MELBOURNE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 3251, 8 July 1872, Page 2

MELBOURNE.

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(FROM OUR OWN W)JtKRSrO>']>KNT.)

Juno 29th.

We have had a warm time with the Ministerial elections. There were many circumstances which contributed to the interest and excitement these elections occasioned- Mr Duffy, in his minute t© the Governor, in which lie argued for & dissolution, claimed that whatever might; be the opinion of the Assembly, the bulk of the country was with him and his party. Lord Canterbury prudently replied that it would bo premature to asBume that till it had been tested, and refused the dissolution. When the incoming Ministers went to their constituents, therefore, every effort was put forth by their opponents to prevent their returoy so as to give an appearance of reality t» the "bogus" commanding public opinion which Mr Duffy declared had endorsed his policy- The first object was to hinder Ministers from »p aking. Accordingly, all the resources of blackguardism, and rowdyism were mustered and sentto the meetings convened by Ministers, for the purpose of causing disturbance and noise, and bo of smothering their utterances. This was a very prudent course for the friends of Mr Duffy to adopt. Ministers had some very ugly revelations to make regarding the various abuses of power on the part of the late Government, which, since they had assumed office, had come under their notice. The one side was as desirous to prevent; these communications as the other side was to publish them. The Dtiffyites are entitled to the credit of doing their best to silence Ministerial oratory, but all to no purpose. With more or less difficulty the fipeecheH were made. Each Minister contributed his quota to the exposure of the many flagrant act* of corruption hy which Mr Duffy tried to strengthen hi* weak hold on power, and the effect of these successive revelations on the P 1*]""; mind was very obvious. Many who liad given their support to Mr Duffy, believmff him to be a clever man who deserved ant opportunity which he had hitherto failed to obtain, and who was a sincere well■yrisher of his adopted country, now recoiled at the view of the disgraceful mesan* -which he had condescended to employ in. furtherance of his objecta. But a large number of porsona, who do not care much.

* for party polities, but who still de»ire to see the Government of the Colony administered with honesty, came forward to give their support to the men who had overthrown the Government that had resorted to these practices. Not only did Mr Duffy's friends and colleagues try to atop Ministers from speaking to their constituent*, they also attended the meetings of the Opposition candidate and made speeches in their behalf, endeavouring as well as they could to lessen the effect of the charges made against the late administration. These • charges v,i;n: manifold. There was the gross favouritism and icross political trickery in making appointments, and the BubHidixiug with public money a wretched rag called the Tiim-s and Mines at the rate of £7000 a year, in thy shape of payment for Government jidveru.u.ementn. There was the .«<;fUid;j,lous waste of money at the Crown Law department, where a barrister who w.uj afterwards made a ' County Court Judge was paid for doing the work of the incompetent dummies, Me-tHrH \V;tl).h and Spennicy, who held the position of A H?/rney-( JeneraJ and Solicitor(ieneral, and when; another protege of the Irish party vas paid upwards of £1000 in ;.\\;:u<;c U>r drafting bills that were never finished, and which in any ca;c would have been perfectly worihh-M. There was also the shameful mixuKiuagemcnt at the Land Oflice, when: Mr Grant took upon himself to remit in favour of a lot of wealthy squatters about £.120,000 of penalties which had accrued on their selections, from their not having made the required improvement;*. Regardless of this neglect ]Vlr Gi-.un, foiewerit the penalties and] ordered the Crown i;rant;i to issue. These ' and many more were amount the charges which have been urged against late by fche present .Mini.'st.era.

Another element of excitement was applied to the contest, by Dr Goold, Roman Catholic Bishop of Melbourne, who wrote a pastoral directed to the Catholics of the country, which was read on Bunday last from the altars of the various .Roman Catholic Churches. Dogmatic, insolent, bigot ted, and violent in its tone, this document directed the faithful to me their votes against a Ministry which was intending to introduce a godlwss system of education. Thin pious old gentleman, among a lot of statements for which "misrepresentation " is too weak a term, called upon his flock to resist this measure by their " electoral power, and also an the church had always done, " even t<> the losh of liberty and the .shedding of blood." There was a pretty firebrand thrown into the midst of a lot of explosive matcrhl. Here, if our Catholic fellow-citizens had been more numerous and less mindful of the obligations of law, would have been an clement of very serious danger. The publication of the document canned in the general community a huitimcnt of astonishment mixed with indignation. The indignation was riot limit <1 to (hone outside the Bi.shop'n own Church. I'jven among the better educated ;md more liberal-minded Catholics a feeling of disgust arose ;it ho impudent an attempt at dictation. Jt was very soon seen th;:t the I'i.shop had made a great mistake, and that this intemperate endeavour to introduce ecclesiastical bigotry and intolerance into the arena of politics had destroyed all chance of success for those whom the Bishop had sought to aid. Directly the Ministers had been denounced by the Church, their j prospects, always favourable, immensely improved, and the polling the other day gave them a majority of more than two to one over their opponents. This in a very gratifying result, or should be to all whatever their party differences may be. Our politics are Kufliciently violent now ■without any addition of the sulphurous ■element of Catholic: theology. It is well to see that the attempt to add this obnoxious ingredient met with ho decided a ■discomfiture.

Jt appears to mo, from what I see of the New Zealand papers, that it in the fashion of many of them i> attribute the rejection by this Colony of the DuffyVogel mail contract to political and party feelings. Lot me assure you that this is a mistaken view. The contract required ■nothing of this kwid to efl'ect its destruction, it was ridiculed to death directly its terms were made known. There was but one view taken of it, and in that all.shared, irrespective of party differences. And that was, the contract was an absurdly extravagant one, that it was monstrously disproportionate to any advantages that we could hope to derive from it, and that its ratification was out of the question. Now of course this may have been a curious opinion on our parts. But I can assure your readers that it is universal here, and that political or party purposes hay; nothing whatever to do with it. The Colony was willing to pay a reasonable price for a Californian mail service, but it believed that the sum fixed by Mr Duffy and Mr Vogel was a most unreasonable one. It was mortifying not only to Mr Duffy's friends, but to the Co'ony generally, that he proved so incompetent in the negotiation, and allowed himself to bo outwitted so completely by the shrewd gen'leman with whom he did business. But if Mr Duffy failed, .Mr Vogel also failed. Mr Duffy allowed himself to be overreached, but the overreacher taken no profit for the transaction. If Mr Vogel had been contented with equitable terms, the contract might now bo in force. He tried for too much, and lout everything.

The telegraph across the Continent may, in some sense, bo said to be opened ■ for business. That is to say, that the horse express to bridge over the gap in the line has been got to work, and on Tuesday last started with a lot of messages for despatch to England. We expect to receive messages from home by return of the express, in about a week. This seems to be bringing the completion of t\iu line very close, and indeed it will probably be finished in a couple of months. The authorities of South Australia and New South Wales took advantage of the opportunity to send home congratulations to the Imperial authorities ; but in this Colony there seems to have been no one to think of this except the members of the Shire Council of Avoca, an obscure mining town, "who with praiseworthy liberality spent about .£2O of the ratepayers' money in sending home a congratulatory message to the Lord Mayor of London, signed with nil their names. Imagine the astonishment of that functionary when he gets the despatch, and the strain to which his geographical knowledge will be pint in the endeavour to understand where it comes from. If the telegraph is getting on thus flourishingly, the overland railway project has met with a groat check. The Bill brought into Parliament to provide fcr the reservation of the land metwithagreasdeal of oj (position, and would almost certainly have been rejected on the second reading. However, it was doomed to collapse on a curious point. The question was raised by a member—whether the measure was not a private Bill, and subject to the regulations for bringing them before Parliament. The question was reserved for the Speaker to consider, and he, after some deliberation, gave his decision that 4he measure was a private BUL This

had the effect of bringing it under a rule which provides that the promoters of private Bills must deposit five per cent, of the amount of the proposed capital in the case of companies, in the hand* of the Clerk of the House. In the case of the Transcontinental Railway, 5 per cent on the immense capital would amount to the substantial deposit of £500,000, and as no one is prepared to lodge thin little sum, the vast project, with all of its advantages to South Australia and to humanity at large, may for the time bo looked upon as snuffed out.

A curious incident occurred the other day in the Sydney Parliament. There wan a person named Alfred Arthur O'Connor, once a resident of Melbourne, in the Speaker's gallery, and the fact becoming known to the Speaker (Mr Arnold) that official ordered Mr O'Connor out of the gallery. The reason that he alleged for this course was that O'Connor was brother to the hid who recently tried to frighten the Queen with a broken pistol. The Sydney people are apt at times to be taken with Jits of lunatic loyalty. Witness their condition when the Duke Edinburgh was shot, and the infamous

Treason-Felony Bill they passed soon afterward.}, and persisted in even after receiving it returned to them with a remonstrance from the Secretary of State. With people of that kind the news of the outrage on the Queen must have nearly reproduced a similar condition of feeling, and the knowledge of the fact that a man who was a brother of the half-witted boy who committed the act dared to enter the Chamber of Legislature, even only as a visitor, seemed like

audacious profanation

Jt appears that

t O'Connor is no relative of the boy, but even that fact scarcely lessens the enormity 'if the cise. At any rate, he bears

the same name, perhaps belongs to the same (jinx, and at the least certainly de-

rives his descent from the same country.

And so he was properly turned out. It does not seem that this piece of degrading flunkey-like injustice attracted much, or

indeed any, notice at Sydney.

We have just been shocked by reading of a murder of peculiarly brutal character

which occurred at liallarnt. Jt was the murder of an old woman named Ann Maxwell by her son Robert Maxwell. The son was drunk, as indeed it seeuiß

that he always was ; he was heard to he beating bin mother, as he often did. No one thought it necfMsary to interfere. In the wretched neighbourhood where it occurred such things om this happened often,

and were not much heeded. The brutal son having left his mother senseless and dying, went to a neighbouring place, and said j that he had " wanned the old I cow." A man saw the woman lying bleeding in a gutter, but thought that she was only drunk as ui-nial, and let her lie and p.'tssed on. Next day she was found dead, her body stopping the flow of the water in the channel. A woman living by he-ud the noise in the night and woke her htis- | band, but they thought that it was " only | the woman at the Chinaman's " near by being beaten, and that was so frequent an occurrence that they took no heed of it. The son who 'committed the murder was too drunk the first day of the inquest to be examined. The locality seemed to be inhabited by a class of the 1 west barbarians, the degraded savages of civilisation. It would form a splendid field for an enterprising missionary were it not that missionaries prefer the languid tropical atmosphere of the inlcs of the South Seas, and cotton plantations, and waving palm trees, to the foul reeking lanes of the low neighbourhoods of towns. And, when all is said, it is rather hard to blame them. There have been rather strange proceedings reported from neighbouring colonies lately in connexion with executions. In hanging a murderer in New South Wales recently tliey dragged his head from his body, and the latter fell headless to the ground. At about the same time a case of almost as horrible a character occurred in Queensland, but this time the corpse, although dreadfully mangled, was not quite decapitated. This is over energetic hanging, but on the other hand at Fiji, they hang too tenderly. We have just received the report of the case of a man named Franks, who was to be hanged for the murder of a man on board the schooner Marion. He was allowed to drop six feet, and then hang quietly for about a couple of minutes, when he began calling out for them either fco shoot him or cut him down. Either course, according to their preference —he was quite indifferent which. They have an evident leaning towards mercy in Fiji, for they cut him down. Not only that, but they reprieved him. If he dropped six feet and suffered no material injury, he must have a vertebne of uncommon toughness ; but even with that, he is likely to have a lively recollection of what Charles Lamb called " the inconvenience of being hanged " as long as he lives.