HARD ON SIR HENRY.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1707, 6 March 1888, Page 4

HARD ON SIR HENRY.

Sir Henry Parkes proposed the toast of “ The Press,” at the banquet given in Sydney by the proprietors of the Evening News and Town and Country Journal. The Sydney Sunday Times deals with the matter as follows One great question remains to be answered, and that is— Why did the hosts of the evening insult a moiety of their guests by ashing Sir Henry Parkes to lecture them on their duties ? This is a very serious question indeed, and one that must be answered. The letters of invitation stated! that the banquet was a strictly non-political gathering. Yet, by entrusting the toast of the evening to a professional politician, to a man who earns—not

bis living, lor he has lived for thirty years chiefly at his creditors’ expense —but all he does earn, by politics alone they gave it a purely political, and vrorse still, a purely partisan air. They allow this shallow compound of ignorance and insolence, this, soulless, heartless, conscienceless clod to get up and insult the representatives uf respectable journals, and to lay down the law on the ground that he, Henry Parkes, is a representative pressman What Press does he represent? He represents a paper that stopped thirty years ago, that was begun without proper capital, that never paid its way, that wound up in eight years with a loss of fifty-three thousand pounds. He was the proprietor of a paper that owed one hundred and seven of its ’prentice boys, clerks, workmen and contributors their wages, that had borrowed their money—their money — the saving of their lives, and never paid them, that was entirely mortgaged, plant, copyright, book debts, claims, stock, lock and barrel, to one creditor, leaving'all the others in the hole. He is the proprietor that was refused, even under the lepient Insolvency Act in vogue, the ordinary certificate by no less a judge than Sir Alfred Stephen, and he was notoriously while his paper went on the mere mouth-piece of such men as Martin Denihey and Edward Butler, men so infinitely superior to him that he never probably understood their language or their ideas, and so infinitely ill-treated by him that there could be no greater infamy inflicted on them in Hades than to have to meet him there even for one half-hour. What an insult, what a mockery, what a detestable, double-edged slander it is to call this creature, this libellous, slanderous, unprincipled vituperator of the Press a repre sentative pressman ! He the mercenary, bought and sold and swayed by every dirty trickster wh > would lend him money—a representative! pressman! He—whose interminable lists of creditors include nearly every human being his so-called policy has benefited —a representative pressman ! ! He—with five of his creditors jn his Cabinet eating up the country’s , bread and drawing salaries they do not [know how to earn, a representative

pressman! He—who has not scrupled to borrow money of wholesale drapers who e taxes he was going to remit, and of contractors for public works whom his breath could make or mar, a representative pressman!