FIRST EDITION. Mataura Ensign GORE: SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 1893. REFORM OR RUIN.

Mataura Ensign, Issue 15, 3 August 1895, Page 2

FIRST EDITION. Mataura Ensign GORE: SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 1893. REFORM OR RUIN.

The remarks of the Stipendiary Magistrate at the close of the charge against Keown on Tuesday last must not be left unnoticed. Southland is attaining an unenviable notoriety — a notoriety in the Criminal Records of the colony. It is time that all good men and true took stock of the position and banded themselves together in a, common opinion and in resolute co-operation to enforce a high standard of morality in this Provines. 3?or morality is not a dead nor a passive weight in society.- It it exists at all, it is a leaven pervading all social, commercial and political relation?. Its existence is shown only by its activity. And what activity has it among us? What are we to say of the operations of our great commercial undertakings ? Is it not lamentable to find them cropping out as the active factors in human despair — the Pythons whose coils are crushing the life out of settler?, and leaving them dead to all sense of criminality — a prey to their passion 9 , reckless of their future, dead even to the very feelings of humanity? For years one great banking institution sacked like an octopus the life-blood of the pastoral and commercial industrials of this colony, clinging to and paralysing them with its oruel embrace. Of what use is it to us in Southland if this BaDk is at great cost to the colony made powerless to do further mischief, if it be only to allow the growth of a new octopus in our midst ? And as in oar commercial, so in our social state. Of what advantage are our publio schools, of what advantage the mechanical training in the rudimentary knowledge of letters and of figures, if the training end there — if truth and justice and purity, if the duties of man to man, il the obligations of the citizen to the State, if the religion if the heme, the law of obedience, the love of truth, the sense of justice, the joy of self-control, the curse of a lawless heart, are left utterly out oE the system — unacknowledged, untaught, treated with contemptuous 9ilence, or made the subject of ridicule? Of what use is it to look to the Ministry of the day for every social reform ? It is a Bhame to us to read day by day the disgraceful records of Parliamentfalsehood, decit, contempt of law, defiance of justice — a mockery of all honest Parliamentary procedure, open outrage of all constitutional rights, tyranny founding its force upon the slavish submission of representatives of the people : that is the popular Parliament of to-day. And now we have the Stipendiary Magistrate forcibly calling our attention to the existence in our midst of actual sympathy with crime ! And what is to stop it ? How can the Executive, being what it is itself, ever be expected to use the sword of Justice? What is the Department of Justice in this Colony ? An institution for wringing fees and fines out of the suitors in its courts and the offenders against its laws, and starving with an ignominious parsimony — the outcome of mean and grovelling minds — all the service of the Department, of every judge, magistrate or ofllier engaged in its administration. Ttnre is no remedy for this state of things but one. Lot all that are good and tiue men in Southland band together now and henceforward to drive this base and corrupt Ministry from power, and select tru? and honest representatives, pledged in solemn form to set themselves to a complete and entire change in the system of administration of publio affairs — representatives who will exorcise the evil spirit of Party and seek nothing but the true welfare of the State, who will insist on a complete disclosure of the true financial condition of the Colony, force a true bjlance-sheet from the Bank of New Z.-aland and its dependent institutions, relieve the Civil Service and Railways, the Defence Service and the Police, from the killing cancer of corrupt patronage, and set up a standard of public morality which will restore confidence at home and respect abroad. The Colony is perishing under a tyranny the most corrupt it has ever kaowr, and this tyranny is sapping the very principle* of manhood, destroying the individual energies, paralysing all enterprise, and undermining the independence of men of all conditions. We have a year before us to do the work. Let us begin at once, and at the next election chase out every man who ha? oboyed the Ministerial lash, and, himself a slave, enslaved his constituency. And, setting aside all class jealousies, and with one eager movement of true patriotism, let us pick out the ablest, the bravest, the most independent of our men, and send them to do the great work of Reform at the ensuing Parliament.