The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, The Morning News and The Echo. MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1878

Auckland Star, Volume IX, Issue 2690, 2 December 1878, Page 2

The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, The Morning News and The Echo.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1878

For. the cause, that acks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For 'the future in the distance,And the good that we can do.

New Zealand has ofteu been foully libelled in English journals by disappointed and unscrupulous writers. " Shallow observers have rushed through the colony at railway speed, aud have scribbled off a rambling sketch for publication in some English newspaper, as for instance Sir Charles Dilke, who thought that the Bay of Islands was in the tropics. Soft-handed adventurers havecome out withcoleur do, rose views of the rough earnest life of the bush, and finding it sheer hard work instead of romauce and poetry, have returned disappointed seeking any excuse but their own want of pluck and industry to explain their failure; and have vented their disgust in the columns of any journal open to them. Mischievous political schemers, reckless of the financial credit and commercial prosperity of the colony, have sought to undermine opponents by circulating insidious libels in influential English journals, and in various ways attempts have been made to injure the colony. Fortunately through the able advocacy of colonists, New Zealand has been completely vindicated ; and in the great majority of cases the crucial arguments of facts and figures have dissipated the shallow flippancies of the libellers. But perhaps the most infamous and lying specimen of this kind of thing we have ever seen in print was published in a newspaper called "The Colonies and India," in Oct. last. The paper tbmigh it has not a large circulation amongst ordinary readers, is, as its name indicates, widely distributed. We reprint the following precious extract :—"Go some Saturday evening into some small publichouse in any country town ; see there a man dirty and unkempt, smelling .strongly of beer or gin, with his hands in his trousers pockets, and a battered hat on the back of his head, without a necktie, and -with a shirt from the appearance of which one might justly conclude that he had been born and grown up in it—a man who never in his life made the acquaintance of the letter h, and whose education was begun, continued by means of "Reynolds'" or some similarprint —a man whose sole subjectof conversation is sensuality in its various forms, and whose only idea of music is a, bawdy song, and, such as he is, you have an excellent type of a certain class of the honourable representatives of this colony." From a perusal of the paper in which this stuff appears we gather that it is devoted to the interests of the squatters and landowners in the colonies, and it is therefore not surprising that Sir George Grey, Mr Berry, and other friends of the people are roundly abused. The style of the extract above quoted is, however, sufficient to stamp the character of the writer. His knowledge of low-class public-houses, and his familiarity with bar loafers point him out as one of those outcasts of English respectability who are sometimes expatriated by their relatives to save the family honour, and who eke out a precarious existence between the intervals of occasional charitable remittances by loafing on some confiding hotel-keeper, or prostituting the degraded remnants of an early liberal education in the interestsofpoliticalschemesand monopolists. Such men, through the influence of friends in England, occasionally foist upon English journals,letters tinged with the misanthropy and low associations of the writers, but the landom arrows thus discharged seldom strike home. Their only mischief lies in anonymity. Were the real character and position of such writers as the Wellington correspondent of "The Colonies aud India" disclosed his raviug would be contemptuously consigned to the purifying element of the nearest lire. We venture to say that there is not a single member of either branch of the New Zealand Legislature to which the above extract would apply. It is a lying fabrication, and it stamps the man who penned it as a contemptible libeller. He has evidently taken as his model that lamentable specimen of wasted talents and irreclaimable intemperance, who, from occupying one of the most honorable positions in the colony, sunk by degrees to the depths of a pot-bouse loafer, and a poor homeless vagrant, a spectacle for angels and men to weep over. But even in this pitiable case there was educated talent of the highest capacity, and talent which still occasionally gleams up from the expiring embers of former genius. We make bold to say that there is not now, and never was, any member of the New Zealand Parliament which the above extract would fit.