THE WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 2009, 25 August 1892, Page 25

THE WEEK.

" Nunquam aliuS nttara, aliad saplentl* dlxtt."—Jovimi. " Good nature and good seme must ever join." —Fopx. The " constitutional question," as it is called, between the Governor and the A Party of Ministry mu3t perforce be Callers. taken seriously, as it involves highly debatable matters; otherwise it might be regarded merely as one of the devices to which Ministers have resorted in order to evade the constant pressure upon them from outside to make appointments to the Council. Sir Robert Stout, coming as usual to the re-cue of his befogged friends, says that had the Governor "acted constitutionally" the cal's to the Council would already have been made. It is very doubtful indeed whether they would have been made, whichever way the Governor had gone. It suits present circumstances far better to wrangle over them than to make them. ThS contention of Mr Ballance in his correspondence with the Governor is that a Ministry which is supremely blessed in the presidency of a Ballance has lights which a Government lacking that inestimable privilege could not pretend to. That is, as nearly as possible, the subbtaEca of the whole thing. The people of New Zealand are inferentially represented as the adoring vassals of the present Government —deprived of which, by any untoward chance, they (the people; feel that they would perish utterly. To the end that they nay not so perish, they are yearning and langaUhing—Mr Ballaioe'a argument im-

plies — for one of the oddest medicinal plasters ever prescribed — namely, a brannew set of Legislative Councillors, and plenty of them. And if constitutional practice and precedent should indicate that under piesent circumstances it is desirable that Ministers should give up place and pay for a few days — why, so much the worse for constitutional practice and precedent. They know their value to the colony too well for that — not to speak of the colony's value to them, which is more practical. So they pack off the despatches to London, as the University people do their examination papers ; and will probably — that is, if their hopes are realised — have to wait about as long for the result. Meanwhile they can air their injured innocence in public, and, what is more valuable, assure some four or five dozen expectant honourables that " it will be all right." It may be that the people are yearning for i more Lords — only, if so, it is singular how few ot them are conscious of the feeling. It may also be that the people grieve at the spectacle of their idolized Ballance being reminded of rules which were made for merely human Ministers, and which cannot be supposed to apply to anybody who has been clever enough to patent the use of " Liberalism " as a trade mark ; but here, too, it may be remarked that the public tribulation, if it exists, is uncommonly well borne. As a matter of fact, "could all hearts be known," as a recent temperance lecturer used to say, probably everybody, from Lord Glasgow downwards, would be found to be fairly well satisfied with " the constitutional question" as the published correspondence leaves it, except the four or five dozen estimable (but nor yet honourable) gentlemen above alluded to. It is much to be regretted that both the Speaker and the Chairman Ordor ! of Committees of the present House should have failed in the very qualities which are most required in an assembly elected under unusually bitter conditions of political strife. We gladly acknowledge in the case of both these officials that they do not stand convicted of exhibiting a partisan spirit in the discharge of their responsible duties. Perhaps, indeed, they would be less generally condemned (though as a matter of fact they would have, deserved a wider condemnation) had they adopted the principle of distributing the advantages in their gift among those whose party vote secured them their appointments, and reserving oppression and unfairness for people of the " wrong colour." That is the principle of the dominant political party nowadays, and had Mr Steward and Mr Rees followed it they might have reckoned at least upon the unreasoning support of a very large section of hon. members, whose arguments and backing would have influenced in their turn a considerable proportion of the community outside. As it is, the feeling is very general that the appointments by the present Ministry of the cnief officers of the House have turned out as unsatisfactorily as most of their other appointments. Mr ReeE' quarrel with Mr George Hutchison seems to have been an absurdity. The member for Waitotara, according to any possible reading of what he said, could not be deemed to have offended anybody, even if it had not afterwards been made perfectly clear that Mr Rees himself was responsible for the misunderstanding. Yet Mr Rees chose this one occasion, in which he was himself only technically to blame, and Mr Hutchison not at all so, to make an appeal to the Speaker to maintain order, and in this appeal itself, which he had no power to make except by command of the committee, he himaelf transgressed the very rules it was his business to enforce. We see this kind of thing in the case of weak-minded umpires in the field. " How's that 1 " queries the wicket-keeper after knocking off the bails when the batsman is a yard out of his ground. "Er — not out," says the umpire. Whereupon a prolonged siare and whistle reduces him to a state of nervousness such that next time the bails fly, when the batsman is obviously safe " home," he astounds the field by giving him " out," and is rewarded by a general gasp of utter amazement from both sides. It is characteristic of weak people to seize an ocsasion when they are hopelessly in the wrong to indulge in a stubbornness worthy of the holiest cause. As for the previous day' 3 performance on the part of the Speaker, we are quite at a loss to characterise it. As a northern contemporary very truly remarks, it does not matter a straw whether the members who complained had a grievance or not. But the spectacle of a Speaker pleading elaborately to the House that he " had no intention " of being deliberately partial, and permitting that plea to be "accepted" by anybody alive, is one which may perhaps be imagined, but is certainly belter not described. Mr Ward's penny po&tage did not come off, but he has done patient The aD (i excellent work in the Postmaster- matter of the cable charges, general. aDd is fairly entitled to set off his recent success against the former fiasco. Mr Ward's minor telegraphic reforms have been a trifle "wobbly," and even now can hardly be considered complete; but when this is said the wor3t has been said of a Ministerial career which has been marked by substantial excellence and signalised by more than one first-class reform. The entiy of New Zealand into the Postal Union was an event of which any Postmaster-general might be proud. Indeed, it might almost be added, were it not unparliamentary, that former Postmasters-general ought to have been ashamed of themselves for permitting it to be deferred so long. It should have been supplemented, and would have been if Mr Ward had had his way, by the establishment of colonial penny postage— the twopenny post for 20 miles being an irritating anomaly when we have a twopence-halfpenny one for 20,000. Again, in relation to this same subject, Mr Ward evinced a commendable superiority to the ordinary red-tape bonds when he not only recognised, but successfully attached and overcame, the one drawback whioh our entry into the Postal Union had entail 3d upon vs — namely, the increased postage upon weekly and monthly newspapers sent beyond the colony. The

ordinary official answer would have been to refer complainants to the rules of the Postal Union, and there it would have ended.

The purchase and equipment of the Terranora, and her successful enterprise in connection with the broken Cook Strait cables, were distinctly creditable to the Postmastergeneral ; indeed, he has hardly had his fair meed of praise In the matter. He risked a good deal in deciding to purchase the Bteauier, for had she proved a failnre he would not soon have heard the last of it. While his colleagues prate of "self-reliance" of a kind that excites nothing but derision, Mr Ward has here given us an instalment of the r€Bl article, and verj attractive it looks by the side of the shoddy one. His latest achievement is to arrive at a compromise by which, with the assistance of . a guarantee fund raised by merchants in the chief centres, the cost of cabling to and from Europe is reduced by more than half, and the charges between Australia and this colony are also cut down in even greater proportion. In this he has once more shown that he recognises the value of the utmost liberality in postal and telegraphic matters in this age, and is willing and able to work for their attainment. We are not aware whether the existing state of the law is adequate Thereafter? to deal with what, unfortunately, appears to be a growing necessity in connection with cases of gross cruelty to children by their natural guardians. Quite recently all England was horrified by the revelations in the case ot Mrs Montague, a wealthy lady belonging to the " upper circles," who tied her little daughter naked to the wall of a dark closet, and then went out for a walk, and, as she said — apparently thinking the hideous confession would be accepted as an excuse — " forgot all about her." The poor little mite was found dead in the dreadful solitude ; and it was given in evidence at the mother's trial that horrible cruelties had been the regular portion of all her children. She was sent to gaol for a year — it had better have been 10— and in the interval has given birth to another child, la what way does the law propose to protect the helpless children who must again call the convict "mother" when she emerges from her too brief restraint ? The other day at Blenheim a drunken doctor and his drunken wife were committed for trial on a charge of infernal cruelty to a mere infant — cruelty which, it is alleged on the part of the prosecution, was deliberately aimed at the unhappy babe's life. We cannot of course comment upon this case at its present stage ; but in such a case, does justice propose to punish a criminal, and yet deliver up bis innocent victim to his cruel will when he has technically expiated the infamies that are past ? The case of the Goodgames.man and wife, is another instance of the same kind. These wretches, who were convicted at Master ton the other day of subjecting the helpless daughter of one of them to a life of daily and nightly agony, and of adding to physical pain the degradation of nameless indignities, have been sent to gaol for a few months — there to be nurtured with far tenderer care than has ever fallen to the lot of the poor creature whose body and mind alike their brutality has nearly destroyed. When they come out — doubtless fat and healthy — their poor victim may perhaps be just recovering her strength under the unwonted ministrations of kindly neighbours. Who or what is to save her then from being dragged back into the hell of her former misery 1 These surely are questions which form themselves in the mind of every reader of these hateful chronicles of our time. Can nobody reassure the public — to say nothing of .the sufferers — on this pressing matter ? Is slow murder to be taken up a few months hence where it was left off — but quickened this time by the added impulse of cowardly revenge 1 Why should not the State, in addition to adequately punishing these villains, levy upon their possessions without stint, and thus endow their victims sufficiently to secure their separate maintenance? The view taken in these columns about female franchise is strongly She. supported by the present position of the matter, which is really remarkable, and seems to prove to conclusively that, as we have always said, the public has not thought about the matter seriously at all. As everyone is aware, this " reform " was passe 1 by a very large majority in the House of Representative?, and therefore it only remains for the Legislative Council to deal with it. The Council is understood to be pretty equally divided : it is a toss up, and "wcman"may come uppermost or go -under — nobody knows. The present position, therefore, ia that the extension of the franchise to the women of New Zealand — surely a momentous change, whether regarded from a friendly point of view or from a hostile one — will or will not be carried into effect, according as one or two members of tho Upper House (some of whom seem remarkably fond of claiming the recognised feminine prerogative of changing their minds on this feminine question) may happen to be in a positive or a negative frame of mind on the day the bill omes up. Now if this were a question of paiuh-pump politics, or even one of the so-culled " great Liberal " measures (many of which are much the same thing) one could understand the general indifference which is beiDg manifested in the case. But the bringing o£ women into the political fold, or den, if the expression is preferred, is a matter fraught with the very gravest consequences for weal or woe, and we maintain that if the people had ever really thought out the matter at all, they would not be now paying the slightest heed to nine-tenths of the other questions about which Parliament is bothering itself, but would be all in a tremor of excitement to know the day and hour when the Female Franchise clause is to come up for settlement. Instead of that the Electoral Bill has been kept for weeks at the bottom of the Order Paper, againsb all the promises of its author3 — and the remarkable thing is, that nobody has missed it ! The plain fact is, that while there is among a email section of women — and only that — a certain agitation for political rights, the great bulk of those upon whom the choice of responsible representatives has

hitherto exclusively devolved have hardly realised that the female suffrage business is seriously meant at all. Most of them, indeed, have pretty nearly forgotten that it is on its trial now, and may be decided one way or the other before the end of next week. The Government took it up, under pressure, with a very bad grace, and carried it with the aid of several votes which would have gone the other way if there hadn't been an Upper House. The Council, it may safely be predicted, will not be " stuffed " to carry the clause through, but the country has been stuffed all along, and if it had not been chloroformed into apathy before the operation it would be getting pretty •• full " of it now.

This is the day of fads, and the faddists everywhere are "off the Another chain," and doing a wild Boon. gambol to celebrate their

unaccustomed freedom and the unwonted toleration of their vagaries by sensible people. If we had to deal in one issue of The Week with half the rampant fads of the present hour, we should have to crowd out several pages of vastly more interesting matter. We have already dealt with one, and from among the other samples we select haphazard Sir George Grey's Elective Governor Bill. The reason "why we do so is to further illustrate the utter public indifference to most of the panaceas for all human ills which their political patentees are so industriously advertising just now. If lOOOiutelligent electors had been asked last week " Which of Sir George Grey's annual Regeneration and General Sancification Bills hasn't made its appearance this year 1 " we would almost guarantee that not a solitary one would have hit upon — simply because no one would have remembered the existtence of — the Elective Governors Bill. They might have thought of the lawyers and the lucifer matches, and half a score of others ; but the boon which, according to its anfchor, is going to " illuminate with the light of hope thousands of New Zealand homes now darkened and blighted by the curse of servitude to an emissary of Downing street " (or words to that effect) would not have been mentioned. Yet the House of Representatives very nearly carried it, as indeed it will very nearly — or even quite, which is worse — carry anything whatever nowadays which is sufficiently vague to enable a number of babbling philanthropists to ialk at large about it. As is happened, tho bill was rejected ; but it was purely chance that it was not carried, and the entire constitution of the country radically changed (supposing the so called " representatives of the people " who voted for it had had their way) behind the people's backp, without a solitary opinion having been expressed in the country one way or another, and with the spectacle to boot ot "Ministers of the Crown" jostling each other two into the Ayes lobby, one into the Noes, and the rest " anywhere, anywhere out of the House" to escape the responsibility of voting Aye or No, on a question where the Crown was most intimately concerned.

This is the Ministry, and this the majority, which represents itself to Lord Glasgow as "representing the country," and requiring all of the wrong colour to be either kicked out of their path or smothered by the votes of raw political partisans who may have never served the country in any capacity whatever fora single hour. His Excellency seemed to have a pretty fair appreciation of the value of these pretensions before. It will not have been impaired by the perusal of the debate and division on the Elective Governors Bill.