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Wellington Independent, Volume XXVI, Issue 3094, 5 January 1871, Page 2

Richmond is on the seas. — Eejected by Taranaki where he is best known ; unable to obtain a seat in the province in which he resides; he is anxious to make Wellington a refuge for his destitution, and he accepts a proposal from " John Plimmer" and his 250 electors to stand for Wellington, and to address a meeting of its citizens. The requisition is conspicuous in the absence from it of any pledge of support, and is, we must say, rather onesided. Mr Eichmond is to be put on his trial ; he is to be trotted out for the exhibition of his paces, and is to be his own auctioneer, and those at whose invitation he undertakes this gratuitous performance are to be quite unfettered on their own part, and are not required to pay beforehand the smallest coin of compliment or confidence. So significant an omission, and such a want of mutuality in the proposal would, we should have thought, be akin to an insult to a public man of Mr Eichmond's standing and experience ; but we suppose that his poverty, not his will, consents, and compels him " willingly" to accept the affront. When we reflect that Mr Eichmond has been ten or twelve years in the General Assembly, and has resided as a Minister three or four years at Wellington, we cannot think so badly of the intellectual acuteness of 251 electors, headed by " John Plimmer," of that city, as to believe that they are not able at once to state whether they would support the election of Mr Eichmond as their representative, and to dispense with another essay on his own capabilities (we have it in " Hansard" of last session), before they can make up their own minds. The truth, we fear, is that the 251 electors and Mr Eichmond resort to each other from affection. Each is apis alter to the other. The Constitutional Eeforin Association, as it calls itself, consists, we suppose, of these 251 electors, and is hard up for a candidate, but unwilling to pledge itself to any one in general and to Mr Eichmond in particular ; it therefore hits on the novel expedient of reserving its confidence, and at the same time calling on that gentleman to come forward. He is hard up for a seat, and catches at the straw of hope that his persuasive eloquence, will in the course of two hours create that confidence which his public conduct during ten years has failed to implant in the breasts of those whom he will address. He has self-confidence enough both for himself and his constituents, and if they will only lend him their ears for a short time he feels that he will be irresistible. " Confidence," Burke says, " is a plant of slow growth," but an evening with Eichmond will see it sowu, germinate, grow, bud, blossom and bear fruit instantaneously. His reply is eminently characteristic. It is the Eichmond essence of obnoxious self-assertion, offensive in a Pharisaic worship of himself, and a supercilious contempt of others. He, forsooth, is the prudent calculator, and his opponents are blind and profligate gamblers ; he is for liberty and they for despotism! This kind of sensational auto-biography will not circulate in AVellington ; it is nauseous and unwholesome. Mr Eichmond must be judged by his acts, and not by his words. His native and defence policy conclusively condemn him. Their sentence is the indelible writing on the wall, Tehel — " Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting." His political merits are recorded in the lavish expenditure of blood and money, a senseless muddle of native affairs, and are illumined by the conflagration of war. We are not aware that the cause of freedom owes much to Mr Eichmond. We recollect that a few years ago he introduced as a Minister, a Newspaper Bill, which was scouted

throughout the colony as forging fetterß for. the press. If "social intermeddling," against which he protests, refers to Government Savings Banks and Government Insurance, why did he introduce the former and support the, latter measure in the Legislature? Why did he not oppose the Contagious Diseases Act when brought in by a private member ? His idea of abstinence from " social intermeddling" is his famous Married Womens Property Bill, which, if it had become law in its original shape, would have revolutionised marriage and subverted society. Under it the " anti-com-mercial restrictions" of matrimony were to succumb to the " cause of freedom," — the wife was to become an independent trader, and the definition of Mr Jellyby, as " tbfe husband of Mrs Jellyby," would soon be applicable to most married men. On the whole, we. tKink that the colonists, including the electors of the city of Wellington, prefer the vices of public works, immigration, and Post Office Savings Banks and Insurance to the virtues of civil war, whether ib be between the two races, or the two sexes, of her Majesty's subjects in New Zealand, and that Mr Eichmond will find this out to his discomfiture, should he be rash enough to go to the poll.