Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News SATURDAY, JULY 16, 1898.

Te Aroha News, Volume XIV, Issue 2128, 16 July 1898, Page 2

Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News SATURDAY, JULY 16, 1898.

We ventured on a prediction in our leading column the other day which one event of late occurence partially justifies. We refer to the statement that with the new regime would come a severance of old ties. Out of the mutability of human affairs arises perhaps some of the saddest memories and it must surely occur to many of us at times when we behold the. vagaries of fortune played out daily, under our very noses, and the caprice which tinges that fickle Dame’s treatment of us with such sombre hues, that while we have a neighbor by us, whether he be a friendly neighbor or no, it would better to judge his doiugs leniently, and even when they do not recommend themselves to us, to moderate the flavoring of jaundice with which we are all jboo ■ prone to dash our judgments, for Heaven only knows what -fortune may await him and us at the turning of the next street. The world behaved with strange fickleness to its public men in the past: but in- those violent times the successful official stood in the broad glare andjthe people shouted, while the head of the unsuccessful candidate for public favors oftentimes adorned a pike and his corpse lay sprawling ©n the high road. We do not pull our public men from their seats and behead them nowadays. , We pass votes of censure, or want of confidence, or make them feel so uncomfortable that they are glad to resign. Against the late clerk of the Te Aroha Town and Domain Boards, as an official, not a word of dissatisfaction was ever breathed. To a man those constituting the now defunct boards speak in high terms of his services. In other words he had faithfully discharged his duties as a public servant to the satisfaction of those to whom be was* immediately responsible : but in the person of Mr Snewin the Town Board Clerk, the public detected or fancied they detected an objectionable feature: namely his connection with Sriewin and Co. In pious horror it raised .its hands against the so-called unholy alliance, and in the roundabout way it adopts on such occasions gave that gentleman to understand, through its newly chosen representatives, that unless he severed his connection with ity the official position he occupied would be thrown open to competition. Mr Snewin, in our opinion, adopted the best and only course open to him He sent in his resignation forthwith. We' feel sure, howev r, we speak on behalf of a large section of the public when we say that his faithful services are by no means forgotten, and that it was only through a concurrence of circumstances deemed adverse to the borough’s interests, on prinniple, that this severance of a tie that b >und that geo l lemon to us for . j o many years has resulted..