WARD AND THE WOWSERS.

NZ Truth, Issue 79, 22 December 1906, Page 4

WARD AND THE WOWSERS.

The public has notoriously a short memory, and politics, for a great part, consist of bluff, but when Sirjoe Ward starts playing a game of gammon, absurd m its very transparency, he lays himself open to .censure. Only' some eighteen months ago the anti-gambling, anti-everything-pleasurable push succeeded m getting the telegraph offices on some racecourses closed. Sir joe was then Post-master-General and consequently head of the Telegraph Department. Just what steps he tqok to neutralise -the parsonical parasites' success m re the racecourse telegraph offices is still fresh m the minds of most people. He declared that, m order that the racing revenue should not be lost to his department, he would open telegraph offices close to the racecourses from which he was barred by statute — and \Ke carried out his intention. That was eighteen months ago. And yet last week at Napier Sir joe Ward was found declaiming and bemoaning the "awfully" abnormal evils of gambling throughout New Zealand. He did not protest, he said, against betting on racecourses (how magnanimous, to he sure), but he thought telegraph investments should be stopped.

How does Sirjoe .reconcile his faceabout attitude ? It would seem that, having assumed the added dignity of Premier, Sirjoe has come under the sway of the intolerable bible-banging bounders who want to rule the land. Else why should he now be found contravening his own deliberate action of but a few months back. Evidently, when he took the radical step of placing telegraph offices outside barred racecourses, he had satisfied himself that such step was necessary or he would not have acted m the manner he did. It is impossible to believe, that things have altered m such drastic fashion m the short intervening space of time as to warrant his extremely pious declaration at Napier. On the face of things it really looks as though the Premier made his anti-gambling-by-wire pronouncement at Napier as a sop to the already swollen-headed puritanical pietists who think they own God's Own Section. Short-memoried as it is, the public will note Sirjoe's lamentably weak "kow-tow" to Garrulous; Gibb, Nauseating North and Co., and righteously condemn such self-appar-ent smoodging to the white-chokered crowd.