WELLINGTON NEWS NOTES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9241, 19 December 1888, Page 5

WELLINGTON NEWS NOTES.

[BY TELEGRAPH. —OWN CORRESPONDENT.] Wellington, Tuesday. SIR HARRY ATKINSON ON' READY WRITERS. The Premier this morning, in a speech at a meeting held in Dunedin to promote tho Jubilee .Exhibition, referred to the cable- j gram received last night, which contained certain sonsational and libellous attacks on the Bank of Now Zealand. This speech is too good to miss, so 1 send a condensed version of it, lest you should not receive it in time, that it may not lose any of its points by delay. The Premier is not usually surcharged with pleasantry when ho appears in public, but he has on this occasion employed the force of ridicule with excellent effect. He says:—" There is a telegram in to-night's paper saying that a particular paper, the Financial News, has been writing a very severe article upon one of our important institutions. ell, it must have occurred to most of you that these articles are generally the result of pure ignorance of the facts on the part of those who write them. There is a large number of writers who have quick and ready pons, who write much better and much more easily if they are not troubled with facts. (Laughter and applause.) And I am afraid many of those writers are in that position. You know it has been suggested that wo should invite certain great men to visit our Exhibition here, and it occurred to me that one of the persons we ought to include in our invitation should be tho editor of the Financial News. (Laughter and applause). It think that is a quarter worth trying. (A voice : 'It is Westgarth.') Mr. "Westgarth knows more about the colony than to write such stuff, but I say we might invite gentlemen of that sore to pay us a visit, and that it would pay us to pay their expenses, and I, for one, would be glad to put my hand in my pocket, and subscribe my mite." • THE SHANNON APPOINTMENT. It appears that it was the editor of tho Press who telegraphed to Wellington Mr. Shannon's account of it. He denies that there was any " private " conversation on the subject, and he gives also the following account of the passage which appeared to be so offensive to the Civil service:— " This," he says, " is as nearly as possiblo in Mr. Shannon's own words, the telegram, as it appeared in the Evening Press, being, to all intents and purposes, a verbatim report of Mr. Shannon's statement. Tho only word in it which was purposely altered was one which, by the telegram regulations, could not be transmitted, and for which, therefore, the editor substituted a Latinised synonym." ____________