THE PREMIER AND THE CORRESPONDENT.

Evening Post, Volume VI, Issue 90, 31 May 1870, Page 2

THE PREMIER AND THE CORRESPONDENT.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE EYEXIMi TOST. i Sik, — There is one phase of this singular case -which should, I think, be placed before the public. Mr. Fox, at Dunedin, made a statement of the defence expenditure of the year. The correspondent questioned the correctness of the Premier's figures, and put fortli a set of his own, as being the real Simon Pure. The Premier, at Christchurch, declared the correspondent's statements to be -absolutel\' and totally false. At the same time he accused the correspondent of having stolen his information from Ministers private despatch boxes, or having obtained it by a breach of confidence on the part of some employee. Since his return, the Premier has established an inquisition into the conduct* of all the officials who were acquainted with the facts, and has threatened them with dismissal, transference, or some other horror, if they don't tell who told the correspondent v ovr, if the correspondent's information

was totally and absolutely false, it must have ¦ been a pure invention on his part, and can neither have been obtained from Ministers' private despatch boxes, or by a breach of confidence on the part of any one acquainted with the true facts. Consequently, the correspondent was wrongfully charged with any more serious crime than a fertile imagination, and the Government clerks have been most unjustly suspected, and are about to be most unjusti3 r punished. If, on the other hand, the correspondent's information was so true that it could oul\* have been obtained by looking into a Ministers' despatch box, or pumping a confidential clerk, what becomes of Mr. Fox's Dunedin statement, and his subsequent positive denial, ac Christchurch, of the truth of the correspondent's statements. Here are the horns of a dilemma. You pays youi money, and you takes your choice. I am, &c, Logic.