ANOTHER VIEW OF THE POLITICAL SITUATION.

Southland Times, Issue 1142, 6 October 1869, Page 2

ANOTHER VIEW OF THE POLITICAL SITUATION.

(TO THB EDITOB OTf THB StfIJTHLA.T*D TIHB9). » Sib — On looking over a book on Folklore the other day, I stumbled on the following Hindu legend, quoted from the Hitopadesa, and it struck me as being such an excellent illustration of the system pursued by the partisans of the late Executive in their controversy with the Superintendent, that I made a note of it, and here it is : — A Brahman, who had vowed a sacrifice, went to the market to buy a goat ; three thieves saw him, and wanted to get hold of the goat; they stationed themselves at intervals on the high road. When the Brahman, who carried the goat on his back, approached the first thief, the thief said, " Brahman, why do you carry a dog on your back ?" the Brahman replied, "it is not a dog, it is a goat." A little while after, he was accosted by the second thief, who said, " Brahman, why do you carry a dog on your back?" The Brahman felt perplexed, put the goat down, examined it, and walked on. Soon after he was stopped by the third thief, who said, " Brahman, why do you carry a dog on your back?" Then the Brahman was frightened, threw down the goat, and walked home to perform his ablutions for having touched an unclean animal. The thieves took the goat and ate it. The moral of the story, the book goes on to say, is that a man will believe almost anything, if he is told the same by three different people, notwithstanding its antecedent improbability. The partisans of the late Executive have, however, not been willing to trust only to the testimony of " three," but have repeated the cry of the immaculate innocence of their clients, and the unmitigated constitutional and other iniquities of the Superintendent, and of his present advisers, through a good many times " three" throats, chiefly in the columns of your contemporary. And although they may possibly not have convinced the " man that carried the goat" that he had defiled himself, yet, according to the News, they seem to have swayed the opinion of a great many other unsuspecting persona in their estimate of the unfortunate " Brahman's" integrity. Let me take some of these effusions and see what their value is. I had just read, before lighting on the story of the Brahman, a letter in the Weekly JTew* of the 25th, signed "Observer." As it is typical of its class, it may be sufficient for the present to deal with some of • Observer's' " observations." Commenting on Dr Monckton's address to his constituents, he says : — " He takes credit for overcoming the many obstacles that prevented the finishing of the railway. Before we can judge fairly on this subject, we would know how these obstacles have been overcome." Why then did not " Observer" endeavor to place himself in a position to "judge fairly" before assuming the office of a judge, and before insinuating, as he does in the next sentence, that it may have been " done at too heavy a cost? " " What," he asks, "if the ruin of the province should be the price of overcoming these obstacles ?" What if the tidal wave should sweep us all away ? It must be borne in mind that the question is simply of the finishing of the Oreti Bailway ; and if the writer himself imagines, what he evidently wishes his readers to infer, that bis own surmise is satisfactory proot that the present Government have got the province into further difficulties by the arrangements they have sanctioned for the transfer, in security, of the contract to parties who are in a position to finish it expeditiously, I can only say that his reasoning (?) will hardly recommend itself to anybody with a head on his shoulders. " The railways have been the great evil. One- half the money wasted on them, properly expended, would have given the province good roads." Well, this is but " Observer's" <Spinion ; so, of course, there is no harm in bis expressing it ; only he should remember such facts a» this :— -that £50,000 have been spent already in an attempt to make the first few miles of the North Eoad alone passable ; and what the best part of it will be worth after a few wool-dr.ays have been over it, " Observer" may, if he pleases, learn from the local settlers, from the experience of last season, and from the present condition of the roads. " The other half, unspent, the province would at this time have been out of debt." Possibly, we will say, for argument's sake. But then we have got into debt for the sake of making a railway over forty miles of the worst ground in the province, down to the only good shipping port. This railway once finished will not only cost us nothing to maintain and, ere long be a source of revenue, but will be a convenience which, on " Observer's" plan, we should be without altogether. Whereas if the £400,000, say in round numbers, which they have cost us, and which we owe, had been spent altogether on that line of root?, we should still be in debt to the same amount, and have possessed a very second-rate road instead, which, even with the present, and still more with the anticipated traffic, would cost us at least £20,000 a-year to keep in repair, taking the very lowest Otago estimate for such repairs. » " But why that apparent anxiety on the

part of the Saperiat ndeut and his favorite advisers to smother ; all enquiry into the true state of railway matters bj the Council, and to prevent their legitimate action in relation thereto?" I am really not aware that, either in the Council or out of it, any such "anxiety" has been manifested. "Observer" here again draws, for anything the public knows to the contrary, on a fertile imagination. " He claims praise for the way he stood by his Honor in his disputes with his Executive in the first place, and with the Provincial Council afterwards. Indeed, the summary and high-handed manner in which he sent both about their business seems to have met the Doctor's hearty approval, if it was not suggested by him." If Dr Monckton has expressed hia , " hearty approval" of those measures, I [ think he was right in doing so ; for it seems to me that the Superintendent, far from acting unconstitutionally himself, i simply dismissed his Executive for doing so, and only erred in not doing it sooner ; as a good deal of delay in the contractor's financial arrangements for finishing the railway would thereby haye been avoided. But then there would have been no chance, as there happily is none now, foe the project Mr Pratt" is said to have started, of forfeiting all the works the contractors had already done " for the good of tho province ;" a proposal which another of the If etas' correspondents, in the issue of the 28th, signing himself " Roland," approves as " strictly correct, moral, and honest ;" and with whose views of " honesty and morality," " Observer" may possibly (though for the credit of the province, I hope not) concur. To a dispassionate looker-on, it would seem that the Superintendent had no choice, under the circumstances, than to prorogue the Council, aa soon as they had voted their own dissolution, for they had positively refused to enter on any business as long as the present Executive were in office, and over and over again refused to vote them out by a want-of-confidence motion, when invited to do so. It was not likely that Messrs Blacklock and Monckton should be ambitious of retaining their seats on "the ministerial benches, with no other apparent object than to be made targets of by an opposition that had not the courage to take their places; and though the contemplation of such an amusement may be to the taste of " Observer" and bis like, yet the spectacle was neither so dignified, so edifying, nor so useful as to warrant the Superintendent in retaining the Council in session, at the cost of £20 a-day, for the sole purpose of prolonging the exhibition, and pandering to a taste for senseless and useless vituperation. I pass;-, over the writer's attempted analogy between the late fracas and the times of- Charles the First. If w Observer" will read his Hallam attentively, he will .find that his. analogy lacks all the four legs. " The people of England," be goes on elegantly to say, " would not be bamfoozled or" befooled by their sophistry. Still less should the people -of Southland in their day, when the theory and practice of representative government is thoroughly understood and defined." If the " theory and practice of representative government" were indeed so very well understood by the people of Southland, their represent* taftves in the Council would hardly have made such an exhibition of their ignorance of this subject as they did, in endorsing the acts for. which the Superintendent dismissed his Executive as legitimate, right, and constitutional, while they stigmatized the act of dismissal — specially provided for, be it remembered, by the Executive Council Ordinance (said to Have been framed by one of themselves) as unconstitutional and unwarrantable. ; •" Has it not become the universally received and accepted maxim that the Chief Magistrate should only keep such advisers aa are in accord with the representative body ?" If this refers to the retention in office of tho present Executive, the obvious answer is : it was the duty of the " representative body," if they were not "in accord " with it, to vote them out. " If this fundamental rule is trampled under foot, the rest becomes an absurd andipernicious farce." A farce it certainly was, that the majority of the Council should unite in yelping at two Executive officers for a week at a stretch, who were anxious to be relieved of their offices, whom, they would not allow to introduce the most necessary business, and yet upon whose minds the idea never seemed to dawn that it was their first duty to turn them out. The " farce," however, was the handiwork of the late Executive, and their party, notthat of Dr Moncktonandhis colleague. ADd what is the excuse set up for trampling on this wise and just maxim ? The Executive that possessed the confidence of the Council failed in some points of courtesy to his Honor ! Bather a sorry excuse for such an arbitrary and despotic act." It would, indeed, have been a sorry excuse if it had ever been made. But though I have read all that has been printed, and listened to all that was said by the Superintendent on this subject in the Council, not a word of his can justify such an assertion. The Superintendent has given his reasons for this act in the published correspondence, and no one who takes upon himself to write on the subject has a right to plead ignorance of such documents. I, on the contrary, clearly remember Mr Calder, in his place in the Provincial Council, himself hinting at some such cause being at the root of the quarrel ; and equally well I remember the Superintendent's emphatic and indignant denial that any such feeling bad influenced him. It would have been a bathos indeed' to have added such an "excuse" as " Observer" attributed to him to the heavy indictment recorded against the late Executive in the documents laid on the table. I remember, too, Mr Pratt asking the Superintendent in the Council whether be individually

had ever been personally disrespectfu to him, and receiving an answer in th< negative. If Mr Calder himself had pui so 'point-blank a question as Mr Pratt did, the Superintendent might not perhaps, have been able to give him quite so re-assuring an answer ; and perhaps Mr Calder's misgivings as to the general effect of his not notoriously engaging manner may have given rise to his suspicion that the Superintendent had thought it worth his while to resent it by dismissing him. This may be just within the bounds of possibility, and I only give the idea for what it is worth. " Observer" proceeds : "And the case becomes aggravated when suspicion gains ground that the excuse was an after, thought intended to justify what was done from and for improper reasons." It is surely putting the Superintendent's intelligence at rather too low a level, to imagine that he thought the allegation of a personal slight would be a better justification of his act than the reason he had already placed on record. "But perhaps "Observer" wishes us to infer some hidden meaning from the expression "improper reasons." If so, the public would be glad to be further, enlightened. "Let me ask who took the initiative in want of courtesy? Was there anything in the manner of Mr Taylor which led them to believe that their presence was the reverse of agreeable ?" Not at all unlikely I should think, considering that they inaugurated their official career by issuing the manifesto of 6th March, which implicitly taxes him with a suppression of fact perpetrated by one of themselves. " Did he always act in good faith towards them ?" If the writer knows of any instances, it would have been more to the purpose if he had given them, rather than ask the question in a manner which implies that the answer must be in the negative. Perhaps he will, in a future letter, state explicitly what he means, or the public may look in vain for an (Edipus to this sphinx enigma. " Were they not compelled sometimes to act without him for other reasons than want of courteßy — as, for instance the state of his health ?" As the Superintendent has emphatically denied this in his place in the Council, " Observer" has no right to assume it as a fact. And the Superintendent's denial is strongly borne out by the fact, stated by him in the Council, and not denied by any of the Executive, that they invariably fixed the time for the Executive meetings themselves, and in " all but every case " fixed them for their own convenience at five o'clock in the afternoon, and that he was never but once absent from any meeting, whatever the weather, and then only because he only got notice of it at halfpast four, on bis way home, where he had already made another engagement. All this " Observer" might have heard for himself in the Council. " Did he not endeavour to thwart their measures of retrenchment ?" Mr Calder laid this to his charge in the Council, and the Superintendent denied it, stating, as should be seen from the debate,' that the only so^called retrenchments he had objected to were (1) the leasing of the Bluff Eailway, on the ground that there was no provision for completing the protection of the embankment, which the first high tide might destroy, and for the replacement of which the lessees would not be liable, and (2) the insane arrangements with the Harbor Master, whom the first south-easterly gale might ruin, if they were enforced. These are both v retrenchments" only in appearance, very clumsily devised, to make a show on the estimates, and the first-mentioned of them may prove the reverse of a retrenchment. One realj piece of economy the late Executive do deserve credit for, and it does not appear that the Superintendent made any objection to it, viz., the replacing of Mr Howard in the Land Office. "Making needless and expensive appointments by his unrestricted prerogative in defiance of their remonstrance — throwing more from the window than they could retain by closing the door." If these remarks point to Messrs Geisow and Graham (andl have heard of no other) v Observer" might have learnt from the published correspondence that the Superintendent did not appoint these gentlemen until he had the consent of Mr Calder's successors, and that until then Mr Dnndas was obliged, if the works were not to be stopped, to employ them on his own responsibility, because the late Executive persisted in thrusting on him two others whom he bad declared to be unsuitable for the work required of them. If "Observer" knows of any other instances, perhaps he will let the public know them as well. " Observer" conclndis the paragraph with, "If Mr Taylor did any or all of these things by the promptings of Dr Monckton, it is for the public and his electors to judge the amount of thanks he deserves." Ah ! what a saving little word if is. " Observer" and his kind lay down a foundation composed of unauthenticated assertions, " assumptions," " surmises," " suspicions," and "*/*," and then proceed to erect thereon a superstructure of arguments (?) with as much self-satisfaction as if their reasoning were based on a rock, which consign the present Government to Acheron, and their predecessors to canonization and Elysium, where, let us hope Pluto and Proserpine will treat them — according to their deserts. Let us hope also that, notwithstanding the intelligent manner in which "Observer" and his. collaborator* have carried out the ingenious co-operation theory of the " three thieves " in the fable, the public will not be quite unanimous in condemning either Dr Monckton or the Superintendent to sackcloth and ashes for having "defiled themselves." In conclusion, I cordially join in the first part of "Observer's" peroration — •'Electors of Southland! you must rely upon yourselves, and not be misled by evil council" — Tours, Ac., W- W. laverctrgill, lit October 1869.