MR BUXTON AND THE "COUNTRY BUMPKINS."

Press, Volume XLVI, Issue 7382, 7 August 1889, Page 3

MR BUXTON AND THE "COUNTRY BUMPKINS."

WELLINGTON. July 31. For eight days the reporters have now been excluded from the galleries, and no one should be so grateful for their exclusion as the stonewallera, whose speeches, upon the whole, have been the most dreary exhibition of tongue without brains that could Tvell be imagined. The only speech worth reporting was a most remarkable and unexpected speech from Mr Buxton, but if there had been fifty reporters in the galleries that speech could never have been reported in all its native humor, which kept both sides of the House shaking with the most hearty and irrepressible laughter I ever witnessed. Mr Buxton sat in the extreme corner of the House, as far from the Speaker as he could possibly get, and he has always been regarded as one of the best tempered and most harmless of men, who could be chaffed and shot at without much fear of any dangerous retorts. On Saturday night he astonished the House by showing that he could retort with an effect that put all the would-be wits of the House entirely in the shade, and revealed a wealth -of humorous satire which no other member of the House could have equalled. About nine o'clock on Saturday night, when the House had been wearied to utter exhaustion by dreary attempts to kill tune and waste the too liberal provisions of a generous country, Mr Buxton strode majestically from his single seat in the corner, and put himself six yards nearer the Speaker, and, in an intensely solemn voice, proclaimed himself as one who was only too proud to stand there and claim to be a farmer and a farmers' representative, notwithstanding all the abuse which he had heard heaped upon them during the last four days. They might say what they liked about " country bumpkins" and " clodhoppers," but he would rather represent men who stepped over clean clods and followed the useful plough than he would represent men primed with the smoke and perhaps not altogether untainted with the vices of the city. The Young New Zealand party had called his constituents " country bumpkins/ but, he continued, " some of my constituents are the most respectable and the most learned, and the deepest thinkers, and even the most profound philosophers that you would find anywhere; men, Sir, who could talk Latin and Greek before these young gentlemen could say their ABC, aud what is more, they can talk it well now, Sir, although, of course, they are not so young and so vain as to want everybody to know that they understand those languages. These young men need not have such a " down" upon this- Bill. Sir, such very clever young men as they are would not be kept out of the House by any Bill, and then the member for Dunedin South is afraid that if the city districts are all joined together the electors might forget to send him back here again. At any rate this House will never forget him, Sir, as long as he is here. Why this would be a quiet House without him. Why, he makes so many speeches that he has never got time even to go into the Library and read a book. We can't be always instructing other people Sir, unless we take some little time to instruct ourselves sometimes. Then Sir, the hon. member for Auckland Central (Sir G. Grey) has just made a very eloquent speech. Sir, that gentleman has got so much power that no one can resist him. He can make us believe almost anything; but. Sir, he can't make mc believe that my constituents are not as good as his. Still he is so eloquent Sir, and has got such wonderful power, and then he was so very earnest and looked so very angry that he almost made mc believe some of the things he had to say, and I believe he would, only when he sat down aud 1 came to think it quietly over I could not make out what it was all about after all."

There was just an amusing spice of Lincolnshire dialect with it all, and the face and voice so so'emn, which seemed to say " what are you all laughing about ?" No summer shower ever had more refreshing effect upon a parched field than that happy speech had upon that angry aud wearied House.