SIR G. GREY'S LAST DANCE BEFORE THE FOOTLIGHTS.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VI, Issue 861, 12 August 1879, Page 2

SIR G. GREY'S LAST DANCE BEFORE THE FOOTLIGHTS.

The following commentary on the Premier's speech, after the adverse division on Tuesday evening, is from the New Zealand Times : — It is strange, indeed, how he, who seems by his talents and acquirements to be eminently a leader of men, dashes all his opportunities by his moral obliquity and his graceless disposition. He gets one of the least considerable of his followers to move a silly amendment, and his own particular parasite to talk against time, m order that he might have one more dance before the footlights^ And what a dance it was — an exploded cracker — a stale fish— -a monotonous < reiteration of all the slanders and misrepresentations with which he has bored and scandalised the country for the last two years. This was obviously the speech which he had prepared for the Arcade last week, but which the mob would not let him deliver. We will not discuss it m any detail now, but shall take another occasion to point out such of its fallacies and absurdities as seem to us to need exposure. We will only say that it was a speech entirely unworthy of one m his position, entirely unworthy of the conditions under which it was made, entirely unworthy of anybody claiming to be a statesman. And how fiat it fell ! The rounded oeriods, the sonorous declamation, the pathetic illustrations, the indignant remonstrances, all went for nothing. Nobody cared a straw for it all. ■ The feeling that the speaker was void of the sentiment of truth, and that the speech itself was a violation of decency, prevailed over every other. There he stood, an old man, with the shadow of a great name, occupying the last moments of his tenure of office by falsifying the history and vilifying the institutions of his country, and by uttering every mean and spiteful thing that a little mind could conceive. Even his followers must have felt ashamed of him. He himself, indeed, seemed depressed by a sense of his own shamelessness, and towards the end of his speech he almost dropped altogether that eloquence which is natural to him. He got very angry when some of his hearers were unable to repress their laughter, but really they were not to blame. The most merciful way to treat such a tirade is to laugh at it. If we do not consider it ridiculous, we must consider it very wicked. After all, what was the result of it ? When it was over, and the amendment was put, the Government dared not divide the House. Had they done so, we venture to say that Sir George Grey's speech woujd have been found to have increased the majority against him by a considerable number of votes.