HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXIV, Issue 35, 11 February 1902, Page 2

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF.

When Southey penned the following remarks concerning the conduct of the Opposition during the Peninsula War, he little foresaw how exactly they would apply to the conduct of a section of the Opposition in the yesrs 1900-1: —" The Opposition consisted of the most heterogeneous and discordant materials. . . . The Foxiteß, from

the beginning of the war, throtgh all its changes had uniformly taken part against their country; consistent in this and nothing else, they bad always sided with the enemy, pleading his cause, palliating his crimes, extolling his wisdom, magnifying his power, vilifying and accusing their own Go vernment, depreciating its resources, impeding its measures, insulting its allies, calling for disclosures which no Government ought to make, and forcing them sometimes from the weakness apd the mistaken liberality of their opponents. Bonaparte, as Washington had done befer* him, relied upon their zeal and virulence ; and they by their sperches and writings served him more effectually upon the Continent and in France itself than all the manifestos of bis Ministers and the diatribes of his own press. J.n future ages it will be thought a strange and almost incredible anomaly in politics that there should have existed in the Legislature of any country a regular party, organised and acknowledged as such, whose business it was to obstruct the proceedings ot Government and render it by every possible means contemptible and odious to the people; a party always in semialliance with the enemy, who in timeu of difficulty and danger prophesied nothing but failure, disgrace, and ruin ; and whose systematic course of conduct, if it had been intended to bring about the fulfilment of their predictions, could not have been more exactly adapted to the object."