THE COMING PROVINCIAL MAN (?)

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 482, 27 February 1868, Page 3

THE COMING PROVINCIAL MAN (?)

It is only the other day that the Provincialists hailed Mr Fox as the coming man. lie may be the coming man, hut hardly from the Dunedin Provincial point of view. Let us hear what Mr Fox said, and ask this question—Why has Mr Fox been dropped like red hot iron by some of our contemporaries ? : From the Alps we look down on great United Italy, where everything seemed present to charm the mind of man. Italy is now no longer a bundle of petty duchies, tyrants' kingdoms, and papal prisons, but a free land—free from the foot of the Alps to the shores of Sicily. There you see none of those petty provincialisms (hear, hear, and applause) which dismember a country —none of those discreditable hagylings of which and where is to be the smt of Government. — (Laughter and cheers'). Pffhaps there is no country from which New Zoa:a"d may learn morn useful le&sous than from the history of Italy."

And then, the Canterbury * Press,' commenting upon the brilliant speech of the exMinister (which, by the way, we do not remember the Dunedin journals to have published), remarked :

Could the influence of each Province have been confined to its local affairs, and could the independence of the General Assembly have been maintained, we should never have seen defalcations from the ranks of the Provincial party. But the provinces have become powerless in local affairs, omnipotent in the Assembly. They have ceased to colonise and settle the couutry, whilst they have reduced the Assembly from the position of the Parliament of a free and united people to a meeting of delegates from isolate and jealous States—a body in which no question is considered with a view to its operation on the inhabitants of the colony, but only with a view to the manner in which it will affect the power and interests of the Provincial establishments. It is not to be wonlered at then that Mr Fox, short a time as he has been in the colony since his return, should be led to contrast the feeling of this disunion and isolation which he finds ripe in the colony, with that revival of national sentiment which he has so recently witnessed in Italy, and which will ever mark the past ten years as an epoch in the life of that great country.