The Daily News. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1912. THE WARD INCIDENT.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 134, 24 October 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1912. THE WARD INCIDENT.

In many respects Parliament is a quaint and curious collection of irresponsible identities who suffer from a severe attack of personal dignity. At an oldwomanish meeting of the Public Revenues Committee a day or .two ago Mr; lline, .with that delicate courtesy which characterises all his public utterances, said that Sir Joseph Ward was a cat or a "was-er" or other deprecatory words to that effect. Sir Joseph Ward naturally said that he was not a cat nor a "has-been," nor anything even remotely related to these incidents in the pharmacopoeia or the Guide Book to New Zealand. The incident then resolved itself into a contest as to which of the disputants should survive, and after Sir Joseph Ward had stood upon his dignity and slammed the door, and Mr. Hine had sat upon his and crossed his knees the other way the House of Representatives of the Dominion of New Zealand, in solemn conclave assembled, was called upon to sit in judgment upon these two children's "Sid-didn't" dispute. The whole episode might very well have graced the playground of a primary school when the infant classes were having their ten minutes' interval of playtime, but to magnify it into a national complieation says as little for the House as it does for the immediate participants. Some fiend with a penchant for statistics has estimated that it costs the country £6O an hour for the sittings of Parliament, and taking this estimate as accurate the taxpayers of New Zealand have had to contribute something like £4OO towards an attempt to vindicate Sir Joseph Ward's dignity. There is no member of the Legislature whose dignity is worth the cost of metalling a mile or two of baekblocks road, and the House is just as much to blame as the two combatants for wasting the time of the country in such a criminal manner in discussing one of the most puerile grievances that has ever been before it. Mr. Hine, of course, was grossly offensive in his reference to Sir Joseph Ward, if his words arc taken literally, but with a knowledge of his general character that is probably shared by Sir Joseph Ward, we are quite prepared to believe that he neither meant what he said nor knew what he was saying. Under these circumstances the member for JVwarua would have better consulted his dignity by quietly ignoring Mr. ITine's ill-advised commentary, and treating it rather as the ill-advised expression of ignorance than as a deliberate insult. The whole storm in a ton-cup, as a matter of fact, is simply another illustration of how "much ado" can bo made "about nothing." Both parties were obviously in the wrong, and a mutual admission of error would have settled in its early stages a dispute that was distinctly more undignified that the incident of its genesis. The House would have been better advised had it treated the whole matter as the infantile joke that it really was, instead of wasting valuable time at a most important period of the session in discussing it seriously, with

all the pomp and ceremony that would have attached to a serious breach of political etiquette. The country is no further forward as the result of the debate, but it is considerably poorer as the consequence of a display of childishness on the part of two men who really ought to have known better.