SECOND EDITION. DESERVED DEFEAT.

Evening Post, Volume XLVII, Issue 146, 17 December 1897, Page 6

SECOND EDITION . DESERVED DEFEAT.

For the first time in his loug career of devastating victory, the Premier last night tasted the humiliation and bitterness of obvious defeat, and the deserved discomfiture which he then encountered upon Mr. Rolleston's motion that Sir Walter Buller and Major Kemp be heard through their counsel at the Bar of of the House is, we trust, but the forerunner of complete and ignominious collapse of the whole Horowhenua iniquity in the sense of the attempt that is being made by the Minister for Lands through Parliament to go behind the Supreme Court of the country. But on the demerits — for of merit it has none — of the Horowhenua Bill we need not now touch. The immediate cause of the Premier's defeat was his unfair determination to refuse to Sir Walter Buller or Major Kemp the right to be heard in their defence either before the Native Affairs Committee or the House itself, to do which he had no doubt strained every device within his reach. Happily there was enough of a just sense of resentment against the tyranny of the Government to achieve a bare majority in favour of Mr. Rolleston's motion. It must have been a bitter, though we trust a salutary, experience for Mr. Seddon to witness the departure of two such old and ardent Ministerialists as Major Steward and Mr. Guinness into the Opposition lobby, but what more fitting than that two such tried exponents of law and precedent in Parliament should vote against so deliberate and dangerous an attempt to subvert established law as is involved in the provisions of the Horowhenua Bill ? And for established law we are now to have, if the Premier have his way, the law of the caucus of the Ministerial Party. But last night the House said it should not be so. It is true that it was only by a bare majority, but at the present rate of progress it will be a sufficiently substantial one to effectually efface the Bill at the proper time.