MR FISH AND OUR PARLIAMENTARY REPORTER.

Evening Star, Issue 7449, 18 February 1888, Page 2

MR FISH AND OUR PARLIAMENTARY REPORTER.

During the course of his address last evening Mr Fish took occasion to refer to the Pailia. mentary correspondent of this journal in the following terms : Now I want to detain you for a few minutes with regard to something personal to myself. I dare say some of you (I trust not many) read a publication published in this City called the Evening Star. Those who may have waded through that journal during the month of December last might have found during three or four days some statements from their own correspondent in Wellington relating to myself. When I saw those statements I was amazed, because, in so far as I had any reason to know, the gentleman who acted as “own correspondent” for the Star was no personal enemy of mine. In fact, on the other hand, I had reason to believe that he was rather friendly than otherwise, because we had travelled together through a large part of the Island during the recess to ' which I have referred this evening. We were very cheerful, very companionable together, therefore I cannot imagine that this gentleman had any personal animus to myself. And therefore when I saw these things, which I shall read presently, and when I knew them to be, as they were, utter lies, I could only conceive that the well-known hostility of the paper to myself and its wellknown slavish adherence to the Atkinson party bad induced them to send instructions to the correspondent that he must give me a little blackguarding, no matter whether it was true or not. On December 6 there appeared this ‘ 1 local. ” When the charge was made by Major Atkinson that the Opposition had been obstructing his measures, I got up and objected to this. On account of this, the correspondent says This aroused the indignation of Mr Fish, whose waste of the time of the House has been absolutely shameful. On December 7 appeared this— The Champion Obstructionist.—Ur Fish is now re* garded as the boss obstructionist. On December 9 he has a heading— The Obstructionists Have Their Fling.—Repeated boasts were made by Messrs Seddon and Fish that they had obstructed and delayed the Representation Bill for three days. The House did not generally join in the congratulations of this pair of champion blockers. Again he goes on to say : Some of the Oppositionists took occasion to disclaim any sympathy with the Seddon and Fish tactics. Now, I am prepared to assure you on my word of honor, and I am not in the habit of telling a lie, that every word of these paragraphs is a pure invention, and if I characterise them in Saxon, which is the proper way to characterise conduct of this kind, I am justified in saying they are deliberate lies. Now, not content with lying about the matter himself, this veracious correspondent makes another and very respected member of the House lie for him. On the 9th or 10th be has a note to this effect: “Rough on thePakeha.” He was referring to the speech made by Mr Carroll, the half-caste native member. And amongst other things he makes Mr Carroll say this in part of his speech:— Mr Fish had been one of the most notorious obstructionists, and it goes without laying that Mr Carroll’s bit was received with considerable applause. Now I was in the House the whole of the time Mr Carroll was on his feet making that speech, and I knew that directly I saw it in the Stab that it had never occurred. So I wrote this letter to the gentleman ; Wellington, December 13, 1887. Dear Ur Carroll,—ln the Dunedin Evening Star of the|9th Inst, appears a paragraph purporting to give your words when speaking on the previous evening on the Representation Bill, in which inter alia you are made to say the following; “Mr Fish had been one of the most notorious obstructionists." I was in the House during your speech and did not hear you make use of that language. Will yon he kind enough to let me know if you made the statement referred to? On December 15 Mr Carroll replied: Your note re certain remarks supposed to have emanated from me, I have received, and must thank ypu.for referring it to me. The words quoted by you, viz.,“ Ur Fish had been one of the most notorious obstructionists," I can safely give the most emphatic contradiction to as coming from me, Now, as to obstruction, to show you the lying nature of this correspondent—whether on his own aepount or by instructions from his journal Idp hpt know—l wish just to read to you from a speech I made in the House with regard to something of this kind, I may say that during the dates oth, 7th, and 9th, and later on, and for some days preceding, I do not think that for all these days together I had spoken for more than two hours during the whole of that time in the House. Nothing of this kind appeared before, and nothing of this kind has appeared in the ‘Times.’ The ‘Times’ is no particular friend of mine, only it happened to have a gentleman for a correspondent.—(Loud applause.) Nothing of the kind appeared in the ‘ Herald/ and the * Herald ’ correspondent was not on the staff of the ‘ Herald’—which is a paper favorable to myself—but a gentleman who was correspondent;, I believe, for the ‘Lyttelton Times,’ and did both papers. Therefore, if anything of the kind this person refers to had occurred i it would have been in one or other of those papers. But, no; it remained for the sapient correspondent of this very sapient paper to find it cut. I will read what > I thought and said about obstruction. On December 8, amongst other remarks, which I i won’t trouble you with, I made these remarks < with regard to the Representation Bill. I may v ; say here now, gentlemen, that obstruction at proper times and for proper purposes is 4thing i to be commended, but obstruction of a .factious ..a and unnecessary character is a thing to be ” deprecated. If it is necessary to obstruct, so long as the voice which Almighty God has given me can be used, it will be used to obstruct measures which are against the interests of the people. I would obstruct, no matter what they called it. Now, upon this very Bill I will read you what I said : But I say it was and is the duty of the Opposition, seeing that the Bill is now in the position it is in, to obstruct the passage of that Bill as much as'it is in their power to do. They were entitled to and ought to use every form of the House to prevent tbo Bill, of which the majority of the House are not in favor, from being forced on the country until a clear majority of the House were in favor of it. But the position I have taken Is this; I said at a meeting of the Opposition yesterday that the Bill ought to be obstructed; that the Opposition as a body ought to obstruct that Bill, and prevent its being made law. A number of the members of the Opposition were not in favor of that course. Had they been in favor of it I should have been prepared to debate the Bill for a considerable time in order to prevent its passing; but 1 am not prepared to take the onus and responsibility on myself of 4n individual obstruction. I do not think I should be justified in doing that, and I do not intend doing it, nor have I done it. I do regret that the Opposition did not Unanimously, or nearly unanimously, consent to obstruct this Bill to the utmost of their power. These arc the words that were used by the man who has been characterised by the representative of the Evening Star as the most notorious obstructionist in the House. I pledge my word to you for this, that except upon the financial debate, when I spoke for two hours and forty minutes, and which I hold myself justified in doing, I made no speech last session which lasted over half an hour. And I did not on any occasion obstruct in any shape or form the passage of business. Not that I object to do it under certain circumstances, but I do object to this: that a scurrilous correspondent of a scurrilous paper, in running me down, should tell deliberate lies about me.—(Applause.) OUR REPORTER’S REPLY. TO THE EDITOR. Sib,—There are only two points in Mr Fish’s attack on me which call for reply. The first is that I was instructed to write in a hostile attitude concerning him, because of the Evening Star’s well-known slavish adherence to the Atkinson parly. This assertion is entirely without foundation, and I aver that in my Parliamentary repotting I was left wholly untrammelled. To show that there was no warrant for the accusation made, I need only allude to the kindly references to me made by the late Premier, who, when addressing his constituents at North Dunedin, stated his conviction that I was thoroughly impartial, and went to no end of pains to get at the truth of any rumors that were in circulation in the lobbies. The other and principal point is with respect to Mr Can oil’s speech. In referring to this matter Mr Fish, with characteristic disingenuousness, only quoted part of Mr Carroll’s reply, and carefully omitted the conclusion, which was to the following effect: “ Probably the words complained of were put in by way of comment, but in transmission the distinction between the speech and comment had not been ebaerved.” The correspondence that bad passed between the two bon. members was shown me by Mr Carroll, who said that my account of the matter, if it had been published as written by me. would have been quite accuiate. I now publicly charge Mr Fish with purposely abstaining from reading to‘ his audience the most important part of Mr Carroll’s letter. On this very point I telegraphed to the Star on December 16 as follows: — • The only leg on which Mr Fieh can bate fcls charge against me (f misrepresentation is so weak as to hardly w rrant any attention being given to it. On Friday last I mentioned that Mr Carroll had felt it incumbent on himself to rebuke the member for Dunedin South for suggesting that the Native representation should be a -olished. and that hi added that Maoris weie not fit to sit there as representatives, muoh lees were the Europeans who had so shamefully wasted the time of the country during the previous three weeks. In commenting on the matter I wrote; “As Mr Fish had been one of the most notorious of the obstructionists, it goes without saying that Mr Carroll’s statement was received <with considerable applause’’; but in transmission the word “as” had been omitted, and, as the paragraph appeared, Mr Carroll was mode to say that Mr Fish had been one of the most notorious of the obstructionists. The member for Dunedin South is endeavoring to insinuate that 1 intentionally

attributed these words to Mr Carroll, though he never n-t-d thorn. 1 now .assert that Mr Fish is aware that !tie error was not mine, and that ho has seen a .. sUierti newspaper v.lili llio same paragraph, nLo furuUlird by me, cjiiiclly printed. Mr I'ish repudiates the charge of obstruction, which, however, was preferred against him in stronger language inthe two Wellington evening papers and iu many Northern journals than I made it. It is true, .as stated by him, that our relations were of a friendly nature in the early part of the session—indeed it was so till Mr Fish f„und that I could not be swayed into reporting favorably on his conduct as a member. Whether I was justified or not in ehaiacterijiug the member for Umudin BovitLi as au “obstructionist,” I am content to leave to the judgment of his fellow representatives. lam not," and cannot he, held responsible for the "headings” that have so grievously offended the member for Dunedin South. —1 am etc., York Reporter. Dunedin, February IS, [Regard for our reporter only has induced us to allow this explanation. Mr Fish’s attempted K-df excnlpation is beneath contempt.—Ei>. E.S.]