THE ELECTIONS.

Westport Times, Volume VII, Issue 1120, 31 October 1873, Page 2

THE ELECTIONS.

[grey river argos.] To choose from among themselves the two men best fitted to fill the honorable and onerous position of chief administrator of their public affairs is a duty which will devolve, in a few weeks, upon the inhabitants of the extensive section of the Colony represented by the Provinces of Nelson and VVestland. The duty is not only an important and exceptional one, but in the situation altogether novel. It is entirely new to the inhabitants of Westland. The present is the first time that they have been called upon to exercise, in the choice of chief administrator, the popular vote. And, although not nominally, it is literally new to the inhabitants of the large section of the Province of Nelson whose situation, industries, and interests are similar or identical; for, hitherto, they may be said to have been unenfranchised. The discharge of such new duties, like the acquisition of new acquaintances, requires to be undertaken circumspectly It will at once suggest itself to anyone that there is a wide essential difference between the election of a representative and of an administrator. It is common for both to be contained in one and the same person as in the case of a Premier, but he has really in all instances, to undergo a period of probation which is, as a trial, not only equal but far superior to his primary popular election. In the case of a Superintendent, he usually achieves his position directly by the voice of people to the majority of whom he may be only known by remote hearsay, or by a solitary appearance in their presence "on the stump." It is that circumstance which, on the occasion of the forthcoming elections, should induce the electors to carefully analyse their own position, and to analyse also the pretensions of those who may be candidates. It will become them to remember that they are not merely sending to a County or Provincial Council a person who can intelligibly or even eloquently represent their sectional or general interests. They are not clients selecting clever counsel to advocate a cause; they are appointing, rather, the factor of their estate or their family lawyer. They are not a port or starboard watch in want of a pair of lungs to help them in the hauling of

ropes with a well-sung " yo-he-oy," but a crew in want of captain —some little man, it may be, on the bridge or quarter-deck to whose slightest word or action the movements of the ship are responsive. They are not appointing a regimental drummer-boy or trumpeter, but a general. They, are in short, or should be, in search of a shrewd, steady man of business—one of business habits and Commercial training, if possible—who can at the same time originate and design, and who is sufficient of a democrat to recognise the source from which he derives his power. It is fair for them also, in theif search, to judge of a man by his antecedents, more as a plodding public-spirited citizen than as a rowdy agitator and blatant orator—more as a man who has respected hiinself, other men, and the ordinary amenities of life, than one who has scorned all order, mistaking libel for logic, and accumulated " loads of dirt," in the shape of wrongs, to demonstrate at the washing up that they contain some solitary, questionable " color" of right. Even accepting antecedents as admittedly excellent in their way, there always remains the essential distinction between the attributes suited for " the stump " and the Superintendent's chair. In reality, they are often the opposite poles of Provincial politics—-with as little affinity the one for the other as oil and water. Only on this point is theTe any radical difference between the ensuing elections in Nelson and Westland, the etiquette in the one case being for the Superintendent to commit his thoughts to the occasionally appropriate medium of foolscap, and in the other for him to take part in open debate in the Council. By both constituencies a lesson may be learnt from their legendary, dramatic, or recent reading, by remembering the fate of Little Red Riding Hood in the mock maternal embraces of the wolf, the picture of Titania with Bottom and his ass's head reclining in her lap, and even the rebellion of the dull Roger Tichborne against such an outrage upon the fitness of things as the placing of a live I donkey in his bed.