MR HENRY FELDWICK, M.H.R.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1108, 22 May 1883, Page 1

MR HENRY FELDWICK, M.H.R.

The following scathing article on Mr Feldwick appeared in the Mataura Ensign: —" Few men have less to say, and say it worse than Mr Feld fvick. In him silence is golden. We know of no speaker in whom brevity would be more readily excused. He either labors to express an empty nothing, or if he has a thought in view it is anticipated by the hoarers some minutes before he gets to it. He extracts his sentences from the pit of his stomach, and in dragging them round an angular bone in his throat he breaks them sadly and has to sort the pieces. The process is like picking a stubborn cork out of the neck of a bottle, bit by bit, and having, when we have done, the cork for our pains. Yet Mr Feldwick was elected in protest against a ' silent member !' Would that he had that redeeming virtue ! He is an Englishman, he says he's a Protestant, and we know he's an officer in Her Majesty's forces. For these weighty reasons he drinks the health of the Pope before that of his Queen. He is so attached to Southland that he promised to live in Geraldinc rather than be out of Parliament. But he saved his character by explaining that he only wanted to gull Geraldine into electing him so that he might represent Invercargill. He is of opinion that Parliament and the country lost nothing by the rejection of such men as Fox, Kichardson, Ormond, Seymour, Wakefield, and Saunders in favor of a set of fellows never heard cf before or since. Mr Feldwick also thinks that our schools are being dragged down to one ' common mediocre level'for want of 'competition.' State school teachers have no inducements to compete with private schools. That's true. It is a piece of originality worthy of a man that a nation should keep a second army, under private control, to afford competition for the first; that a storekeeper should run a shop, in opposition to himself, to make his servants sharp ; and that there is no emulation and 'inducement among teachers and schools now. Mr Feldwick also argues that the House of which he is a member is better than the one of which he was not a member, from the fact that in its first session it did more work than had ever been done in a session before. That's true too. It did more work than Sir George Grey did in all his sessions. Perhaps he didn't like to say that they don't advertise as much as Grey, and that they don't build Supreme Courts opposite his sections.