THE CHAIRMAN AND THE HEADMASTER.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXXI, Issue 12124, 22 March 1907, Page 4

THE CHAIRMAN AND THE HEADMASTER.

The last clause of Mr Aitken's letter merits being treated separately. He writes as follows: "Do the Board consider that it is right and fair that the chairman of the Board should attack me in the correspondence columns of a newspaper, knowing full well that the regulations of the Board prohibit me from dealing with him in the same manner?" The only comment made upon this came from the chairman: "With regard to the last sentence, the trouble was that it was the other way about. ... A letter of Mr Aitken's, attacking me, appeared in the 'Herald' first, and I merely replied to it." Now, we have looked through Mr Aitken's letter, which appeared in our columns on February 9th, and we fail to find the smallest reference to Mr Pirani in any form or shape. How he can say, therefore, that his letter of February 12th was called forth by an attack upon him is for him to explain. But passing over this letter, how does Mr Pirani account for his letter of 26th February, which, while ostensibly a reply to our article on the District High School question, which appeared on February 22nd, was in reality from beginning te end a veiled attack upon the bona fides of the headmaster? It is possible that Mr Pirani's first letter may be looked upon in the light of a defence of the Board's policy. The same cannot be said of his second, and his coment on the last sentence of Mr Aitken 'B letter is to our mind disingenuous in the extreme.' For the chairman of the Board to write as he did on February 26th, knowing that Mr Aitken^ could not reply to him without breaking the Board's regulations, was a course which cannot be defended on any principle of fairness, and we wonder that the Board did not express themselves plainly on the subject.