WANDERING MINISTERS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2105, 28 June 1894, Page 19

WANDERING MINISTERS.

A rather telling point was make by Captain Rassell ia tho course of his remarks upon the Governor's Speech, when he first called to mind the fact that tho Atkinson Government had been criticised by the then Opposition for leaving the Government of the colony to official?, and then proceeded to remark that now those critics had themselves come into power they had occupied themselves iv skylarking over the colony, leaving the administration in tho hands of the undersecretaries. Quite an outburst of laughter was evoked when the captain rather sarcastically added that no djubt the work was probably done much better by theee officials than by the Ministers themselves. Captain Russell was, however, never more serious than when he pointed out that it was absolutely futile for the Government to congratulate them upon the state of the country, when the value of products was never lower and the cry of the unemployed was never more unmistakable. A laugh again went round when he stated that some people thought him a Conservative because he was not a humbug. A PARALLEL. Most suggestive was the clever comparison which Captain Russell drew between the pomp and display of the Premier and that of the Roman prietors. At Wellington the Premier, he said, was attended by two secretaries, and when in the country by six, just as the prcefcors were followed in Rome by two lictors, and in the provinces by six. With an army of cooperative labourers, with greater privileges and doable the wages of private employees, answeriDg to the P/sefcorian Guard, Mr Seddon seemed on the way to claim and assume dictatorial honours, while the panem et circensis (tucker and the races as it may be freely translated) of the ancient Romans was paralleled in New Zealand to-day by Ministerial banquets and buffonery.