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Oamaru Mail, Volume IV, Issue 1318, 28 June 1880, Page 2

After our article in reference to the Middle Party was in type, we received a telegram from our Wellington correspondent announcing that the Ministry had assumed more happy faces. Our correspondent clearly hints tfyat this g]jg,i}ge from a state of gloom and dispondency to oiip of happiness and pojitent is the result of thp Ministry having been successful in making terms with the Middle; Party, and we think he is not far wide of the mark. The Ministry have shown greater facilities for " eating the leek" than any otljep set pf men that ever occupied the Treasury Benches. They l?ayg made more modifications in their proposals, accepted more suggestions, and suffered greater indignities to be thrust upon them than any Ministry that has ever pretended to lead the House and govern the Colony. It is not, therefore, surprising tp find them casting aside their own policy and adopting that of the Middle Party. It is not surprising tq learn that the whole of the wild, visionary, unworkable, and unsatisfactory scheme of financial refqrm nufoldfi4 by tlje Colonial freasurep, amidst a flourish of trumpets, in his Financial Statement are to be reversed and a new order of things instituted. The Ministry have shown firmness in one direction only, and that has been in sticking like leeches to the positions in which they were placed by discreditable means. What little they had of policy has b§pn ruthlessly torn to shrecjsi, iintjl there dqes nc)t: regain a single particle qf it sufficiently intact tp give any trace of what it originally consisted. Everything has been modified qr by Ministry, in order to remain in power and keep their opponents out. What room for surprise, then, can there be that they should now have consented to cast aside the proposals which they only recently declared were the safest and surest means to overcome the difficulties by which the Goiony is beset ?