Tuapeka Times. AND GOLDFIELDS REPORTER AND ADVERTISER. SATURDAY, JUNE 22, 1895. " MEASURES, NOT MEN."

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 4251, 22 June 1895, Page 2

Tuapeka Times. AND GOLDFIELDS REPORTER AND ADVERTISER. SATURDAY, JUNE 22, 1895. " MEASURES, NOT MEN."

Nobody nowadays, W9 should say, attaches much importance to a Governor's Speech. Such a document should ba, and at one time was, a plain/ brief, and uncolor«d statement of policy. It has now become an eulogium, a laudatory dissertation on Ministerial measures and actions, past, present, and to come. The Governor's Speech of Thursday is even more. Its statements are nob literal. It also repeats statements that are largely controversial in character — statements the accuracy of which had been already contested and form now the basis of wide political differences. It may be a matter of opinion as to whether the depression began to pass away at the end of autumn, though the evidence at present before the country does not favor the authenticity of the statement. At all events, it is a perfectly harmless declaration, and its repetition by the Governor at the Ministerial instigation is entirely inconsequential even though incorrect. Of quite another texture is the declaration that the state of the public finances afford ground for unmixed national satisfaction, or that the public accounts show a surplus of a thoroughly sound kind, " able to challenge any honest and reasonable criticism." These are plainly the expressions of a partisan and an advocate rather than the guarded and unbiassed statement of a man who by virtue of his position knows nothing of parties, of political controversy, and consequently of the questions on which he is made to discourse with such an appearance of faith in their actual and absolute reality. Of course it is so merely in form and appearance ; but even the appearance should he wanting and the semblance of gubernatorial authority should manifestly be withheld on questions of such a direct and intensely controversial nature. The argument on the question of surplus of revenue over expenditure is in this colony an interminable process. It never reaches a definite or decisive point. Like Tennyson's brook, it promises to go on for ever. The subject affords material in inexhaustible store for discussion of an entirely barren, unprofitable, and indecisive nature. It is simply a case of Ministerial assertion against the reiterated denials of the Opposition, and the public are by turns at the mercy of both. Such are the financial shifts and stratagems of each succeeding Government that it probably would not do to introduce a system of keeping the public accounts that the public could understand and that would not on occasions permit of what is known as jerrymandering and jugglery. The paragraph in the Speech referring to the disappointment of settlers whose applications for loans "have not received that consideration which their merits deserve " is clearly intended to avoid whatever unpopularity, present or prospective, may attach to the administration of the Lending Department. To throw the responsibility on the shoulders of officials may seem a convenient way of getting rid of a delicate and an embarrassing question. No one will, however, believe that the Lending Department is not amenable to the control and authority of the Government. There are too many instances on record of Mr Seddon's autocratic temper in his treatment of subordinates to allow the public to believe that he would permit the officials of a department to set up a separate authority or an independent kingdom. Probably the truth is that the loan money which should be at the disposal of the department is required to create that " surplus of- revenue over expenditure," of which we are assured in the Speech. If so, it is easy to understand the delicacy of the position and the necessity of resort to evasion.