Wellington Independent MONDAY MARCH 13, 1871.

Wellington Independent, Volume XXVI, Issue 3146, 13 March 1871, Page 2

Wellington Independent MONDAY MARCH 13, 1871.

The thoughtful remarks of the Hon. Mr Fitzherbert, reported elsewhere, are, as Mr Rhodes aptly characterised them at the meeting, " a lesson to all New Zealand." The earnest manner in which they were delivered greatly enhanced their effect, and elicited even from some present who had lately distinguished themselves by their zeal in demanding " the sweeping away of Provincial Institutions" a confession of the crudeness and impracticability of their notions of " reform." How road boards or coun ties would fail to fulfil the functions of the provinces was put with a clearness and amplitude of illustration that carried conviction to all except one or two anii-provincialists among us, whose opinions will yield to no argument, being founded rather on personal antipathies than on careful study or honest conviction. The picture of numerous deputations in a couDty system coming up from all ends of the colony about this bridge or that road, of a bewildered Minister leaving the affaire of the colony to attend to a matter of which he could have no knowledge, and blandly promising to refer what required immediate action to the consideration of an assembly of whom few would know or care to know anything about it was felicitously sketched, and the earnest advice to stand by our peculiar institutions until we had something better to substitute in their place, are but imperfectly reproduced in our report, which is, however, as full as our limits would allow. There can be no doubt that Mr Fitz-

Herbert will now walk the course. To attempt under specious pretexts to deprive the province of his valuable assist r anc© in its present crisis would be worthy only of those whom the hon. gentlemen so thoroughly exposed, who make " an indecent living" by setting class against class, and raising a devil of discord and confusion not so easy to lay. Such, we have no doubt, will still be found clamoring with senseless cries for a procrustean policy for the whole colony, regardless of the wishes or the wants of its settlements, differing widely in tbeir origins, necessities, and sympathies ; but their dishonest bolstering up of their cause with the name of Mr Fitzherbert, which has of late been shamefully notorious, will now no longer deceive any. The cry that " the colony is ground down by high salaried officials," which we have lately been at some trouble to expose, called forth a withering denunciation, which, coming from so experienced a politician, will, we trust, speedily fructify throughout the colony, to the credit of the public Press and to the advantage of the public service. Nor <vas the rebuke less emphatic, because more indirect, when he declared his determination to speak of those who owed their position to the legislature (whose supremacy was a cardinal point of his political creed), to whom as Ministers of the colony he professed all loyal allegiance, and tendered all dutiful respect. We have heard Mr Fitzherbert make a more eloquent speech ; we never heard him deliver one more appropriate, more interesting, and more profoundly suggestive. We commend it to the careful perusal of the electors of the province. It might well form a text book for the reform leagues and political associations which have sprung up among us for tho avowed purpose of " sweeping away provincial institutions." We think if th6y give it the study it deserves, their programmes will be much shorter, the tone of their speeches less truculent, and the language of their organs more moderate and becoming.