THE PREMIER AS PROVIDENCE:

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 11662, 22 January 1902, Page 4

THE PREMIER AS PROVIDENCE:

("Evening Post.") As was only t:. be expected under our present one-mau system of Government, Air Hall-Joi.es ■and his subordinates are to bear the whole brunt of popular indignation at the wholesale dismissal of men from the public works of the colony. Tliev were set to do tile unpleasant work which might possibly have brought unpopularity upon the performers. When the unpopularity came the Premier, who claimed to have been ignorant of what had been done, promised to redress all wrongs and see that things were better mar.aged in future. -He has apparently been having some of the woikers reinstated, and generally posing as the country's Providence, whose task it is to set right what his subordinates have done -wrong. He is very clever, is Mr Seddon, far too clever for colleagues of the Hull-Jones type, and the view he wished the co-operative workers and settlers to take has. to judge from the letter written bv Mr R. E. Hornblow to him, been taken by them. The Minister for Public Works is, of course, to blame for all the errors committed, while the Premier is to have all the praise for the reversal of those errors. Car: observant people living here at the centre of Government believe for a moment that the meek and mild Minister for Public Works, whom we so often see aboutour streets, could have dreamt of wreaking all this havoc among co-operative labourers and settlers on his own account, and without definite ordeis from his autocratic chief? Is it not that Mr Seddon is now undoing his own- work because of the popular -outcry which he has had the adroitness to turn •from himself and his Government as a- whole against the Public Works Department ? This pretty little pantomime of Providence Seddon stepping down from the machine to unravel tlie complications created by Sublieutenant Hall-Jones may look well from distant Mangaweka, but the paint and the make-up are too much in evidence from the stalls in Wellington.