New Zealand Legislature, Sir George Grey had to defend himself against charges founded on the great disproportion between his promise and his performance. Commencing the session with pledges to bring in measures that would result in giving everything to everybody, the Premier had to end it with an explanation of its comparative barrenness. The explanation is not a matter of the slightest difficulty to him. It is that he has found himself hindered by an obstructive world. His beneficent intentions and statesman-like capacity were equal to the achievement of nil he had promised, had he not found the rest of mankind leagued against him. Ho had “a hostile Home Government, a hostile Governor, and a hostile Council, and a small majority in the House.” There was Sir George Grey still firm on the side of liberalism and progress, but unhappily the remainder of the world were on the other side. Instead of regarding this circumstance as casting some shade of doubt on his personal infallibility, Sir George Grey only accepts it as further proof of the hopeless depravity of human nature, and of his transcendent superiority to the rest of mankind. For our own part, we must plead guilty to some slight scepticism regarding these transcendent superiorities before a little investigation of their claims. In the case of Sir George Grey we can, as it seems to us, see other reasons for the opposition he complains of la Parliament and in the world outside, and it is not necessary to go very far back in the session to find justification for the suspicion which attaches to Sir George Grey's motives and principles. With a very high soaring theory and a profusion of gashing philanthropy and beneficence, it has been the misfortune of the Grey Ministry to have been implicated in some transactions of a very questionable character, which upon grounds utterly aloof from politics could only receive the severest condemnation of all interested in preserving the integrity and purity of public life. Some of these have been in connection with the Press, and are only explainable on the assumption of a determination on the part of Sir George Grey to strangle all newspapers which he could not by the most unscrupulous means attract to his support. The attempt to carry out this object by the manipulation of the advertising fund we have before commented upon, and the latter days of the session wei*e stained by the exposure of a somewhat similar case. We refer to the attempt of the Government to give a grossly unfair advantage to three Ministerial journals, which were already subsidised from the advertising fund, by granting them the lease of a special telegraph wire at one-half the sum which the general manager of telegraphs reported the concession to be worth. When the matter was brought under the notice of tho House by Mr. McLean, we are sorry to see that a politician so respectable as Mr. Stout allowed himself so far to be influenced by tho bad company is keeping as to resist a motion which, according to the statement which makes him a- part proprietor of one of the favored journals, affected him personally.' It is difficult, on reading the papers connected with this case, to arrive at any other opinion than that the Government was giving to papers partly owned by its own members further unfair advantages at public expense, and was thus by a slightly circuitous way putting public money into their pockets. It is not surprising that Sir George Grey, in speaking to the case, resolved it into one of a very different aspect. As he stated it, the affair was an attempt on the part of the Government to break down a newspaper monopoly, which “ tended to menace public opinion, or prevent public opinion from being formed. It was,” declared the intrepid Premier, ft a question of free printing.” Even through this impudently audacious travesfcie of the facts of the case the purpose of spending public money for a political and party purpose becomes clearly apparent. The more the case was discussed, the more shady its character became, and it admirably illustrates the tendencyof colonial “liberalism,” whether this is represented by Sir George Grey, or Mr. George Higinbotham, or Mr. Berry, to restrict free discussion by either corrupting or subsidising or terrorisng the public Press. When we remember that this was one of the closing incidents of the session, we may fairly hold that there are other reasons for the growing distrust in and opposition to the Grey Ministry than the incurable perversity of human nature, to which the erratic Premier attributes all bis difficulties.