The Wairarapa Daily. FRIDAY OCTOBER 13, 1882. MR E. G. WRIGHT.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 4, Issue 1203, 13 October 1882, Page 2

The Wairarapa Daily. FRIDAY OCTOBER 13, 1882. MR E. G. WRIGHT.

Our contemporary the Evening Post endeavors to explain by a cloud of verbiage the grounds on which it rejoices that Mr E. G. Wright has not become a Minister of the Crown. That journal declares that Mr Wrigiit Would be an undesirable acquisition to any Ministry, and the Government would not have been strengthened bj his accession, Why is Mr Wright at such a discount with our contemporary 1 The answer crops up in the tail of the article to which we allude. The head and frontof Mr Wright's offending is that he was Chairman of a Rail way Commission which ' reported ' against the West Coast Railway. For his honesty in the performance of. an important duty on this occasion he is branded as unfit to occupy any seat in the Ministry. ;: Mr ;Wright has admittedly. a special knowledge and experience of railway matters, and as a Minister of Public Works he would have been the right man in the right place, but then he is known to be a foe to political railways and to unprofitable lines. The Ministry are not strong enough to employ a man who will not deal ; gently and mercifully with the all powerful railway rings of the colony. Mr Walter Johnston, the.present Minister for Public Works, has no special aptitude for the portfolio he holds, and is reported to be not too fond of hard work. He may from his general business capacity be ablo to keep the department in hand, but the real tie which binds him to it is the West Coast Railway. His Manawatu constituents and his Wellington supporters would never forgive hini were he to. sever his connection with the Public Works Department. The consequence is that the colony loses in Mr Wright a first rate Minister for Public Works in order to retain Mr Johnston, a second rate one. Mr Whigm is denounced as incapable because he told that very unpleasantthing, the truth, about the Manawatu railway. Mr Connolly, who has been taken into the Ministry to fill the vacancy offered to Mr Wright, is a my respectable man, but he certainly will not carry the same weight with the country as the Member for Ashburton would have done. Under these circumstances the Ministry may be said to be weakened by the appointment jusc made. The interests of the colony as a whole have been sacrificed to retain the support of a section of it.l Ministers, no doubt,, have been hard pressed and placed in a position of considerable difficulty. Nevertheless they' must expect to pay at some future period the cost of the temporary relief they have secured to themselves by their injudicious settlement of this vexatious question.