Wellington Independent PUBLISHED DAILY. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 1871.

Wellington Independent, Volume XXVI, Issue 3101, 18 January 1871, Page 2

Wellington Independent PUBLISHED DAILY. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 1871.

" The proper position of "Wellington" has been so often talked about lately in a sort of transcendental way, that we are really glad to see it touched upon at lasfc in language we can understand. Notably this has been done by Mr Hart, in the very excellent remarks reported yesterday as made by him in the Mechanics' Institute. How that position differs so materially from a small constituency, and requires a different sort of representative, was very clearly put. Hi 3 hearers felt that the distinction he drew not only accorded with their experience at home and in the colonies, but had a foundation in reason and the natural fitness of things, which all the most eloquent special pleading could not shake. The fact of home constituencies electing eminent statesmen from

a distance has been sometimes urged against this view of the case. Before, however, this analogy can be available, it must be shown that they stand to the Imperial Parliament in the same relation as ours do to the Assembly. Is Liverpool, Glasgow, or Limerick hanging to the skirts of ihe Imperial Government for such a distribution of borrowed capital in their vicinity as will extend their means of communication ? Is there at home a hostile element at work which in certain districts more than others prevents the progress of settlement, and the increase of manufactories, and on the successful policy with regard to which the whole country is interested, but especially certain portions of it? No, the circumstances are widely different ; but whenever any legislative or administrative action is likely to affect any one city or district in particular, then the view Mr Hart takes of the duty of electors is acted upon as the merest corollary of common sense. The electors of Edinburgh were not the fools they have been often represented to be in preferring to the brilliant iVlacaulay an unpretending citizen who had only distinguished himself in the City Council, and who had nothing to recommend him but his natural sagacity, his public spirit, and his material stake in the city. On this principle too, the best Parliamentarian Lord Advocate that Scotland has ever had was defeated in Leith by a merchant and Commission agent, His illustrious successor (Inglis), learning by his fate, sought out a constituency far from the centres of population, the very name of which he had never heard in his life before ! It may be said that we are comparing small things with great, but a little reflection will show that the city of Wellington has far more to gain or lose by good or bad representation than Edinburgh or London. We have heard sufficient lately to convince us of this, and we say distinctly that all the objections to Dr Featlierston. as a city representative are well founded, in so far as they allege that his ministerial position prevented him rendering those services to Wellington which out of office he could most efficiently have done. Nay, more, we most unhesitatingly declare that if he knew bis duties as Commissioner would have so long and so exclusively occupied his attention, he did a great wrong in not at once tendering his resignation, and giving his constituents the full value of the representation then allowed by law. If the Ministerial position of Dr Featherston, whose manifest interest and most anxious care have ever beenjto advance Wellington, militated against his usefulness as a city member, it would be an infatuation amounting to madness to elect a gentleman whose private character or political ability is no way superior to his, who has no stake in the city or province", and whose friends openly declare that he is going to use "Wellington as a mere stepping-stone to office, in which, if he is truly honest, he must pursue a policy diametrically opposed to that unanimously supported by Wellington members, and from which Wellington has so much to gain. Mr Richmond may console himself with the brilliant examples we have pointed out, and, if wise, will learn by their fate, before it is too late, that his acknowledged political abilities and appetite for office may be recommendations for a small country constituency, but no way fit him in the absence of more essential qualifications for being a useful city member. His own constituents in Taranaki rejected him on the simple ground that he had failed in his duty to them as their representative. It would be ridiculous for Wellington to reward him for his past neglect as representative of a small constituency by entrusting him with the representation of the capital of the colony ! Such conduct would be Quixotic, and, using the word in its strictly classical seuse, idiotic, would make Wellington the laughing stock of the ' other cities of the colony, and would be a lamentable way of illustrating "the proper position of Wellington." Of all the attempts to " draw a herring across the. scent," the speeches of Mr J. C, Richmond and Mr Travers last night, were the most barefaced and transparent it has ever been our lot to witness. The importance given to the land question would have led anyone who had dropped into the hall from "another country remote from New Zealand," to infer that the whole election turned upon it. The conclusion intended to be arrived at, was that the present Ministry were opposed to the settlement of people on the land, and that they regarded the production of wool as the great concern of Government, and as the great source of the prosperity of the Colony. We would not insult the intelligence of the electors of Wellington by any formal denial of such an egregious misrepresentation. Perhaps the simplest way of treating it is to say that the Government have appointed an AgentGeneral to see that more people, not sheep, are brought' into the country, and that the Customs revenue is expected to be increased by an increase of consumers of duty-paying articles, and that sheep, as a matter of fact, neither smoke tobacco, drink spirits, nor consume anything on which revenue is raised. It might be further added that the railways and public works were designed to give employment to men, and the modified form of protection pioposed by the scheme was to encourage the agriculturalist and not the squatter. If provincial authorities in any part of the colony have mismanaged the waste lands of the crown it is a very great pity : but that is not the question put before the electors of Welington. Mr Richmond claims great ciedit for being an honest man, which virtue we had hitherto conceded to him ; but the speoial pleading of last night has altogether changed our opinion of him, and we are sure the speech, when it goes to the colony, will

1 not add to his reputation. Mr Travers last night assumed the new character, as I he naively explained, of " a modest man," | but we fear that he has not yet read the part sufficiently, as his impersonation of it was anything but successful: No one would have known he was modest unless he. had told them, and many were ill-natured enough, even after his repeated asseverations, to declare that no modest man ever boasted of his modesty. There was an amount of flippancy about both of these orators that was absolutely painful to any reflecting colonist, and a miserable attempt to shirk the great question at issue, by setting ] class against class that was truly piti- j ful to listen to. In a crisis like the present we want guides who will not confine themselves to meaningless negations, but who will plainly say they intend to carry into effect the laws recently passed by the Colonial Parliament, in such a spirit as to ensure a speedy increase of land for the people contemporaneously with an increase of people for the land.