MR SAUNDERS, M. H.R, ON MINISTER.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 2, Issue 607, 29 October 1880, Page 2

MR SAUNDERS, M. H.R, ON MINISTER.

His difkemes, huwovor, with Major Atkinson were not small. He was a good iicoiiuiitaiil, and could both understand and talk figures. He wa9 naturally quite at home amongst the Government, and he kept ll.e House fairly well informed as tu the financial coudi'tion of th,e country. Ho wai a straightforward ] blunt man, mure given, to hard blows than coinpliingt'U, but he could also imitate \ugel in getting up fictitious systems of finance and schemes that bewildered common persons/such as his proposed rate on Crown land and Maori land, by which he hoped to keep up a revenue for his pet Taranak.i, at the of the Si,uth Island, Considering the position he had so lone occupied, he either was or pretended to be exceedingly uninformed on questions of political economy, and on the state of the South Island. He acts like a man who haa never gone out of a Government office, and seems to expect that he has nothing to do, hut to put on taxes enough, and an ample revenue must follow, h the Premier, John Hall, they had a man of g.jod all-round ability,-and one who was. assiduous to a fault. Nothing would be lost lo the colony that he could prevent by perpetual attention, as he was a man committed t, New Zealand an /.not a Vogel. seeking to suck the orange and then throw it away. His great fault was that he wasted his energy too much on small details that could be attended to by inferiors, and interfered too little with the main feature? of policy originated by his lQ*rvlj#> colleagues, the fiflajwial proposals of his treasurer, much had to be dropped, and the extreme feebleness of the Public Worki Statement of the Minister for Public Works, which "ailed even to utilise the material brought to his, hand by the Civil Swipe and, Railway Commission, were strong proofs of this, Mr Bryoe was a man of fgeole health, and no great pretensions, but a. man whose veraoity was doubted by no one. In their old friend William Rolleston they had a long and well-tried public man, who had long stood before them in a very strong light, and still stands there with very clean hands. He was perhaps rather too original, and .would make more mwtakes^tha'n, aVman?Jwho jVbuld:

really" belonged jo other parsori,'. and far too prone, to sacrifice that purnon of the Colony in which he had himself the greatest' persona! interest. Mr Oliver was not strong enough for the very hard ii place he was in, and was' effecting very f slowly, if at all, the reforms in his department which were so urgently demah- ? ded by the necessities of the country. His '% old friend Thomas Dick was an old Radical, whom ho had known and worked with twenty years ago. He was the very personification of honesty and straight-; -A forwardness, and a man who would lead ■'' in ways of common sense rather than in labyrinths of mystification, which were too often regarded as proofs of groatability. There was a great deal which was very good in the men themselves, and if they had not been half as good as they" are he would have been obliged to support them rather than run any risk of restoring such men as they had replaced.