The Gisborne Standard AND COOK COUNTY GAZETTE Published every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday Morning. Saturday, November 30, 1889.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume III, Issue 384, 30 November 1889, Page 2

The Gisborne Standard AND COOK COUNTY GAZETTE Published every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday Morning.

Saturday, November 30, 1889.

Be just and fear not; Let All che ends thou aim'st at be thy country's, Thy God'e, and truth’s.

MR ARTHUR’S POLITICAL “ ESSAY.’ Mr ARTHUR’S first public utterance was an expression of his extreme surprise at finding himself a candidate for politica honors. We, too, were, and after hearing Mr Arthur, still are, extremely surprised. We are not quite sure whether M Arthur’s Committee on Wednesday night was intended to be a foil for Mr Arthur, or whether Mr Arthur was to be a foil for the Co. Certainly he was supported by the most curious congeries of talent and respectability it has ever been our good fortune to see placed on a political plat form. We gazed and wondered, and as we wondered we asked ourselves, if graced and aided with all this entourage of political premium, the candidate would be able to give some faint promise of a political future in which he might, if ever elected by a New Zealand constituency, prove himself capable of renderingany service, of the least public utility, to his country.

There must have been many in that large audience gathered on Wednesday night who must, as we did, have keenly felt the hope that the good-natured gentlemanly man before them, who felt his arms and legs so dreadfully in his road, painfully struggling through the task he had had set for him, might end it promptly without utter collapse; and who must have been extremely thankful when it was all over. His supporters went expecting nothing, and would gladly have taken him upon faith and spared both him and themselves the painful ordeal. Theyjnow say he did better than they expected, and this, under the circumstance of what they did expect, may at once be conceded. It is a difficult thing to treat such a speech seriously. Yet we must make the attempt, although our pen almost fails us as we write. We were told :—

(i) There were no parties and no party questions in New Zealand.

(2) He had been to Wellington on his own .affairs. He and Mr Graham had passed a Native Land Act which they had allowed Mr Ca;-roll and Mr Harris to help behind with. Mr Graham had been very kind to him —“ for a member, you know, can do little things for his friend, put him behind tha Chair,I’—and 1 ’—and take hmi into Bellamy’s, he might have added. (3) Sir H. Atkinson, the Apostle of retrenchment, was the man to swear by. Sir Harry, by crushing taxation upon the people, had enabled the Colony to meet the debts which he (Sir Harry), more than any other living man, had created by profligate political .expenditure. Do we not recollect that it was Sir Harry A’.kinson who, at one swoop, added (£3,000,000 of Deficiency bills to the permanent debt, for the most part made tip of his own anmjal deficits as Colonial Treasurer. Mr Arthur idid not tell us this, but no doubt his eloquent silence meant it, and his talented supporters behind at least looked it. (4) He believed in the present incidence of taxation. Land he thought, and in particular Native land, while in the acquisition, should not be taxed, nor the in comes of retired or bjghly-paid civil servants, or professional men. (J) He told us a little story about Queen Victoria on an almanac, or the almanac upon Queen Victoria—our reporter her?

got quite mixed up. He had also a story about Sydney Taiwhanga, which quite woke up the respectability and talent, or the talent and respectability (we are not quite sure which was which) on the platform.

(6) Big estates must not be touched. They were sacred. The whole civilized world—all mankind —would laugh at such sacrilege. Mr Arthur did not tell us what would happen to New Zealand if it, or they, did laugh. (7) Absentees who spent their lives and their New Zealand incomes in London or Paris, were good-natured fellows. They talked up New Zealand, and advertised us largely ; besides after all, if they were sinners, they were very little ones, and few. Under no circumstances must they be taxed.

(8) Education was a grand thing. In New Zealand the people might claim to be the best educated in the world. (Here Mr Arthur must have forgotten that unique address to the electors in the back page of the P.8.H.) High schools were a mistake. The parents whose children used them should pay for them, and clever children of the poor—“ the mute euqlorious (yide P.8.H.) Milton” should be saved from oblivion by some form of natural selection that Mr Arthur had not time to tell us about.

(9) New Zealand was a free-trade Colony, and he believed in free-trade. He did not tell us Sir Harry Atkinson was a Protectionist, and there was no such thing as free-trade in New Zealand, and that free-trade, now resorted to, would shut up every established industry in the country, and bring about a financial disaster unequalled as yet, even by Sir Harry Atkmson’s wild sowing in the past of financial oats, the fruit of which we are now reaping.

(10) He had a bran-new panacea for Native troubles—viz., free-trade in Native lands, with restrictions. Under-his system every Jonah would be able to purchase the site of his coveted gourd.

(11) The land laws perfect, and he especially approved of the perpetual lease system, but had not time to mention that this system was forced on a reluctant and scoffing Opposition by a Liberal administration.

(12) Gisborne and Napier were exposed to attack from a Russian cruiser, and must see to die wool bales. Perhaps he thought that tiie Russian might teach Mr Washington Weaver a thing or two about petroleum or dynamite bombs. If so he kept this thought to himself. (13) He was opposed to village settlements or to aid of the kind being given to the unemployed in the large towns. They, he thought, had better go away out of the country as they had done before. There were already quite enough people in the country and being bred in it, and these must not be exposed to the rude contact and competition with and of the impoverished or new arrivals, (14) He.had opposed the harbor works, believing them to be unnecessary. He would ask for an endowment, but he should expect to be refused. An endowment was unobtainable.

This is really not a political parody of all Mr Arthur’s speech, which took more than an hour in delivery. Of a truth, the public is a good-tempered, much-enduring animal. We wonder if such a laissezfairs speech was ever before given by any candidate who believed in his own candidature or his own success. We are gravely told that all taxation as it is, is perfect : the Government is perfect: our Education is perfect, but too expensive : theland laws are perfect : free government is perfect, though not so good as autocracy tempered by fear of assassination : and last but not least, I, A. C. Arthur, the intelligent squatter, am perfect. The only imperfect being is the professional politician, and he is imperfect because he does not believe in admitted perfection—the aforesaid A. C. Arthur.

In this Utopian Paradise, to the charm of which the erstwhile leaderof democratic radicalism, Mr File, has succumbed, why should we bother about elections r' The selected member has to do nothing, but has to follow his leader like a tame bear on a chain, eat and drink, rest and be thankful, and pick up the crumbs thrown to the faithful. Free trade in native lands, as Mr Arthur would have it, must end in large estates. The man who for himself or for others can command capital pould alone buy. It is absurd to imagine that the small settler could enter upon the quagmire of the purchase of undivided shares in native land. Stern repression of land monopoly and Crown titles offered to all, on sales of land voluntarily brought in for sale by the native owners by their tribes and hapus, in restricted areas, might aid the general settlement of the country. Free trade, with a continuation at all the trappings and frauds of th? present system, will found families ; it will not feed people.

High Sbhools abolished, or made so expensive as.to exclude the children of the least wealthy, would create classes—the educated and the uneducated. The High Schools are supported by endowments, not by capitation grafts, and are managed by governors who already manage them for a class. The Gis.borne High scho.ol is not one of these, but is a State School, managed by the Education Board and local School Committee. Mr Rees would nationalise all these reserves for the benefit of the Education Fund, and make all High Schools, like the Gisborne School, State Schools for the children of the people, who have* passed their sixth standard. Mr Arthur would sweep them all away, and educate the prodigies only among the children pf the least wealthy—the exuberant freaks of nature, by charity. We listened in vain for the'slightest gleam of recognition that this great Coast had any future before it if it were offered the chance : any hint that it might be better than a mere sheep-walk created at a sheep-walk pace. There was no perception that it was a Colonial estate, waste and unknown because it had trusted its representation for years past to “ mute Miltons,’’ and no statesman had been told bythesedumb watchmen that it merely required business management to render it the most productive portion of the North : that it was capable of being the horn? of thousands of settlers capable of supporting themselves and exporting a large surplus of food. Mr Arthqr disclosed no trace of responsibility as to the great problems before us tobe solved by our public men—the future of the native race, stripped of all their land, a$ he and his kind would strip them, or the great and appalling difficulty of dealing with charitable aid without creating a class of paupers on the one hand or starving the deserving pqor on the other.

We do not blame Mr Arthur for his ignorances. He is, we believe, a good private citizen, and the measure of his information is entirely a matter for himself. His mistake is to think he is called upon to offer his services to his country, He has much to learn, and still more to foj-get, before his services will be seriously wanted. We advise him for his own good —for he, too, has some stake in the district—and for ours, to retire into that private obscurity which so peculiarly becomes him, and from which he has so mistakenly emerged ; and then with further deliberation on the public questions of the day, he may on some fitting occasion qualify himself for a seat bn a political platform among some such brilliant galaxy of talent and respectability as that which adorned his platform on Wednesday SYoaing Jast.