EDITORIAL NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXIII, Issue 7100, 7 February 1898, Page 1

EDITORIAL NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The man who invented the statement that the Government had offered Sir Robert Stout L3OOO a year for his support, has a fine imaginative faculty, though hia low instincts are unfathomable. We think he must belong to the Opposition, for the declaration is quite in their best style. With the Tory party there is nothing like money. Their very patriotism is the outgrowth of a greed of gain. They never engaged in a struggle yet, military or political, or social, that was not waged for the sake of pecuniary or territorial aggrandisement). The men who are being " bowled over" in India are victims of this greed. Those who reap the profit do not themselves fight; the nation pays others a few pence a day to do it, and when they are shot down, or hacked about by cold steel beyond recognition, and are turned into lumps of pitiful clay, they are called heroes, and those whom they have left behind find a sanctuary in the pooihouse. It is the same with the political slave. His occupation is unhealthy, his pay bad, and his motives are suspected and called in question. If Sir Robert Stoub were a Tory •who believed that almost any action would jbe justifiable so long as it resulted in gain, and if he had ever attempted _to bring such selfish principles into practice, the statement that he had been induced to resign by the promise of a reward might have seemed feasible. But Sir Robert Stout practices what he preaches. His political caieer has shown him to be absolutely incorruptible. With all his opportunities—which were all the greater and more numerous because he was universally trusted —he. has kept his reputation beyond reproach. His great abilities might have won for him a'competence in his declining years, had he kept clear of active politics. The man who dares to assert that so long and honorable and unselfish a career has been crowned by a bribe only brands himself with infamy. But the slander is twoedged. The Government are charged with being a party to a contemptibly dishonest transaction. They will outlive the aspersion. People now know that such things are not said because they are true, but because, as they may be believed by the baser and more ignorant sort of colonist, they are, from a Tory standpoint, worth launching against opponents which have resisted every other attack:. Honest politicians do nob gee their reward in this world, whatever they may get in the next.