AKAROA ELECTION.

Press, Volume XXIV, Issue 3218, 23 December 1875, Page 3

AKAROA ELECTION.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE PRESS. Sib, —My opponent, Mr Montgomery, seems very much exercised by these election times, which indeed are putting to a very severe test his powers of stretching and manipulating facts and figures. In his letter in your issue of yesterday Mr Montgomery draws sundry red herrings backwards and forwards across the scent, and finishes a lengthy communication by repeating once more that which he knows is absolutely untrue, but which he thinks will prove a trump card against mc. I refer to the passage in his letter where he says that " My remarks were all personal," &c. Can anyone fail to see through this flimsy electioneering dodge! Why, Sir, because I choose to express views antagonistic to the late Board of Education, of which Mr Montgomery was a shining ornament, and also to the late Provincial Administration, to which his heavy tragic deportment proved of so great a value, I am told that my remarks are of a personal nature. Have public men's political actions ceased to become public property, or is the great Montgomery an exception to the general rule 1 It is all very well for the auditor's name to be dragged into this dispute about the Board of Education's expenditure, but Mr Montgomery knows full well that I never gave it to be understood that I received my information from that gentleman, but that I procured it from documents furnished by the Audit Office for the consideration of Government and members of the Council. With reference to the exceedingly shabby way in which Road Boards on the Peninsula were treated by the Montgomery Government, I will not bandy hard words with Mr Montgomery, as he seems to wish, but I will only refer him and) the electors to the chairman of the Akaroa and Wainui Road Board, to the chairman of the Okain's Bay Road Board, and to the members of Council representing the Peninsula—Messrs Westenra and Buchanan. And I again positively reassert that out of the £1500 voted for road purposes in the Okain's and Akaroa district, the following sums were withheld by the Montgomery Government without any rhyme or reason—viz :—Duvauchelle's Bay to Okain, £375 ; Stony Bay to Little Akaloa, £200 ; Le Bon's to German Bay, £250 : total, £825; £250 more had been kept by the Montgomery Administration, but was paid to the Okain's Bay Road Board by the present Government. Mr Montgomery's skill in election matter, is undoubted. He knows that there is nothing like establishing a good cry against an opponent, and then working it to death. Just now he is doing his best to make the electors believe that I am a wicked sort of a fellow, who plays foot-ball with facts and figures, and wrongfully interferes with the wholesale manner in which he, Mr Montgomery, throws dust in their eyes. It is rather ridiculous to watch the attempts he makes to show the electors that he has done all this and all that for the Peninsula while I have simply looked on ! It is not my desire to blow my own trumpet, but I must remind Mr Montgomery that when last .session I and Messrs Buchanan and Westenra obtained some £9000 ol special votes for the Peninsula, including a sum of £500 for a survey of the Akaroa railway line, what did he try to do for the Peninsula ? The only step he took to obtair money for the Peninsula was to move thai £s€o be spent upon repairing the road at the head of Pigeon Bay leading past a private gentleman's house 1 Yet he knew full well that the gentleman in question bad foi years past fenced in half the width of thai very road. But then Mr Montgomery bati an eye to the present election. During this contest my opponent and hif friends are using every means, legitimate oi otherwise, to further his cause, and Betting at defiance the spirit of the ballot laws novi guiding elections ; but the electors of th< Peninsula are not likely to be gulled, nol even by that show of hands on the nomina tion day which was procured at considerabh trouble and expense, coaches and boats bein| engaged on my opponent's side, while nrj friends never were asked to muster. Yours, fee, Walter H. Pilliet. Christchurch, December, 21st.