SIR GEORGE GREY.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 221, 4 December 1875, Page 13

SIR GEORGE GREY.

Sir George Grey has delivered himself of the speech which was to have placed his political programme clearly before the electors. With all due respect to him, he said nothing that was new, and little that was true. He has trodden the same old weary round of oratorical platitudes. He has poured out the old wild and sweeping assertions, in which he said in his wrath that all men opposed to him were liars. Himself an inherent autocrat of the worst type, he has assumed a coat of brummagem democracy to tickle the ears of the groundlings, and to catch the suffrages of those who mistake license for liberty—the rule of a mob for the true democratic authority of a people. All this does not require comment, nor do the numerous plans devised by Sir George for the regeneration of New Zealand demand attention, since he has pinned his faith on one, that one being separation. After all his rhodomontade, and all his hyperbole, he has come down to the programme which, as we have all along said, will be the watchword of the Opposition at the next elections. We were quite prepared for this, and it seems perfectly superfluous for Sir George to have gushed to the extent he did last night, when in reality he might have admitted that all his talk about resistance to abolition, and constituting Auckland a pleasant little republic, was mere nonsense, and that he, like other Superintendents, was simply going in for separation. We are only curious on one point in Sir George’s speech, and that is to find the leading men in Wellington who he asserted are prepared to support him. Not a candidate in this province but has pronounced against separation, and not a leading man that we know of has spoken in its favor.