Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News AND THURSDAY, JUNE 9, 1898.

Te Aroha News, Volume XIV, Issue 2109, 9 June 1898, Page 2

Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News AND THURSDAY, JUNE 9, 1898.

The rebult of the vote on the Federal Bill was perhaps the greatest disappointment experienced, for many years, by students of the history of the Australian colonies. It makes us almost despair of our fellow-colonists to think that on such a day, and when such a was at issue—the adoption or otherwise of a policy which was tb make a vast, a free, a selfgoverning, but united nation of the scattered handfuls of the English speaking race on the huge island continent—the people of New South Wales should not have taken the trouble to go to the polls and record their votes. Some journals fake a more lenient view of the case, and ask how the people could be expected to vote one way or another when they beheld those in whom they are accustomed to place confidence torn by conflicting passions ; some crying lustily and loudly for, and others with equal animous railing against, Federation. The question was the greatest ever put to the Australian people. It affected not only the electors of to-day, hut posterity. The ‘ difficulties ’ and ‘objections’ which the opponents of the Bill have been industriously circulating in New South Wales for the purpose of confusing the issue and misleading the people effectually fulfilled their purpose. It fias always seemed, to us, that the opponents of the Bill, such as the owners of the Sydney Daily Telegraph which wields immense influence among the masses in the Mother Colony, having committed themselves as opponents of the Bill persisted in that out of sheer doggeduess rather than admit themselves wrohg and ‘knuckleunder’ to the Sydney'Morning Herald. They ap pear now to he rather scared at the responsibility they took upon themselves in advising the electors to vote against it and frightening so many of them in ! o inaction. It grows quite hysterical over its declarations that that

through the defeat of the Bill the way is no w made clear for a greater and truer Federation Bill. That the people of N.S. Wales wished for federation is shown by the returns though those returns fell short of the requisite number of the 80,000 votes necessary to render the vote conclusive. Never was the peril of apathy more trenchantly illustrated than at the polling booths in New South Wales last week. No other constitution in the political world so frankly adopted the principle of universal suffrage, the right of the elector to one vote only, payment of members, the abolition of property qualifications and the equal responsibility of both chambers to the electors. It has been accepted in Victoria. and Tasmania by overwhelming majorities, and was only defeated, as an Australian contemporary says, in the Mother Colony by savage appeals to the less noble motives : to self-interest: to provincial jealousies: to mistrust of the other colonies: and to political cowardice.