THE PREMIER'S DILEMMA.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 18, 23 January 1911, Page 6

THE PREMIER'S DILEMMA.

The Ministerial organ would be wiser to let the Premier fight his own battles than to pufc forward such a defence of his treatment of "those phantom invitations" as appears in its columns this morning. When Sir Joseph Ward launched his angry tirade at our head on Saturday he had evidently forgotten the nature of his previous utterances on the subject. "All the self-governing portions of the Empire," said Sir Joseph Ward on the 6th October, "have been invited to send a portion of their members to the Coronation. New Zealand has been asked to send eight, but the question has not yet been considered by Cabinet." The Premier had so completely forgotten this statement that he was throwa into a very undignified fury •by an article which did not go nearly so far in its assertions or assumptions, but proceeded upon tho revised version which he published in the House of Representatives on the 3rd December. No invitation, he then stated, had been received, but he had been informed confidentially that "after the present general election in England an invitation might come." He added that this information "did not come on behalf of the Home Government, but it came from those who were arranging matters at Home, and it was possible that some of them might be left out at the general election." The plain meaning of these words is, as he said, that no formal invitation had been received, but that the Government had been told to expect one by those who were officially responsible for the Coronation arrangements, but who might cease to be so after the general election. The Premier now says that no invitation has been received, and that he is keeping nothing back. In October he stated that an invitation had been received ; in December he stated that no invitation had been received, but only an official hint that one might be expected, and that as it was confidential he could not disclose it; in January he declares that the idea of an invitation is due to the imagination of his critic, and that he has nothing to keep back. The invitation affirmed in. October is denied in December ; the confidential communication affirmed in December is ignored and by implication denied in January. And then the Ministerial organ brushes aside a criticism based upon a two-thirds majority of these conflicting versions with the contention that the Premier has "a much better grip of the facts" than his critics. It is possible to admire such hardihood, but not to argue with it.