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New Zealand Mail, Issue 242, 8 July 1876, Page 13

It is not worth while for the Wanganui people to be angry with Mr. Waterhouse. We all know what such statements as those he made touching their recent election mean. He had to say something against the Government, and as any bone will do with which to beat an offending dog, so any sort of charge must be laid hold of to discredit a political opponent. Major Atkinson told the electors of Wanganui that they would do well to elect Sir Junius Vogel as one of their members, and better still to elect him unopposed. And he simply spoke the truth. As Wendover did well to elect Burke and Edinburgh Macaulay, so Wanganui did well to elect Sir Julius Vogel. Electoral districts confer honor on themselves by honoring distinguished men. Of course, the public works of a constituency stand a better chance of being carried out when its representative is a man of ability, and not a blockhead. All this is sufficiently plain, and Mr. Waterhouse felt he could make little or nothing of it, reserving his strength of language, if not of logic, for a reference to what Mr. Finniriore said regarding Sir Julius Vogel’s power to serve the people of Wanganui. Mr. Finniriore is not now in the colony, and therefore we are precluded from saying what otherwise might be said with propriety regarding him. He wrote an absurd letter to the Wanganui Chronicle , pointing out a variety of impossible things that Sir Julius Vogel would do for Wanganui. The Wanganui people knew Mr. Finniriore, and simply laughed at the foolish exhibition he was making of himself. He is one of those irrepressible mortals who will write and talk, and must come to the front when writing and talking have to be done, but he was neither a devising nor deliberative head, nor a representative man in any sense, in the election, although it pleases Mr. Waterhouse to assume the contrary. The local Government party took Mr. Finniriore’s aid—such as it was—when offered to them, and the Provincialists would only have been too glad to do the same, if they had got the chance.

The above is a plain and unvarnished, statement of the whole matter. The Government had as much or as little to do with it as with any incident in the election of Sir George Grey or any othermember of the House. The Wanganui electors are as independent and incorruptible as any constituency in the country. The election of Sir Julius Vogel despite local influences and the old-identity spirit, is itself a proof of the fact. But Mr. Waterhouse’s action suggests what Mr. Bigelow would term a “ mild application.” Assuming for a moment that Mr. Finniriore had been a leading person on Sir Julius Vogel’s election committee, what then? Do men require a certificate from a churchwarden or an elder of the kirk before they are permitted to join any political confederacy? If so, it is so new as never before to have been heard of.