The Otago Witness, WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE SOUTHERN MERCURY. (THURSDAY, JULY 20, 1899.) THE WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 2368, 20 July 1899, Page 33

The Otago Witness, WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE SOUTHERN MERCURY. (THURSDAY, JULY 20, 1899.) THE WEEK.

" Xunqu»m aliad nitura, xhud sipienii* dlxit." — Juyizcal.

The omnipresence of Government canvassers touting ior names to The Latest * place on the electoral rolls Trick. is -a subject of remark everywhere. It is a new development in party electioneering, inasmuch as under the thin veil of public necessity — a necessity no member of the public that we have come across is inclined to recognise— party objects are promoted at the public expense. Our news this week contains an item which seems to imply" considerable disillusionment on the part? of at least one " Liberal" organisation as to the professional powers of Mr Organising-secretary Ed-, wards, and possibly the Premier has the same misgivings. At any rate, nobody pretends tfiat this new process of Mr Seddon is anything but an electioneering trick, which takes the particular form it does take in order that the Ministers now in power may be kept there with as little private expense as possible to the party. In other words, men and women of all parties are being compelled in this cunning way to pay the electioneering outgoings of one painty alone. That Parliament was never consulted over the matter, and has been taken by surprise with respect to this daring onslaught upon the Treasury for party purposes, is shown as effectuaily by the Ministerial reply to the questions asked in the House as by the fact of those questions themselves having to be put. The new development not only provides the Government with full party rolls at the cost, as we have said, of all parties, but it enables them to deal out a further bagful of those party rewards for party services for which there seems to be such an inexhaustible demand among the followers of the Government. Instances quoted in the House of the unblushing " selectiveness " of this new horde of Statepaid electioneering agents could readily be paralleled in Otago, where, however, we do not say. that there are not honourable exceptions. The people in the country districts especially are partly amused and partly irritated at the pestering that is going on, and rarely indeed is it that the man with the bag across his shoulder is not a prominent relic of the Government army in 1896. The pretence of disinterested concern for the political souls of people who are wicked enough to postpone their enrolment clashes with the facts and personalities of the case, and we suppose there never was less real difference of opinion on any minor point of" politics in the country than there is about the fact that the whole concern is merely a shifting of what ought to ba private party expenses upon the shoulders of a_ long-suf-fering public.

Mr Justice Edwards has again, after a lapse of some years, raised the

An Oltl question of compensation for Grievance. the losses he undoubtedly

suffered by deprivation of his office as a judge of the Supreme Court. Mr Edwards, it will be remembered, was selected by the Atkinson Government in 1890 for appointment as a commissioner to determine a large mass of difficult Native work which had got into arrear. It is not disputed that at the time he was carrying on a large and profitable business as a barrister and solicitor — in the words of his first petition to Parliament, now several years old, he was, in fact, then in " affluence." Mr Edwards took time to consider the offer, which, if we remember right, was not definitely proposed as a permanency, but which carried with it the same salary a? a puisne judgeship ; and in the end he refused it, as representing an unacceptable sacrifice of income. Here we may remark that what led to the original selection of Mr Edwards, and the subsequent resumption of negotiations with him after his refusal, is, and has always been, somewhat of a puzzle. Mr Edwards, as we have said, enjoyed a large practice, the confidence of a considerable number of clients, and an honourable reputation, and there was absolutely no reason why tht s Government should notselect him ; the difficulty has merely been to understand why they should. At any rate, he was, as we have said, offered the place, and refused it. Negotiations were subsequently received, and Mr Edwards offered to accept the commissionership provided that he was at the same time given the status, title, and (-alary of a Judge of tbe Supreme Court. After a good deal of hesitation, Ministers assented to these terms, and Mr Edwards disposed of his practice and entered upon his new duties, little thinking of tho hidden mine upon which he was innocently stepping.

Developments, however, were not long in arriving, and of a most unDevelopnieiits. pleasant kind. Upon the advice, as is generally understood, of a high legal authority who has since become Mr Ed'vards's colleague and superior on the bench, his appointment was challenged in the House by the leader of the Opposition (Mr Ballance) as illegal, on the ground that Parliament had not first voted a salary for a new judge. A tremendous political battle raged round this question and others, during which the Premier (Sir Harry Atkinson) was laid aside by serious illness. Owing, doubtless, in no small degree to this latter circumstance, a weak compromise was made between Ministers and the Opposition to secure the Government in power till after the then imminent dissolution, and one of its terms was the suspension of Mr Edwards's judicial functions (o.utside the Native Commissionership) until the re -assembling, of Parliament. The general election proved fatal to Minister?, and the new Government, after refusing to pay the salary any longer, set itself determinedly to clear the new judge out. After a Inna: exDerience between wind and

water, Mr Edwards was pronounced by a majority of the Court of Appeal to have been legally appointed. The Government doggedly refused to pay. his heavy costs or his salary, and a final appeal to the highest English Court (still at Mr Edwards's expense) resulted in his being unseated, and cast in costs. The results to the unfortunate appointee, who had been selected for a' most honourable post only to find himself the centre of- a fierce political scrimmage, to lose a fine business, and to be mulcted in enormous costs, may be dimly appreciated. Considering that from first to lasthe himself was not only absolutely blameless, but the actual choice of the Government for a great professional prize, his misfortunes were such as appealed powerfully to the public mind. In his own words, probably not seriously exaggerated, he had been reduced by the process Are have briefly described " from affluence to beggary." He was treated in the most relentless way by the Government which had engineered his downfall, a disposition naturally perhaps somewhat irritable not having tended to smoothe matters down behind the scenes while all the strenuous legal and political battles were going on. He petitioned Parliament for redress, and his petitions were carefully blocked out of consideration by the Ministry, whose victory at the Privy Council had been magnified into a great political triumph, and who were provided at the time with an overwhelming majority of subservient partisans. His case was almost universally recognised outside the House as one in which the colony must sooner or later give substantial redress, but within -the political ring it was hopeless. Mr Edwards set resolutely to work to get together the fragments of his shattered business, and did so in a way that was greatly to his honour. Changes in the Ministry, including the death of its leader, gradually paved the way for the sensational development of some years later, .when, there being a vacancy in the Supreme Court Bench, the new Premier bethought him of the man who had been politically crushed by him and his colleagues in the first flush of their new-found power, and restored Mr Edwards to the title and* dignities from which he had so disastrously fallen as the result of the judgment of their Ebrdships at Home.

Mr Edwards, after a long silence following upon his second appoint The Present ment, now returns to the Position. charge with a claim upon Parliament for £7000. Probably this new development is not unconnected with the state of his Honor's health, which has long been such as to give anxiety to his .friends. We cannot but regret that the matter has to be again dealt with, because a claim made upon the State, under virtually the same political auspices as in 1891, must probably lead to a good deal of raking up of the old acerbities and exciting of the old passions, and such a condition of things between a judge and.t he authorities is, on the face of it, undesirable. But we can hardly see our way to blame Mr Edwards for that. At the time of the original bitter controversy we repeatedly expressed the view that the honour of the colony required the ultimate payment of compensation to the displaced judge, whether the Government of that particular time consented to pay it or not : and though our judicial way- of stating things did not at the time meet with the approval of Mr Edwards himself (who wrote to our columns to complain, apparently, of the fact that we did not confine ourselves exclusively to enlarging upon his wrongs), we never admitted any half-heartedness in that view. We cannot say that we are now prepared to maintain that it has become obsolete through the fact of Mr Edwards having since become a judge after all. Take an extreme case — one admittedly a great exaggeration of Mr Edwards's, but still suggestive of it. Suppose that, on the now assured acquittal of Captain Dreyfus, the French Government proposes, • by way of settlement of all post wrongs, to simply reinstate him in his captaincy of artillery, and expect him to cry quits. What would be thought of such a proposition in the rest^ of the civilised world? It would be scouted as an infamy only second to the original one. Nd such fierce terms as tlie.se, of course, need •be applied to the much less tragic case of Judge Edwards ; yet is there not an analogous principle involved? We are all the more careful to do full justice to his Honor in this matter from the fact that it is an open secret that he has not the political friends to fight for him that he once had. It is permissible to praise or blame Mr Edwards in his special capacity as President of the Arbitration Court, and it is certain that in that capacity, marked as has been the ability he has displayed, he has given more satisfaction to his erstwhile persecutors than to those who in 1890-91 could not share their views. This, however, is merely a passing remark not bearing seriously upon the main point. We trust that Parliament will take the new petition seriously into consideration, and the debate upon it, if conducted as it cuight to be, should prove of a most interesting nature.

Mr Stratford, who appears among his other magist eri a 1 qualifications Some (which we believe are genuCouiparisonn. inely considerable) to have that curious tendency for fastening upon finnicking points of law which distinguishes many intelligent but mechanically-minded magistrates, went into elaborate analyses to justify the surprisingly small fines inflicted upon the latest of the Balclutha offenders. The question is whether, with all his elaboration, he did justify them. It certainly seems somewhat of an ungracious thing to find fault with a judge for an error (if it was an error) on the &ide of mercy ; but the human mind is inveterately a comparison-making machine., and comparisons in this case do not make for the soundness of Mr Stratford's arguments (which, we surmise, probably astonisiifd the delinquents quite as much as anybody else). Mr Stratford indulged in comparisons himself, but, in our opinion, if these meant anything they meant a reflection upon Mr Hawkins for the severity of his sentences of a year ago — sentences which the uublic judgment certainly did not con-

demn at the time as over severe. We cannot at all agree that if a person is convicted of a certain offence this year, and sins no more (or is found out no more) till next year, he should be immune from a more severe punishment when he is found, out. To make this point still more fair to Mr <stratford, we purposely leave out of consideration the actual proof in one case (a surmise that the offending was practically continuous, even without proof, would have been pretty well justified under the circumstances), that one. offence per year, did not cover the facts after all. If, however, Mr Stratford's reasoning is correct, a sly-grog dealer who can reckon on not being caught more than once a year (a fair average assumption in the trade, we believe) can make up his Schedule of prices in quite a mathematical way to ensure his profits. He knows that so much a year will go in fines — exactly what, for the purposes of due administration of the law, it is essential that he should not know. Mr Stratford will, perhaps bear that point in mind " nexttime " (we fear thei-e will always be " nexttimes" in Clutha under present arrangements), and he will also be expected to give some better reason than he has advanced for casting upon the country the cost of prosecuting offenders whose profits, it would seem from repeated experiences, can quite safely and fairly be requisitioned for such expenses. It is now said that Mr Stratford will be called upon to justify his fines. We have in that case a little " comparison " of our own to make, of special interest to him. We have upon our files, at a date where he was' formerly magistrate of an Otago district, the record of a case m which he fined a widow with a large, young family no less than £50 for a first offence of the same kind, and when public remonstrances were got up and the Government , asked him if a reduction could be recommended, sternly refused, in the spirit of a Rhadamanthine judge, to be a party to abating one jot, or tittle' of the law's demands. If the Government authorities happen to compare the records in the case we allude to with those at present in question, they will be interested in learning why the £50 fine upon a first offender in a poor and struggling way was a righteous act to be sternly enforced against every public remonstrance, while a penalty of barely more than half that amount fitted the case of an offender old at the game, previously convicted, and in a special and particular sense a deliberate violator of the law.

We are thoroughly glad of the verdict in the case" of the Exploration ComA pany v. Purser, which was Revision. decided in the Wellington

Supreme Court the other day in favour of the plaintiff company with £36,000 damages. This was the second trial of the case, and if ever the Jegal provision which enables a second trial to take place was justified it was so ' in this instance. The ground of the application for a second trial was that in Blenheim' (where the action arose) it was not* possible to secure a fair one at the hands of any jury that could be got together. The negative verdict in the first trial at Blenheim was certainly one which went far to impair the most profound belief in the jury system as a bulwark of British liberties. The Exploration Company was one of those concerns started at Home by syndicates to pick up any good thing that may be handy in the mining line. It corresponds to what in the mining localities themselves is called a prospecting syndicate, and it practically advertised itself as being open to offers. Obviously, such a concern as this stakes everything upon the character and capacity of the principal local representatives which it appoints. An astute syndicate, for instance, will — to use a notorious phrase now Historic — " embrace a Cabinet Minister." The Anglo-German one, for instance, "embraced " Mr Seddon, who returned its loving advances with such ardour that, according to some accounts, he clings to it yet, though he has himself given out vague hints of having bashfully released himself from its arms. The New Zealand Exploration Company putting out its amorous feelers apparently in. the dark, " embraced " no less a pair than Purser and Pielsticker, ho were anything but coy, but whose ideas of the sweet passion were of a strictly business, not to &ay mercenary character. They saw their naughty opportunity, and they used it with skill, responding playfully and softly to the " advances " of the wooer, but trafficking all the time with each other and with mutual friends upon the comfortable outcome of those useful " advances." By the time they had done with their ardent but sadly befooled lords and masters, these latter were " out " to the extent of thirty or forty thousand pounds — and a Blenheim jury practically said it served them right. Counsel for the plaintiffs were not the men, fortunately, tc take that kind of no for an answer. The matter was taken to an independent court, and has now resulted in a verdict for the Exploration Company for the full amount claimed. We are glad of it for the sake of the colony's name, which came .justly under a cloud in London so long as this infamous and daring series of swindles remained under condonation by a colonial jury. Though Pielsticker had made haste to disgorge before the verdict, what we should now like to know is whether the matter is to end with the civil decision. We venture to guess that Messrs Purser and Pielsticker are just now taking quite a considerable interest in that same little point.

Events in and around the Transvaal tend steadily to war — the war The which, if it comes off, will Cis-Vaal. se ttle the South African diffi-

culty for ever, and compel any Dutch malcontents in the Cape Colony itself to let us hear from them now, or else for 'ever after hold their peace. As time goes on the chance of a really satisfactory settlement in a peaceful way recedes perpetually, because factors and forces begin to declare themselves when the supreme issue is in the balance which w^re only vaguely recognisable while the Boer President was still hopeful that a policy of snuffle might give him his own way, and while Little Englanders were busy insisting that it was the very

policy we ought to welcome. li* looks as if we would have to ascertain in some definite and determined way what we are to make of Cape Colony. The question is ' seriously complicated by the fact that a Dutch Ministry (more or less) is in power there — a circumstance , which has already led to considerable feeling in South Africa, the Premier and one or two of his henchmen having laid themselves under serious suspicion by their obvious Boer sympathies. -There are fix persons in the Ministry at the Gape, and- four names among them are : Mr Schreiner, Premier ; Mr Saver, Minister for Public Works ; Mr Herholdt, Secretary for Agriculture ; Dr Te- Water, without portfolio. These names carry obvious significance at a crisis, like the present one. Mr Hofmeyei:, who is a better-knoAvn Afrikander leader than the Premier himself, has .been' using .language in public which would be allowed in no country but England ; and if the angry remonstrances already addressed by the British press to the High Commissioner continue to be called forth by such lapses of loyalty, we may- have to test the state of the case by arresting somebody, after the manner of Mr Kruger. Meanwhile English forces are steadily converging towards the Cape, munitions of war are on the seas, in thousands of tons, and the offspring of John Bull in more than one of the far colonies are polishing their unaccustomed swo::ds foia fight to a finish. . . ■