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New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 8980, 18 February 1888, Page 4

Very general regret will be experienced throughout the provincial district at the retirement of Mr. D. A. Tole from the Commissionership of the Crown Lands' Board. It would be in bad taste to offer any objection to the proceedings of retrenchment at the hands of the Government, seeing that they are_ only being carried out on the imperative demand of the whole country. It is obvious that the process of retrenchment must have unpleasant results, and that all over the colony it will be accompanied by the wrenching of ties, and by the removal of officers to whom the public in their several localities have been strongly attached ; and if the feeling that this naturally prompts in one locality were given effect to, and efforts were made by the public pressure to tie the hands of the Government, it goes without saying that the process would be repeated in a hundred places, and that the duty devolving on _ the Government, irksome enough as it is, would become an impossibility. _ Viewing it in this light, we do not raise any protest against the retirement of Mr. Tole, although we know that in doing so we would carry with us the kindly sympathy of everyone in the provincial district of Auckland that has ever had any dealings with the administration of the waste lands.

As will bo seen in our other columns, the members of the Crown Lands Board have expressed themselves in very warm terms when taking leave of their Chief Commissioner in respect at once of his courtesy, and his attention to the work of his Department. Everything that has been said by them will be generally endorsed, for a more courteous, affable, and attentive officer than Mr. Tole there is not in the public service of New Zealand. Mr. Tole has served under many Governments, and in the administration of all possible, and nearly impossible, systems for the disposal of the waste lands of the province. But he lias loyally served the system by whatever Government introduced, and with whatever object in view ; and, as we have had probably the most complicated land systems in New Zealand of all the land systems in the whole world, to have mastered them in their details and complexity, and in their chameleon changes, and to have administered them "hot only faithfully,but to the satisfaction of the Governments, and, as far as it was possible in their nature, to the satisfaction of those in quest of lands for settlement, is a feat of no ordinary official Mr. Tole has now been thirty years in the public service, and for some twelve years in the important and responsible position of chief of the Board of Land Commissioners, and we feel assured that it is only the facility afforded by the amalgamation of the kindred offices of Lands and Survey, that accounts for his retirement, when other officers in other departments might have retired with far less loss to the public service. However our late Chief Commissioner has left the public service in the very prime of his manhood and vigour, and we venture to think that his retirement into private life is not his retirement from the public view ; but that we shall see him not only playing an active part in the business of life, but bringing the resources of his official knowledge and experience and ability to the performance of the duties of good citizenship.