THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18, 1890.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVII, Issue 8285, 18 June 1890, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18, 1890.

It is made evident by our latest telegram.-; from Wellington, that Ministers are endeavouring to pull themselves together in order to face the House once more in the position of a happy family. All the evil of Mr. Fergus's Queenstown speech is to be explained away on the venerable but always serviceable excuse that he was misreported ! If anybody cares to argue the question, there arc many reasons why this cannot be received. The blunder of the speech was not an expression here and there, which might have been the mistake of a reporter, but every topic treated, and the assertions running all through, that "we," the Ministers, had resolved to do so and so. The series of blunders which Mr. Fergus made were still more conspicuous in a verbatim report of the speech than in the abstract made for telegraphing, in which mistakes might easily be made. However, Ministers have agreed to put the blame on the reporter, and as everybody knows exactly what that means, we hope the fiction will be allowed to pass unquestioned. The talk about an immediate want-of-conhdence motion lias, it it said, to some extent strengthened the position of the Ministry. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that the proposal has made manifest the absurdity of the idea of this Parliament of dead politicians setting themselves down for a prolonged discussion of whether the House has or has not confidence in Ministers. We are told by the Ministerialist journal that before Sir 11. Atkinson retires "he will say something that will place the position of the colony very clearly before the people." We know the position of it clearly enough. We have now only income and expenditure, to look at. We have no large amounts of loan money now to confuse our finance. Sir Harry Atkinson was never a very lucid financier. He was always rather proud of the fact that nobody understood colonial finance but himself. Put this time he can scarcely bo anything else but lucid. What we want to known clearly is, what he proposes should be done to lighten the burden of taxation so as to stop the outtlow of population. It is evident, from all that is said, that it will be the last Financial Statement that Sir Harry Atkinson will make, and we should think that in the circumstances even Opposition members who are hungering after the Colonial Treasurership, will abstain from making it an occasion of irritation and attack.