THE PREMIER'S "GREAT" SPEECH.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 360, 4 January 1879, Page 8

THE PREMIER'S "GREAT" SPEECH.

(From the New Zealand Times. OxTB. friends at the Thames are wise in their generation. They have got the measure of their distinguished representative exactly. He loves adulation, which is as the breath of the nostrils of the stump orator proper, and he requires that the men to whom he talks of equality and fraternity should first bow down and liok the very dust at his feet. He will do nothing without a "demonstration" of servility, and upon the occasion of turning the first sod of a railway from Grahamstown to Hamilton it would appear that the people of that borough did their best to please him. There were some wry faces naturally, but when a Prime Minister undertakes in the interest of his set the law at defiance, and to commence the work of expenditure upon a railway from both ends at once without the usual preliminary of even a detailed survey, not to speak of such trifles as plans and estimates, he may fee said to have deserved well of his constituents at least, whatever may he thought of his action outside the electoral district whose interest it is his duty to promote. On this branch of the subject we may have more to say hereafter For the present it is sufficient to note that, feaving first ascertained that their disfcin grnished representative would not visit them unless they received him as their titular lord and master, they did what they could to meet his exactions, and he rewarded them by blessing all their little Children, by " deftlv" turning the first eud of the Thames Valley railway at the foot of Mary-street, by eating at their pxjpeose, and by making no less than three speeches within a few Jfeours. The report of the proceedings, .given by all our Ministerial contemporaries, affords innumerable text for comment. At present we confine ourselves to the "great" speech in which he unbosomed himself to his constituents and gave them what he called, facetiously we presume, an " account of his steward- ** ship," and to that part mainly in which he gave a reason for the abandonment of the "great charter" of popular rights, the Electoral Bill, when he found that he Could not secure the dual Maori vote and the control of the elections in the Northern Island which he thereby hoped to obtain. The subject was difficult, and he approached it cautiously and in the roundabout mode which he knows so weM fcow to work. After expatiating upon the wickedness of the Canterbury run holders, and the wrongs which they inflicted upon all the little children in the colony by monopolising the public land, he luggod in a reference to his passage-of-arms with Mr. Rolleston in the House on the subject of the speech about the <c real <x ladies" that are to be found onW in the fcutnhlest of cottages, with which he had

tickled the ears of a few serious friends upon whom he dropped in at a small teameeting in Akaroa when he was there on his stumping tour. It is a curious instance of defective memory on the part <lf an honorable gentleman who, if there be truth in the old saw, has need of th« highest, power of that faculty, that he is reported to have told his constituents that he had used the words * c at a public a mppting, one of the largest, which he ** had attended." We gave this as a fair Specimen of the generally imaginative character of the "account" which Sir George Grey was pleased to render to his cringing constituents. After wading again through the Piako Swamp, after denouncing the man with forty-five votes in him. and after bestowing the customary vilification upon the Governor of the colony, Her Majesty's representative, and upon the Legislative Council. Sir George Grey is reported to have Baid : I will now spealr of the Electoral Bill, and mv onurinct in that matter has been a proon" rleal Impugned. You, yourselves, must j adee whether I was right or -not I am o • my trial, a* it wpre, before von. The SKIU that the Government brongh* in was a'l that we believer! we could carry. All nthe* I nolnts we thought WO might carry by the aid of our friends We were «<>Uged tn bring a Bi'l in without attempting to interfere with the plural voting. We felt certain that we conld »ot as a Ministry carry any attempt upon thatthrough the Honse We should have been defea'ed fcad we a'tempted to do it-, and we thought the measure wou'd be lo«t altogether Under such circumstances weconside r ed i best to get all we could. I felt certain in my own mind tha f . I would not hn allowed an appeal to the country if T asked for it. OftO of our friends brought in a proposal for doing uw y with plural voting, that is. 'hat each man should fc >ve one vote, and votes being the represent tives of human beings Mid not of acres of land. We ende*vnred to get that carried, but it wis los'. You are aware that T ara in favor of trienn al Parliaments and tlv Ministrv not having the power of dissolution •Iba wholeaffai' reason the caprice of the Governor (or the time ' eing—it was quite unce- tain, as one Governor mi' ht grant it and another refuse it. I Chousj t that if the people returned bad representatives, it was too ureat a punishment to have bad m»n returned f r five years. Snre'v it was re-isonaMe enough to ask that the time should be reduced to three years I was quite willing to submit to that test. I did my b-ist to get that measure passed, but ft was rejected. As you are all aware, the Constitution of the countrv gave the natives exactly tbc same right of voting ae the Europeans That ha« prevailed for some tima. Many yea's ago the LegialatuM3 said the great bulk of the natives resided in districts where them we-e no polling places, and it was eatd tbe>- had no franchise at nil. Therefore, they said, we will allow fou native members to be eleeted in and for thoee districts; and they elected four inem--fcer-s accordingly. I have no hesita'ion i saving, and no one will deny it, that in many instances when the Ministers were in danger they effected an escape by boding these four members well in hand. (I.anghter) Th* whole thing was an admirable devic••• They thought they would take even this weapon out fft ~t,-v-n.i-j: ' nt at all events, this ws a device wfcteh they were ready to use iu their own behalf. In

this Electoral Bill, the object of which was to give fresh ptivilege3 to every one of her Majesty's subjects iu New Zealand,—t at is, in effect, universal suffrage, —when it came to the tipper House, they struck out the p.'wer of voting altogether, except in respect of these four native members. They left those in. Then the Act went on to s«-y that all natives whose names were on the roll as ratepayers should have the power to vote for a memb r if i hey had paid their rates, and thatall Europeans who were ratepayers should have the pawer of voting, whether they paid their rates or not. (Laughter.) and some friends in the Legislative Council were determined not to submit to it. They put in these words, " Every male subject of her. Majesty in New Zealand, being twenty-one years of age. and not being a Maori, shall have a vote, and that left the House to the four native members. When the Legislative Council sent the Bill back to to U 3 in that way, seeing that they had interfered with our privi eges, I contended that a nominated body ought not to have interfered with the House of Representatives on a question as to how representatives'of the peopl in that House were elected. Clearly, the representatives of the people had a right to decide th t question themselves, and that those who were, not elected by the people at all ought to have had the delicacy not to have interfered with a question of the kind. The'efore. I said to myself, I now believe in the propriety of doing wav with plurality of voting; I believe in trienn'fll Parliaments; I believe it to be quite possible the Uppur House may want remodelling in some way. They have given us an excellent example of how thev will be prepared to act. and did not hesitate themselves to interfere with the privileges of the Lower House. I thought what is good for the goose is good for the gander—<"oud cheers and laughte). -and the ofore I had no objection to take the example from them. Nov, I conceive that the gauge has b ?en thrown down, and I determined therefore in my own m nd not to accept the amendment, so far as i was concerned,—the amendment made by the Legislative Council in the measure when they sent it b ick to us. I found that the majority of the House of Representatives agreed with me, and therefore I would not accept their amendment. I believe that the result will be that thi3 next year we will have an infinitely better Reform Bill, and that we will get it in time for the new elections. We shall see that the country is divided into fair representative districts—that there shall be no more pocket bo:oughs. (Chee's). . We have given the words in full as reported to the Ministerial papers, and we venture to say that a more politically dishonest and untruthful statement was never made by any public man in this Colony. The dissension in the Cabinet on the Electoral question, as indeed upon every other point of what they called their policy, was notorious and patent ; the only point upon which all were agreed was that they should stick to their places. When, after declaring that they would stand or fall by their policy as n whole, they were defeated, n 6 one doubted, not even the Premier, that a dissolution might have been obtained if it had been asked for. When the Electoral Bi'l was chucked into the waste paper basket by the Premier the Government were challenged to go to the country upon that, question, and to allow the people to decide whether Maoris all over the Colony—many of them hostile to us, ignorant of our laws as of our Constitution, who pay no taxes, and who have already a special representation in Parliament —should have superior electoral privileges to the Europeans. Ministers thought the " great charter" of less consequence than their places and wisely declined that challenge, for the very good reason that some of them would certainly not be returned to the House again, and that the tenure of the Treasury benches for those who might escape the ordeal of the hustings would bo extremely short in a new Parliament. If Sir Geokqs Grby had desired to tell his constituents what he knew to be true, these are the facts which he would have detailed to them. He might have added that the violation of the liberties of the people of the electoral district of the B,y of Islands had thoroughly alarmed the General Assembly and the public. But if he had told his constituents the truth he would most certainly not have received the vote of confidence which is said to have closed the proceedings of the " first sod" of the Thames Valley Railway.