STANMORE ELECTION.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2396, 7 December 1881, Page 3

STANMORE ELECTION.

To the Editor of the Globe. Sir, —With your kind permission I should like to let the public know hovr I am going to vote in the coming election for a representative for [the House, and my reason for so doing. Mr Oowlishaw is a gentleman for whom personally, being a man of great wealth, I have of course a great and terrible respect. But for several reasons I do not think he is the man to represent us in Parliament, In the first place ours is a constituency composed very largely of working people, and I think it is not altogether the thing that we should send up as our representative a man whose interests are so closely bound up with property. Mr Oowlishaw himself is no small property holder, for which, of course, I do not blame him, but his interests are also connected with the Bank of New Zealand, the Drainage Board, the Canterbury College, and almost every well endowed body and cornoration that has grown fat by reason of its large holdings of the people’s birthright, the land of the country; and I say the Bank of New Zealand, the Drainage Board, and all the landed institutions of the country have representation and power enough already without this constituency of working people electing their nominee for its representative. We are told that Mr Oowlishaw has been in the Provincial Council, and this has in some miraculous way given him a special fitness for Parliament, and one newspaper has actually made the discovery, among other wonderful things, that the present prosperity of our provincial district is due to the fact that Mr Oowlishaw was in the Provincial Council. Another discovery made by this newspaper is equally wonderful, and I am sure must be news to all of us, that Mr Oowlishaw, 1 suppose by the help of this training, is a very fluent speaker, and so has a great advantage over the other candidates. The only unfortunate thing about these discoveries is, that they are made by Mr Cowlishaw’s own paper, the “ Telegraph,” and I suppose the man who made them at so much a line must have done so by the help of Mr Oowlishaw’s own spectacles. The only discovery I have been able to make about Mr Oowlishaw’s Provincial Council career is that he looked well after the Provincial Solicitorship and the getting of name and fame to himself, and I have no doubt his training would help him in the same direction in the House of Representatives. But I think that the strongest reason against Mr Oowlishaw’fl candidature is the one supplied by himself — viz,, that he has been content to live in the neighborhood for the last eighteen years or so, and has not done one hour’s turn to help in the establishment or working of its ipslitutions. All the labor, trouble and anxiety in connection with these have had to be borne by others, but now that the honor of affixing M.H.R. after one’s name is to be had Mr Oowlishaw wakes up suddenly to the idea that be is in the district, and this bait is not too small for his capacious soul; and then be gets a map and finds out where Knightstown and Phillipstown are, and in the evening orders his coachman to drive him home through Bingsland, that he may have a look at his constituency. We don’t want a Rip Van Winkle, a man who has been living amongst us for the last eighteen years, but who has only just discovered the fact on the eve of a §enoral election. The cream of the joke, owerer, lies in the fact (unknown I am

afraid to most of the electors) that Mr Cowlishaw is not in the district at all, and his name does not appear on the roll, and if we cannot find in the district one good man and true to represent us, but are obliged to get an outsider, we should go further than Mr Oowlishaw without any danger of faring worse.

Of Mr Pilliet much the same has to be said. He has just come into the district, and has also just discovered how much he has its at heart, and how miserable it will make him for the rest of his natural life if he does not get an opportunity of serving it and himself. Mr Pilliet has given us his programme, a host of wild theories, scarcely one of which I venture to say will be heard of when the election excitement is over, and the country settle down again to sober steady progress ; so that I think, as Mr Pilliet has nothing but these mental cobwebberies to offer us, we should find him quite a useless man for practical purposes. But the worst about Mr Pilliet'e programme is, that it has no backbone in it. It is one thing on the platform and another thing, anything you wish, off the platform. He is playing the game of being all things to all men. On the platform he is strongly in favor of our present system of education, on tho quiet he is in favor of the Catholic claims, for anything else that will catoh the vote of the man he is speaking to Mr Pilliet’s political history shows that his politics are those which carry pay with them. At the last general election ho was writing up ond working for the Hall Ministry, and this election he takes the other side, and both for the same reason that he is paid for it. Mr Pilliet knows very well how handsomely Sir George Grey rewards his political supporters, and it would be strange therefore if Mr Pilliet did not declare himself a thick and thin Greyite. But I think the country has had enough of the reckless extravagant donothing Grey administration, and I do not fancy that any part of Mr Rolleston’s old constituency are going to send up a Greyite. And now I come to the gentleman who has my support, Mr William Elesher. I have said that our constituency is largely composed of working people, and Mr Elesher is one of them. He lives in the district, and has done so nearly as long as Mr Oowlishaw has been in the neighborhood ; but, unlike that gentleman, he discovered the fact at once, and there has hardly been a work or movement for the good government of the district but Mr Elesher has been a leading spirit in it; Boad Board, School Committee, Domain Board, and everything else has had him as a prominent worker. In all these capacities he has done whatever duty was laid upon him thoroughly, and fearlessly, and has proved that he is not to bo bought over or frightened by any one. When, as first proposed by the Representation Bill, Bingsland would have been divided, and one half cast in the Avon district, and so the whole would have been rendered practically powerless, because divided, tho man to look after the interests of the place and get the error set right was not the great and unapproachable Mr Oowlishaw, or the promising Mr Pilliet, but the working Mr Elesher. Mr Elesher, it may be said, lacks the scholarly training of his two opponents, but the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone tolls us that the best training for parliamentary life is neither a college education nor an editorial life, but working one’s way through all the grades and forms of our local government, and this training Mr Elesher has had, and his opponents have not. And as to whether Mr Elesher has ability to form his own opinions and give them intelligent expression his addresses throughout the district give proof enough. Tours, &0., An Blbctob.