The New Zealand Times (PUBLISHED DAILY.) MONDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1878.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5540, 30 December 1878, Page 2

The New Zealand Times (PUBLISHED DAILY.) MONDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1878.

Our friends at the Thames are wise in their generation. They have got the measure of their distinguished representative exactly. He loves adulation, which is as the breath of the nostrils of the stump orator proper, and he requires that the men to whom he talks of equality and fraternity should first bow down and lick the very dust at his feet. Ho will do nothing .without a “demonstration” of servility, and upon the occasion of turning the first sod of a railway from Grahamstown to Hamilton it would appear that the people of that borough did their best to please him. There were some wry faces naturally, but when a Prime Minister undertakes in the interest of his constituents to set the law at defiance, and to commence the work of expenditure upon a railway from both ends at once without the usual preliminary of even a detailed survey, not to speak of such trifles as plans and estimates, he may be said to have deserved well of his constituents at least, whatever may he thought of his action outside the electoral district whose interest it is his duty to promote. On this branch of the subject wo may have more to say hereafter For the present it is sufficient to note that having first ascertained that their distinguished representative would not visit them unless they received him as their titular lord nnd amtor, they did what they could to meet his exactions, and he rewarded them by blessing all their little children, by “ deftly” turning the first sod of the Thames Valley railway at the foot of Mary-street, by eating at their expense, and by making no less than three “ beautiful” speeches within a few hours. The report of the proceedings, given by all our Ministerial contemporaries, affords innumerable text for comment. At present we confine ourselves to the “great” speech in which he unbosomed himself to his constituents and gave them what he called, facetiously we presume, an “ account of his steward- “ ship,” and to that part mainly in which he gave a reason for the abandonment of the “great charter” of popular rights, the Electoral Bill, when ha found that he could not secure the dual Maori vote and the control of the elections in the Northern. Island which ho thereby Tiopea—fo‘ obtain. The subject was difficult, and he approached it cautiously and in the roundabout mode which he knows so well how to work. After expatiating upon the wickedness of the Canterbury runholders, and the wrongs which they inflicted upon all the little children in the colony by monopolising the public land, he lugged in a reference to his passage-of-arms with Mr. Bolleston in the House on the subject of the speech about the “ real ‘ 1 ladies” that are to be found only in the humblest of cottages, with which he had tickled the ears of a few serious friends upon whom he dropped in at a small teameeting in Akaroa when he was there on his stumping tour. It is a curious instance of defective memory on the part of an honorable gentleman who, if there be truth in the old saw, has need of the highest power of that faculty, that he is reported to have told his constituents that he had used the words “at a public “ meeting, one of the largest which ho “ had attended.” We gave this as a fair specimen of the generally imaginative character of the “account” which Sir George Grey was pleased to render to his cringing constituents. After wading again through the Piako Swamp, after denouncing the man with forty-five votes in him, and after bestowing the customary vilification upon the Governor of the colony, Her Majesty’s representative, and upon the Legislative Council, Sir George Grey is reported to have said : I Trill DOW speak of tho Electoral Bill, and my conduct In that matter has boon a good deal impugned. You, yourselves, must Judge whether I was right or not. I am on my trial, as it were, before you. Tho Bill that tb. Gov.rnment brought in was all that we believed we could carry. All other points we thought we might carry by tho aid ol our friends. We wore obliged to bring a Bill in without attempting to interfere with the plural voting. We felt certain that we could not as a Ministry carry any attempt upon that through the House. We should have been defeated had wo attempted to do it. and wo thought tho measure would be lost altogether. Under such circumstances wo considered it best to get all wo could. I felt certain in my own mind that I would not ho allowed an appeal to tho country If I asked for it. One of our friends brought in a proposal for doing away with plural voting, that is, that each man should have one vote, and votes being tho representatives of human beings and not of acres of land. Wo endeavored to get that carried, but it was lost. You are aware that I am in favor of triennial Parliaments, and tho Ministry not having tho power of dissolution tho whole affair rests on tho caprice of tho Governor for the time being—it was quite uncertain, as one Governor might grant it and another refuse it. I thought that it the people returned bad represontatiros It was too groat a punishment to have had men returned lor five years. Surely it was reasonable enough to ask that the lime should bo reduced to throe years. I was quite willing to submit to that tost. I did my best to get that measure passed, but it was rejected. As you are all aware, the Constitution of the country gave the natives exactly the same right of voting as the Europeans. That has prevailed for some time. Many years ago the Legislature said tho great bulk of tho natives resided In districts where there were no polling places, and it was said they had no franchise at all. Therefore, they said, wo will allow four native members to bo elected In and tor those districts: and they elected four members accordingly. I have no hesitation in saying, and no one will deny It, that in many instances when the Ministers were in danger they effected an escape by holding these four members well In hand. (Laughter) Tho whole thing was an admirable device. They thought they would take even this weapon out of our hands; but, nt all events, this was a device which they were ready to use in their own behalf. In this Electoral BUI, the object of which was to give fresh privileges to every one of her Majesty a subjects In New Zealand,—that is, in effect, universal suffrage —when It came to the Upper House, they struck out the power of voting altogether, except in respect of these four native members.. They left those in. Then the Act went on to say that all natives whoso names were on the roll as ratepayers should havo the power to vote for a member if they had paid their rates, ana that all Europeans who were ratepayers should have the power of voting, whether they paid their rates or not. (Laughter.) - Myself and some friends in the Legislative Council were determined not to submit to it. They put in these words, “ Every male subject of nor Majcflty in Now Zealand, being twenty-ono years of ago, and not being a Maori, shall have a vote, I and that loft tho House to the four native members. I When the Legislative Council sent the Bill back to I

to us In that way, seeing that they had interfered with our privileges, I contended that a nominated body ought not to have interfered with tho House of Representatives on a question as to how representatives of the people in that House were elected. Clearly, tho representatives of the people bad a right to decide th'it question themselves, and that those who were hot elected by the people at all ought to have had the delicacy not to have interfered with a question of tho kind. Therefore, I said to myself, I now believe in the propriety of doing away with plurality of voting; I believe in triennial Parliaments; I believe it to bo quite possible the Upper House may want remodelling in some way. They have given us an excellent example of how they will be prepared to act, and did not hesitate themselves to interfere with the privileges of tho Lower House. I thought what is good for the goose la good for the gander—(loud cheers and laughter), —and therefore I had no objection to take the example from them. Now, I conceive that the gauge has been thrown down, and I determined therefore in my own mind not to accept the amendment, so far as I was concerned,—the amendment made by the Legislative Council in the measure when they sent it back to us. I found that the majority of the House of Representatives agreed with me, and therefore I would not accept their amendment. I believe that the result will be that this next year we will have an infinitely better Reform Bill, and that we will get it in time for tho new elections. Wo shall see that the country is divided into fair representative districts—that there shall be no more pocket boroughs. (Cheers). We have given the words in full as reported to tho Ministerial papers, and we venture to say that a more politically dishonest and untruthful statement was never made by any public man in this Colony. The dissension in the Cabinet on the Electoral question, as indeed upon every other point of what they called their policy, was notorious and patent; the only point upon which all wore agreed was that they should stick to their places. When, after declaring that they would stand or fall by their policy as a whole, they were defeated, no one doubted, not even the Premier, that a dissolution might have been obtained if it had been asked for. When the Electoral BUI was chucked into the waste paper basket by the Premier the Government were challenged to go to tho country upon that question, and to allow the people to decide whether Maoris all over tho Colony—many of them hostile to us, ignorant of our laws as of our Constitution, who pay no taxes,, and who have already a special representation in Parliament—should have superior-elec-toral privileges to the Europeans. Ministers thought the “great charter” of leas consequence than their places and wisely declined that challenge, for the very good reason that some of them would certainly not be returned to the House again, and that the tenure of the Treasury benches for those who might escape the ordeal of the hustings would be extremely short in a new Parliament. If Sir George Grey had desired to tell his constituents what he knew to be true, these are the facta which he would have detailed to them. He might have added that the violation of tho liberties of the people of the electoral district of the Bay of Islands had thoroughly alarmed the General Assembly and the public. But if he had told his constituents the truth he would moat certainly not have received the vote of confidence which is said to havo closed the proceedings of the “ first sod” of the Thames Valley Railway.