Mt. Ida Chronicle NASEBY, SATURDAY, AUG. 10, 1895. I, I, I.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume 26, Issue 1337, 10 August 1895, Page 2

Mt. Ida Chronicle NASEBY, SATURDAY, AUG. 10, 1895. I, I, I.

The Treasurer's Financial Statementis, without exception, the. dreariest, most prolix, most empty, and most ridiculously vainglorious of all the Financial Statements on the records of our Parliament. We almost "defy any mortal man to read it through. The style in a, literary sense, is positively shocking, while the mixture of personal vaingloriousness and petty fretfulness which stands out in almost every paragraph is of itself enough to make the Budget speech a record of unsuitableness. Mr Ward has certain!} shown himself personally in a very unfavourable light ever since his unfortunate trip to England, by which, as we and others have conclusively shown, the colony has lost such jan enormous amount of money (in addition to which the bill for the trip itself has to be paid, and will no doubt be, after the regular mauner of Ministers : in these things, coolly concealed from the people till the year after next) was first decided upon. His insatiable appetitefor personal praise, his jealousy of the Agent-general's share in the work he did, his spiteful attacks upon everyone who knows too much to fall down and worship him for his negotiations with the Nelson Company and the other work he is supposed to have done in London, his boasting at the ridiculous "reception" in Wellington -—made up principally of Ministers' carriages, and, as we learn from a Wellington paper, "eight expresses, some of them empty " —and finally his Financial Statement, mark Mr Ward as personally an inferior type of statesman, whatever his "facility" in dealing with figures may be. We judge our statesmen by their works, and it is vain to pretend that the semi-private trip of Mr Ward to London at the public expense luis stood the test of fair examination, orincreased the reputation of the Ministry. The very loudness of Mr Ward's constant boasts shows of itself how conscious he and his colleagues are of the weakness of the case they are, in view of the heavy bill the colony has to pay, compelled to bolster up. In the Financial Statement we have this kind of thing carried to the very extreme, while in many intoler ably prolix passages the views expressed remind one of nothing so much as what one of the Treasurer's col < leagues elegantly and politely calls the ' •' drivellings of an old man"—which ' the Treasurer, among his other excel- ! lences, cannot, by the way, claim to be. ' There is something exceedingly un- ' generous, too, in the references to the ' Agent-general in connection with some , petty reduction of commission. Ever ■ since he has returned home Mr Ward 1 has evinced a morbid jealousy of that j gentleman, and a rabid intolerance of t the credit the papers were disposed to n give hitn. " Our Agent-general," the 1 Treasurer now says, "had a few * weeks before, in conjunction with the h

other Agents-genera], waited on the governor of the Bank of England. No hopes were however held out by the governor that their application would be favourably considered. Subsequently, the Agent-general wrote a normal memorandum to thebankasking cor a reduction of the charges. This application was declined. I thereupon determined to personally urge our claims upon the governor, and accomvanied by the Agent-general, I was favoured with an interiew," &C., &c. All of which, it is plain to the meanest capacity, means when translated, " A lot of people want to give credit to the Agent-general. I intend in his absence (and his tongue, as ■ a civil servant, being tied in the matter) to prove to you : conclusively that what I did he had failed to do, and though he went with me to the Bank of England the truth was that I took him there, trotting at my heels like a little dog, and Jdid"the work." Supposing that it were true, has anything more ungenerous ever been said or done by a public man ? and even if it were both true and generous, what on earth are all these wearisome personal details doing in-a Fmaiieial Statement ? The same spirit of personal, boasting, couched in the same unreadable mass of petty detail, prevails throughout the Statement, and renders it, as we have said, at once the most petty and the most unreadable Budget that has yet been placed before the people of New Zealand. We do not propose, for this reason, to criticise it in detail, but will merely remark that after perusing this and other Ministerial documents, as well as certain revelations which have come to the public, ears in spite of Ministers, we can quite understand how it is that the present Ministry is found "to express such fear and hatred of such an officer as an Auditor-general.