THAT HIGH COMMISSIONERSHIP.

Free Lance, Volume XIX, Issue 993, 16 July 1919, Page 6

THAT HIGH COMMISSIONERSHIP.

How Do These Things Get Into the Papers ? IT would be interesting to know who has been responsible for some of the parliamentary gossip which has been cabled out from London of late

with regard to the High Commissionership. The very latest tit-bit is an extract from an article in the London "Evening News," which solemnly informs its readers that Sir Thomas. Mackenzie's return to New Zealand is eagerly awaited by the people of the Dominion who regard him as the next Prime Minister." "How do these things get into the papers?" asked' that distinguished actor-mana-ger. Mr Vincent Crummies. Who, we wonder, has been stuffing the gullible editor of the London "Evening News." The very idea of New Zealand people "eagerly awaiting the return" of Sir Tain (erstwhile of Clutha) and an ex-Prime Minister for ~ a few months to place him at the head of a Mackenzie party to oust Mr Massey, to say nothing of Sis Joseph Ward— and Mr Parr, Mr Vernon Reed, Dr. Thacker, Mr Bob Semple and other aspirants to the Prime Ministership— is the choicest specimen of unconscious humour this journal has happened across for many a long day.

Wirelessed to our very own Wandering Willie or to tlfe bland and urbane Sir Joseph, it must, we expect, have proved vastly more amusing than all the allegedly comic pages of the New York and Chicago Sunday papers with which the travellers are beguiling, no doubt, the tedium of American trans-continental travel. Tt is a pity the Free Lance cartoonist is this week engaged on another subject. Otherwise he could have drawn a delightfully funny picture of the people of Wellington, or Dunedin, or Auckland, thronging to the wharves, waving their "hankies" to Sir Tam, or shouting ' 'Heaven be thanked! Our Tarn's back, and the country's saved!"