THE AMENDE HONORABLE.

Free Lance, Volume XVI, Issue 849, 13 October 1916, Page 6

THE AMENDE HONORABLE.

Justice for Sir Joseph.

MB. Von Haast must be warmly complimented upon having had the courage and fairness to acknowledge, as lie did the other night, in the course of the . public debate at the Victoria College, that he and / his friends of the Reform Party in Wellington were in the wrong when they denounced, as some of them did with peculiar bitterness,, the Dreadnought gift to. which Sir Joseph Ward was farsighted and statesmanlike enough to pledge New Zealand. • It is-not often that a keen party man as is Mr. Von Haast, or at least' as he was when he was president of thelocal braJich o-f ths Reform Party, publicly admits that he made a. mistake and misjudged the actions of the leader of that party to which he is, or was, so strenuously opposed. But Mr. Von Haast is as plucky and fair-minded as he is outspoken, and. the war has, no - doubt, wrought many changes -in his old-time opinions, just as it has done in so many of us.

Sir Joseph Ward never got fair play —and in certain quarters it is still , denied him—over the Dreadnought gift. But events have proved the wisdom tjid sterling patriotism: of the man who was at one time subjected to wholesale misrepresentation and gross vilification in the columns of the more rabid' section of the. then Opposition press.' Mr/ . Von Haast's speech proves that he has read aright the signs, of the times, and, more than, this, that- he possesses, a. fair and honest mind, a mind open to conviction by facts, even though it be that he has to revise earlier opinions: He - did the right thing in the right way - at the right time, and he deserves everv credit for it.'