THE SUPERINTENDENCE.—AN ANGRY EPISTLE.

Colonist, Volume VIII, Issue 770, 10 March 1865, Page 4

THE SUPERINTENDENCE.—AN ANGRY EPISTLE.

Perhaps one of the strongest proofs of Mr. Barnicoat's unfitness for the office of Superintendent is to be found in the following letter:— To the Editor of The Colonist. Sib, —You have suffered the writer of the leading article in Tuesday's Colonist to revert to that style of composition which has before rendered infamous the paper which you now edit. What right has he, or any man, to tax me with avowing a policy which I secretly dislike for the purpose of securing votes ? The public will judge fairly between us, whether ho or I may be the more capable of conduct such as this. This very base insinuation is founded on the assumption that my opinions, as avowed the other day at the hustings, conflict with those I formerly entertained. I deny the premises; but even granting the premises the deduction is false. I have before had occasion to remind the writer (who ought to be well aware of the fact) that an indictment should be specific, and must not consist of mere vague declamatory accusation. The primary accusation against ma is that of having altered my opinion. Let him bring proof, and contrast my past words with those just uttered. When, where, and in what words have I expressed views totally opposed to those professed the other day ? I am accused by him of voting against the late Superintendent's policy on all occasions of vital importance to the province. Let the writer of Tuesday's article give me the volume and page of the Blue Book in which a few of these votes are recorded.

Among the vast cloud of general charges (thus studiously put in an unanswerable shape), the only one that at all assumes a definite outline, is that of having voted for a loan for the formation of a railway in 1863, whereas I now say " nothing about a railway, and advocate dray roads, horse roads, &c." In the first place it is now useless to talk of railroads ; the question has (perhaps happily) been sealed for us. In the second place I always felt and expressed extreme doubt and hesitation as to the advisability of constructing a railway into the interior, and the evidence before the Council was by no means of a character to settle that doubt either way. The question before the Council on the 30th July, 1863, did not settle the question of construction or non-construction of a railway, but whether or not "the Superintendent be requested to apply to the General Government for permission to raise a loan." Several delays must necessarily intervene between such permission being granted, and the actual borrowing of money; and for my part I required more time and more evidence on the very momentous question of the construction of a railway into the iuterior. I have since seen that interior, and am in greatly better position to form an accurate judgment. The plain fact is that in July 30, 1863, I bad the greatest difficulty in mating up my mind on this perplexing question, (a difficulty never felt by those who only see one side of a question) voting, however, in the mean time, for requesting to be permitted to raise a loan, and on March 3, 18G5, I said nothing whatever on the subject; and this is the contradiction I am called on to explain.

To tell the plain truth I should not be very eager to clear myself from a charge of having changed my opinion as regards the relative desirability of railways and dray roads in this country. The charge of change of opinion on a difficult subject of this sort, without experience to guide us, is one of no great gravity. " I have yielded," says Hugh Miller, "to evidence which I found it imposible to resist, and such in this matter has been my inconsistency; an inconsistency of which the world has furnished an example in all ages, and will I trust, in its onward progress continue to furnish many more."

The foul logic of your Tuesday's writer amounts to this —Mr. Barnicoat has now expressed opinions conflicting with his former ones ; therefore it is a * pretended change on his part with the view of securing votes. Q.E.D, I deny both proposition aud corollary. The change has yet to be prove.'], and even if proved, amounts to little, unless the following rule be applied; a rule which few will avow as their own : — " Of all conceivable motives for a given act attribute the basest to your antagonist as the actuating one." The assertions of the writer of the article on which I am commenting are utterly false and unfounded on the subject of the offer of the Provincial Secretaryship to myself by the late Mr.' Robinson —one of the instances brought forward by me to show that I shared largely in the confidence of that gonttoman. In this statement I am i-harged with " inaccuracy on a matter of factT'- " The office of Provincial Secretary, in itself, was never really offered to Mr. Barnicoat, and even if it had been would certainly not have been accepted, as no salary whatever would have been attached to that office." The writer then goe9 on to Bay that Mr. Robinson recommended me for the post of Land Commissioner, to which was usually attached that of Provincial Secretary, and that in this sense the latter office might have been offered to me. I assert on my honor (and I am sure that all who read this will believe me, and not the writer whose falsehood I am exposing,) that Mr. Sobinson did make me a distinct and separate offer of the Provincial Secretaryship, after the Crown Lands Commissionership had been filled, and that he proposed £300 a year as the salary of that office ; the same salary in fact as had been attached to that office when held by Dr. Muller, the Commissionership being held by Mr. Domett. The writer of this scurrilous article thus accuses me of putting forward a garnished and illfounded statement, which a little enquiry will now show him to have been a plain literal statement of facts. He certainly is not lucky. I wonder whether he will have the grace and candour to retract or apologise ? I may,say in addition, that having taken a day or two to consider the offer just named, for reasons that need not now be entered into, I declined to accept it.

I am, &c,

J. W. BARNICOAT. The selection of epithets is certainly choice— "Infamous," "false," "base," "foul," "scurrilous," "falsehood," are pretty well in their way, from one who, a week ago, expressed himself so desirous of supporting the cause of decorum. Mr. Barnicoat's assumptions are nearly as amusing, as his logic with a single exception is self-convicting. That exception is one to which we shall hereafter refer. Meanwhile we must correct the notion with which Mr. Barnicoat opens his letter and which runs through each of the paragraphs. He affirms, although he does not mention the name, that Mr. Saunders is the writer of the article of which he complains. In this he is lamentably in error. We are indebted to no man for our " thunder," but prefer invariably to manufacture the article ourselves. Mr. Barnicoat's guesses are as weak as his language is the reverse. "Whatever we may think of the terseness of statement and style of argument which mark the speech and writing of Mr. Saunders, we can assure Mr. Barnicoat, that neither from him nor from any other man do we require any outdoor assistance of the kind. We can, however, excuse Mr. Barnicoat's error in this respect, partly because in forming the entirely mistaken assumption, he was allured to it by the thought of enjoying an opportunity of saying some of his very strong things about his political opponent, and partly because, knowing but little of the practical business, amateur editors who were esteemed mainly as " fine and rotund writers" have been almost the invariable rule in Nelson until within the past two years, and they generally required much and varied outside aid. And now to the business of Mr. Barnicoat's letter, which for the sake of perspicacity, we shall treat under separate heads:— I. —THE PEOTmCIAL SECBETABYSHIP. Mr. Barnicoat asserts "on his honor" that the Provincial Secretaryship by itself, and after the Crown Lands Commissionership was filled up, was offered to him by the late Superintendent. This of course is

final, and we must acknowledge our error, and offer Mr. Barnicoat such apology as is necessary in the circumstances. Having done this we must say that Mr. Barnicoat's letter is the first intimation we have of the Provincial Secretaryship having thus been offered as a separate office; and our reasons for understanding Mr. Barnicoat's statement in his speech to mean really that it was offered to him as connected with the post of Commissioner of Crown Lands, had better be stated here. In the first place we had, within the last two years, heard from the lips of Mr. Eobinson the story of Mr. Domett's uncourteous appointment as Land Commissioner of a gentlemen different from the one recommended by the Superintendent, who had, as we said, selected Mr. Barnicoat. This was done under circumstances which

were referred to in the Council in 1563, and formed the subject of a correspondence in these columns, to which, for the sake of the present occupant of the office, who was one of the correspondents, we do not desire more particularly to allude. There had never been any resolution of the Council to recreate the office of Secretary, as apart from that of Crown Lands Commissioner, and the doing so after having conjoined these two offices, in order to save needless expense, (as one man could easily, and in office hours, do at least double or treble the actual amount of work required by both,) would only have been warrantable under circumstances which threatened to obstruct the working of the G-overnment. It might be urged further in extenuation of our assertion that, at the time of making the proposal to Mr. Barnicoat, (which must have been essentially a contingent one depending on the will of the Council,) the office really did not exist as a separate appointment; and the chances were that the Council would refuse to sanction an outlay of £700 a-year for services which, so far as their extent is concerned, are exceedingly well paid at £400. Speaking strictly and literally, therefore, the Superintendent could not offer that which did not exist.

On making the enquiry which Mr. Barnieoat suggests to the " wrong man" to make, we now learn, not in corroboration of Mr. Barricoat's statement, for that is unnecessary, but in supplement thereto, that, though not formally resolved in the Executive, Mr. BobinBon did propose to separate the offices, in order to be free from an official forced upon him, and who was at the time the acknowledged editor of a print which incessantly assailed Mr. Eobinson and his Executive; and which now does its public duty by maintaining a too discreet silence on a question of such great importance as the choice of a chief magistrate. Well, the proposal was made to Mr. Barnieoat, and refused by him for reasons which he thinks " need not now be entered into." We now know that the reason was not that no salary was attached, because Mr. Barnieoat tells us that £300 a-year was proposed (to be of course sanctioned or rejected by the Council) ; but if Mr. Barnieoat will " ransack his memory," he may remember that he stated his reasons for refusing, to be that, tight times were coming for the province, and that when money grew scarce, the Provincial Secretaryship would be the first office to be struck out of the estimates, and therefoi'e he very sagaciously preferred to adhere to the certainty of the Spealicrsb-ip, rather than choose the other ofßco with such a precarious jirospeck of continuation.

We must be permitted to say, however, that even the fact of the offer having been made to him does not prove, as Mr. Barnicoat intended it to do, that he " shared largely in the confidence" of the late Superintendent. Personally, we know better; and our knowledge is from the best source, although that now is silent for ever. It proved undoubtedly that Mr. Robinson had less objection to Mr. Barnicoat than to Mr. Richmond; but it did not prove that he reposed "large confidence" in the former: We repeat, without fear of contradiction, that such was not the fact. It was this statement of Mr. Barnicoat's, to which, for the best possible reasons, we took exception, and we were perfectly justified in concluding that the statement was made with the intention of securing the aid of some of Mr. Robinson's supporters. Without question Mr. Barnicoat may have believed what he stated, but such belief does not alter the fact. II. —MR. BARNICOAT's VOTES. With much astuteness Mr. Barnicoat challenges us to give the volume and page of the Blue Book in which a few of his votes appear adverse to Mr. Robinson's Government. He knows very well how he is sheltered from a scrutiny of this kind by the fact of his being Speaker of the House. His opinions never appear on the votes and proceedings, unless the House is in Committee, and then but rarely on the occasion of a division. The only case where, in our experience, we witnessed this opposition given expressionto in a vote was in the railway debate, to which we have referred, and of which we shall presently speak. But a man is known by the company he keeps; and when we find on Mr. Barnicoat's requisition the names of Mr. Oswald Curtis, and several other gentlemen, who, in the Council, brought forward and, by a majority of one, carried a most futile address to Governor Gore Browne, praying his Excellency to dissolve the Council and dismiss the late Superintendent, and in plain terms accusing him of wilful misrepresentation—when, moreover, we know that Mr. Barnicoat, although his vote does not appear, stood by consenting to this indignity and mean-souled action—when we know that the opinions of those people respecting the deceased Superintendent's government have not changed,— are we wrong in inferring that, while he is the representative of men holding these opinions, Mr. Barnicoat does not, and cannot, represent the safe policy of sound aud moderate progress which he last week lauded, but which the main body of his supporters detest? 111. MB. BARNICOAT'S EAILWAT VOTE. Mr. Barnicoat must have allowed his anger to run away with his judgment when he penned the second and third paragraphs of his epistle. We believe we ought to know as fully as any man in Nelson, all the facts, returns, reports, and speeches on the railway scheme. We heard and made notes of all the speeches in the Council debates, read and epitomised all the evidence, and dissected the whole body of

facts which were brought to bear on the case. Not many months before we had been concerned in the getting up of a railway line, now completed, in a provincial district at home ; had been deep in the statistics of the country to be passed through, its produce, population, and resources; and had seen and analysed all the financial calculations and the probable traffic returns of the new scheme. We therefore went into the discussion of the Western Ranges folly not without some business knowledge, and we repeat what we said then, that a more gigantic absurdity was never seriously entertained by men who pretend to have ability to govern the destinies of a young country. Mr. Barnicoat does the very thing which he wrongously accused Mr. Saunders of doing with those Waste Lands Eesolutions of which, on reading to the electors. Mr. Barnicoat himself carefully omitted the concluding and telling portion. He says the question before the Council on 30th July, 1863, " did not settle the question of the construction or non-construction of a railway," but whether or not

" the Superintendent bo requested to apply to the General Government for permission to raise a loan." Now, this is simply not fair; we might use stronger language, but we prefer leaving that to Mr. Barnicoat's pen, whose aptness

thereat his letter shows. The resolution certainly asked permission to raise a loan; but it did a great deal more than that. There were four resolutions, of which Mr. Elliott was the proposer. The first expressed the opinion that " it was the incumbent duty of the Government at once to take efficient means to open the interior of the province by a road capable at all times of affording cheap communication with the port." The other resolutions were these:—

2. " That a railway would best fulfil these requirements."

3. " That a railroad should be made, with as little delay as possible, to the Plain of the Four Rivers in

the Central Buller." [This " Plain," which is really no plain at all, was afterwards, at the suggestion of Mr. Curtis, changed to the somewhat undefined spot

1 the Western Ranges," a chain of mountains ex;ending for about a couple of hundred miles! ]

4. " That the Superintendent be requested to apply to the Government of the Colony for permission to raise a loan of £300,000, to defray the cost op constbucting- a bailway, and other works essential to opening the country."

Is Mr. Barnieoat extremely reticent when it " suits him," or is he not ? Has he eyes, or does he suppose newspapers have no records or memories at their service ? The money was to be borrowed to make a railroad, to which he and those who voted with him unequivocally committed themselves; and there is an absence of ingenuousness in the endeavor to make it appear otherwise.

There was no need for Mr. Barnicoa!; to see the interior. Mr. Blackett and Mr. Burnett, perfectly competent surveyors, saw it, and reported on it. Business men gave evidence touching production. Common sense, and a little ([application of the simple rules of arithmetic would have sufficed to show the utter absurdity of the scheme ; and we affirm that the man who professes ability to fill the chief office of this province was bound to see that absurdity, and was bound to have a prevision of the disaster which the carrying out of such a scheme would inevitably have produced. Mr. Barnieoat informs us that in July, 1863, "ho had the greatest difficulty in making up his mind," that "he required more time and more evidence." If so, why did he vote at all, or commit himself to a project of which its strongest promoters are now thoroughly ashamed ? The rule is that the president of a deliberative body, when the votes are so close on a question so evenly balanced, shall avoid going in for any change, and vote for things remaining as they are, so as to allow time for further consideration and a subsequent trial of the question. Of course Mr. Barnieoat was in Committee, and not in his position as Speaker; but he must have known the anticipated result, for polls were carefully counted beforehand. Nay, more than this; there is no doubt whatever that this question was peculiarly a party one, and intended to form a trial of strength between the Government and the opposition. The votes prove this. In such circumstances, it is more seemly for an official like the Speaker to stand aloof from all such contests. Mr. Barnicoat's admission in his letter implies a vacillation, an infirmity of purpose, a seeming fear of consequences, a difficulty of deciding with that self-reliant action which is a necessary part of the nature of a man to whom the reins of Government may safely be intrusted. We have felt it necessary to be exhaustive on every point in Mr. Barnicoat's letter, except those where he wanders from the subject, and deals in strong, direct, and implied invective. We desire to be as decorous as possible in debate, and luckily we have no difficulty in maintaining a serenity of temper, which becomes all the more bland in proportion as our antagonist forgets his wisdom in his anger.