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judgment of those who may examine my work and consider the tests which it has stood. But though such exhibitions are unbecoming in and can only recoil on one who is not himself a professional accountant, and who is the great obstacle to the adoption of any reform in the accounts of our public departments, I should obviously be attributing to him an impartiality of which human nature is hardly capable if I were to expect that he could point out a single satisfactory result of such a reform as the removal of his control from the office. It was doubtless thought to be politic, as well as conducive to a more satisfactory conduct of the business of the Public Trust Office, and necessary to reform, that there should be no insurmountable difficulty from the Audit Department. The wisdom of the Act of 1891 might now appear to be unquestionable. We may discuss commercial practice and the service of banks, systems of account and methods of book-keeping, and Mr. FitzGerald may even refuse to affix his certificate to an account which is not according to his taste, or even to some arbitrary theory; but I can now, on my own responsibility, with no more serious consequence than one or two of such queries as have made up Mr. FitzGerald's total of 320, pay the account, and the business of the public can proceed; and, this being the case, the public will regard our discussions as interesting only to men of leisure or to the antiquary. The introduction, however, of the arrangement authorised by the Act, and by the regulations which were made under it, was met with some resistance early in 1892. The Post Office actually refused to make, as my agent, Trust Office payments out of the moneys collected by the Post Office for, and belonging to the Trust Office, without Mr. FitzGerald's sanction, notwithstanding the express provision of the law. This state of things was probably due to the common departmental fear of the Audit, for it has always been the peculiar disposition of the Post Office to readily second me in my arrangements of the business of the Trust Office. And it was not until I had exposed the absurdity of the objections to a compliance, with a request in the very words of the law, that I could convince the Post Office that there was no occasion for fear. Mr. Gray refused to listen to my earnest entreaty that he should pay some account of this office out of the money which he had collected for the office. He actually refused to comply with the wishes of the Colonial Treasurer, because, as he wrote, he was, " pending the result of your conference with Mr. FitzGerald, decidedly of opinion that effect should not be given to the direction of the Colonial Treasurer." But I had agreed to no such conference; all that I wished being obedience to the law, even from Mr. FitzGerald, I put an end to the difficulty by writing the following letter, and, as I was ostensibly finding with Mr. Gray a fault for which Mr. FitzGerald was apparently responsible, I wrote with much pain : — " Sib, — " Public Trust Office, Wellington, New Zealand, 9th January, 1892. " With reference to your memorandum of to-day, in which you suggest that I should remit you the money required to pay the claims on the Public Trust Office, I beg to point out that, according to a statement sent to me from your office yesterday, a sum of £287 15s. 7d. remains as a balance in your hands of Public Trust Office moneys received by your department. What I desire is that you shall apply this money to the payment of the claims in question; and, in order that it may be so applied as to occasion you no uneasiness that the law, as you interpret it, would be infringed, and to satisfy me that the law, as 1 read it, would be observed, I would ask you to draw a cheque on the Post Office Account for the amount, and pay the cheque back into the Post Office Account as a remittance from me to pay the claims, or as an imprest, or an advance, or whatever other name it may be expedient to give the transaction. If you will do this, it will not be necessary even to advise me that you have done so, as I cannot think it would serve any useful purpose to make any corresponding entries in the Public Trustee's Account. But, after all, you may yet think it superfluous to go through even this simple process, yet leave the money where the process will leave it, and give effect to my first request. "I am,&c, " The Secretary, General Post Office, Wellington." " J. K. Waebueton. The Public Trust Office, however, could not, in spite of its strength and triumph, afford to be less circumspect than formerly. Wherever occasion could be found or plausibly invented for attack, the attack came with a regularity which has served to exercise the Public Trust Office in the strict discipline by which assaults of every character can alone be rendered abortive. On the 22nd of April, 1892, Mr. FitzGerald, in one of his many memoranda of complaint and objection, wrote : " As the Audit has been deprived by the legislation of last session of the power of compelling compliance with its requests, the only course left is to make a special report to Parliament of these facts." I replied by pointing out that no allowance appeared to have been made for a transition period, a period "when a trying operation has become necessary to a healthy existence." And I added, "The system, if it can be called a system, under which, up to the 31st December last, the accounts of this office were kept, was such as to reflect no credit on any one responsible for it; and, though in former years you may have been furnished with the annual balance-sheet in less time than it has taken to furnish it for the year just ended, it has not been a balance-sheet of satisfactory accounts. To give no more than one instance of the deficiency of the accounts of the past, it may be sufficient to bring to your recollection the fact that forms of receipt, each stamped with the duty of one penny, had, until recently, been issued from this office for years, for the use of its Agents, without even an entry having been made or any account kept of the issue of the forms or of the value of them; and that, when I confessed my inability to furnish you with an account by which the forms returned as obsolete under the new system could be checked, you yourself very truly observed, ' these matters seem to have been managed with no conception of what is necessary to secure the department from fraud.' I filed away the papers on the subject because cases like this are just as well buried. They belong to a wretched past. But what is the value of a prompt balance-sheet and its signatures, with all the concomitant neatness of books from an office in which