BIASSED BIOGRAPHY

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVI, Issue 14167, 15 September 1906, Page 4

BIASSED BIOGRAPHY

We quite agree with the “Otago Daily Times ” that any biography that is written of Mr Seddon should be accurate in statement and authoritative in tone, and we are inclined to regret that the work of this character that is now in preparation aspires to be a history of the Liberal Party in New Zealand as well aa a life of the colony’s greatest Premier. But our contemporary in noticing the apparent bias of the publishers’ announcement falls into the very error it sets out to condemn. The authors, it seems, have promised a chapter on the “ Continuous Ministry,” which is to be embellished by accounts of the unemployed, coupkitchens and destitution, national discontent, crippled industries, the exodus and so forth. The “Daily Times” takes exception to the headings of this chapter, and thinks they will destroy the value of the whole work. “We should have supposed that the myth of the soup kitchen had been sufficiently refuted and exposed,”'it says, ‘‘‘and ■we must enter our protest against its return in this relation. As a matter of fact,, there wore no soup kitchens until the Government in which the late Mr Seddon took office came . into power.” Our correspondent must be labouring under some extraordinary misapprehension. Of course there were soup kitchens shortly after the “Continuous Ministry” succeeded the Grey Government in 1879,, as many people in Christchurch will recollect, and they were revived in. a modified form, in 1887 and 1888, when it was again in office. About the unemployed and the exodus there can be no question, as the melancholy statistics of 1881 and 1888 tell their own tale. But the most curious misconception of our contemporary is shown in its statement that the soup kitchens were one of the expedients of the Liberal Government. There were certainly no establishments of the kind after Mr Ballanco and Mr Seddon took office. Clearly there, is no need to revive the old controversy in a biography rf the late Premier, hut it really looks as if a history of the relief measures of the black eighties would have to be written for the guidance of the Conservative Press.