Hawke's Bay Herald. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21,1904 THE SESSION.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 12868, 21 September 1904, Page 2

Hawke's Bay Herald. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21,1904 THE SESSION.

The House resumed the consideration of tlie Licensing Bill yesterday, and we may assume that it will not bo very long before that measure is carried through. We do not anticipate that Use Upper House will have much to say about it, for, as it will reach that Chamber, the measure will be divested of most of the provisions which can be considered contentious. When the discussion of this bill is finished, there does not seem much loft which is likely to occupy the time of the House to any very great extent. The volume of legislation, as it will appear in the book of the statutes for the year, will perhaps bo swelled by the inclusion of several consolidation measures. Bills consolidating the law of education, marriage, and divorce have been introduced, and if these are passed they will assist in giving to the work of the session an appearance of importance which it can hardly be said to deserve. Those measures are probably useful enough, and there are other branches of the law which would be worth codifying, but they have been prepared by the Parliamentary draughtsman without any assistance from Ministers or members.

There has been, as has frequently been pointed out, an absence of interest in the discussions of the session, which indicates very clearly how little importance hits been attached to them. The only thing that can be said for the manner in which the business of the House has been conducted is that there has not been very much waste of time. The Address-in-reply and fiinancial debates were both nnsnally short, and the want of confidence debate on the land question did not occupy as much time as it might very easily have done. And, lastly, the Licensing Bill, which promised to evoke such heated discussion, has, in point of fact, been hurried over with remarkable rapidity. There ia among the bills still left hardly one that is likely to arouse much interest, unless it be the Monopolies Prevention Bill, but we shall be surprised if this is passed this session. We take it that everyone is anxious to get back home, and both the Premier and Sir Joseph Ward are evidently not able to bear the strain which a long session involves, On the wbolafthe countyy will have po wwcti

to regret the absence of novelties of- a | legislative kind. The less it has of that kind of thing the better for it.