Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1904. A TRAGIC ESTRANGEMENT.

Evening Post, Volume LXVIII, Issue 131, 30 November 1904, Page 4

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1904. A TRAGIC ESTRANGEMENT.

The Premier and Dr. Gibb have had so many happy interviews over the Bible-in-Schools question, and appeared so clearly to own "two hearts that beat as one," that it is particularly distressing to find the smooth current of their love disturbed so seriously that one roundly accuses the other of insincerity, and the other retorts that, at any rate to the unthinking and the uncharitable, his candid friend may appear to have been "telling a 'tarradiddle.' " These mutual recriminations may be but the prelude 'to a fuller harmony ; they may be destined to furnish another proof that "the falling out of faithful friends, Renewing is of love" ; but at present ,the symptoms are far from favourable, and the tragic estrangement bears every appearance of depth and permanence. In our blindness we rejoiced at the wreck of the Referendum Bill, but our transports would have been moderated if we had foreseen that it would carry this deeper tragedy in 'its train. It is, indeed, a melancholy and an unsettling reflection that after all he has said and done on behalf of the Bill, after all the stage thunder he has hurled at the Legislative Council, the Premier should be accused by his_£>wn familiar friend of Insincerity in his attitude to the question from first to last. "It is the fate of a public man to be misrepresented," says Mr. Seddon in the letter to the Presbyterian General Assembly of which we published a summary on Saturday, "and in my own case it happens so often that I am usually content to leave my vindication to time." We cannot help thinking that in the present instance also Mr. Seddon would have been wiser to follow | his usual practice and trust to his usual champion than to indulge in the laboured, undignified, and unconvincing vindication which he has thought fit to publish. "The tooth of time and razure of oblivion" would have proved much more effective apologists than any special pleading, which with the inevitable retort necessarily involved a revival of the whole business. The retort has not been long in coming, and in it Dr. Gibb prefers his charge with a more brutal plainness than before. He accuses Mr. Seddon of having promised last year, both in private conversation and m the House, that as the general Referendum Bill had been rejected he would proceed during the session of 1904 with a measure to provide for a. special referendum on the question of Bible in schools. Dr. Gibb complains that no attempt was ever made to fulfil this promise, that no special Bill was introduced, and that the old Referendum Bill was revived with the certainty that the Legislative Council would reject it. " When," he asks, " has that body dared to reject a mea-sure the Premier was determined should pass?" If the Referendum Bill is really an example of such a measure, we fear that it must be admitted to be the only one. It is equally clear that at the end of the 1903 session the Premier did promise to bring in a Bill to deal separately with the Bible-in-schools question, and his pobition would have been much stronger if lie had frankly admitted that he found such a course impracticable, instead of suggesting that he never undertook to follow it. The most plausible of the Premier's points in reply proves on examination to be the reverse of ingenuous. He complains that in quoting* from his speech containing the alleged promise, the report adopted by the Presbyterian Assembly has, by omitting the words "and

other questions," converted his promise to revive the Referendum Bill into the promise of a special Bill to deal with religious education only ; and to the careless reader he may seem to have made good his point. But the full context makes it perfectly clear that the untoitunate omission affected only Mr. Seddon's remarks with regard to the rejected Bill, and that no such general words can be supplied to enlarge his specific promise of a new Bill to deal with the single issue. Mr. Seddon's ingenuity in constructing an. imaginary grievance out of a misquotation tha-t did not touoh the point at issue is calculated, in his own phrase, to " rouse niQre astonishment than admiration." With the many other interesting features of a very pretty quarrel we have not the space to deal. Dr. Gibb concludes his philippic with the remark that "his (the Premier's) dealings with the BiWe-in-schools Executive are one more nail in the coffin in which the Seddonian regime will one of these days find sepulchre"; and it is odd that on the same day the Premier should have received from the Chairman of the Wesleyan Synod for the Wellington district a letter of another sort, in which the opinion of the Synod is expressed that "your distinguished' career is an incentive to the youth of the community to persevere." These. views are hardly reconcilable, unless perseverance may be regarded as a, virtue regardless of the objects to which it is devoted ; but the two together would form a good text for a discourse on the moral influence of the church in politics.