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Lyttelton Times, Volume XXIII, Issue 1408, 3 June 1865, Page 4

Peehaps a more singular speech was never uttered from Government benches in any legislature than that which Mr. Rolleston spoke in the debate on the Southern Railway resolution on Thursday evening. If there is a subject to call for statesmanship on the part of a Provincial Government, it is the consideration of how the resources of the country may best be caused to fructify, and how they may most wisely be applied to the colonisation of the country itself. If anything may be called a " provincial policy " it is a plan for performing such an operation on a large scale; and the Southern Railway plan is just such a one. Mf. Rolleston has no chance 9f agreeing with his colleagues in a policy common to the 'whole Government unless he agrees with them in a scheme which disposes of a large share of the provincial resources, and applies them to one out of several possible objects of great importance. Now, Mr. Rolleston made a clean breast, told the Council that his opinion had been adverse to the prosecution of the plan, and gave the House to understand that he had merely submitted his judgment to that of his colleagues, not that he. had altered his first-formed opinion. And yet Mr. Rolleston is the leader of the Government. It is quite impossible that-he should be content to act as a mere clerk to the Secretary for Public "Works, and to keep his mind a blank as to the propriety or otherwise of a step of such importance as his colleagues forced upon him. We believe Mr. Rolleston to be thoroughly honest as a politician, and to be as incapable of acting against his own judgment as of concealing what his opinions on the question are. Had his views changed in favour of the prosecution of the railway, he would not have said what he did on Thursday night. The most refined candour does not compel a member of a Government to damage his party by enlarging publicly on mistaken opinions which he has abandoned. Mr. Rolleston's announcement was clearly intended for a practical purpose. Either he means to retain his office, under protest against the consequences of the Rakaia Railway scheme being imputed ,to him ; or he means to give up his post in the Provincial Government. And we have too high an opinion of Mr. Rolleston's logical powers to believe that he can prefer the former alternative. The Province may therefore consider itself without a Provincial Secretary. A wider sphere of action lies before Mr. Rolleston, where his undoubted but peculiar talents may be rendered of greater value to the colony;—we mean the service of the General Government. Such a prospect is open to his reasonable ambition, and we do not profess to regret that he may yet enter upon it, even if an arrangement to that effect be not already settled.