10

H.—34

who had been guilty of drunkenness, but it was very unlikely there were any who had been guilty of peculation. No matter what the occasion, he would certainly consider it a breach of Regulation 44 for a Post Office official to give information in the manner Mr. Willis did. The seriousness of the offence was not, in his opinion, dependent upon the fact that it related to the present Government. He considered there was no possible excuse for the giving of information in this deliberate manner. If an officer considered himself bound, in the interests of the colony, to give certain information, he should do it through the proper channel —through his superior officer. He (witness) considered Mr. Mcßeth a competent man to handle a case of this kind. Giving the information to Mr. Mcßeth would have relieved Mr. Willis of the responsibility. If he (witness) had handled a voucher he considered improper, he would not have dealt with it in the manner Mr. Willis had. He had seen the evidence given before the Auditor-General, and still considered Mr. Mcßeth a competent person to deal with such a matter as this. The proper thing to do was to apply first to Mr. Mcßeth, and then, if he did not do what was expected, to write to the officer over his head. He (witness) could not say what would have happened to an officer taking such a course —nothing probably if the charge was justified. He knew that Mr. Willis did not " run " with the information immediately he had it: that was where he was wrong —he should have done it at the time. The declaration signed by Mr. Willis was probably signed on his entry into the Department; it ought to have been. Probably the same declaration had been in use since the Department was a Post Office ; it was in the Act of 1866. At the time the declaration was compiled it probably related to postal packets and the Savings-bank, and other things ; the first paragraph of the declaration was a general one. He had not seen any other telegram sent by a clerk to a member. Whether or not a breach cf the regulations had been committed by the sending of this other telegram would depend on what the telegram was and how it was used. As to these points there might be differences of opinion. The Board contended here that the commission, or alleged commission of other breaches of the regulations, could not be urged as a plea of justification for Mr. Willis's alleged breach of the regulations, unless he had thereby been himself led into error. If it could not be shown that Mr. Willis had broken any specific regulation, then it became a question for consideration as to whether or not recourse should be made to the general relation between master and servant. In this instance they would take Mr. Willis as the servant and the Postmaster-General as the master. Mr. Rose (to the Board) : The word " charge " in Mr. Willis's telegram he took to mean the charge Mr. Willis made—or rather the charge Mr. Fisher made on the information given him by Mr. Willis. During the sitting of Parliament, Mr. Fisher made the charge of a wrongful payment to Captain Seddon. The words " hope you will press your motion " supposedly referred to the public inquiry before the House. Mr. Bose (to Mr. Willis) : With regard to the question of the telegram being sent to Mr. Taylor for the purpose of getting an inquiry made such as would enable Mr. Willis and his colleagues to prove the truth of their statements : He (witness) supposed this was what was meant, he did not see that anything else could be meant. He assumed this was the object. Joseph Willis sworn. In reference to the declaration, he would contend that it did not cover the alleged breach in the slightest. The first paragraph which it had been alleged he had infringed had no bearing on the matter at issue. There was a comma after the word " charge," and he was supposed to be " true and faithful" in the execution of his "trust." That trust was the handling generally of postal packets, which were clearly defined under the Act. They did not include Treasury vouchers. By no possibility could these come in. When this declaration was printed, the business of the Post Office was confined to postal matters, with the exception of the Sayings-Bank. The information he had given related purely and solely to the Treasury, not to the postal packets, which were the things referred to in the clause Mr. Rose had quoted. In the regulation quoted, the clerk declared that he would not divulge information re postal packets, detain them or delay them, &c. He did not say he would not divulge matters in connection with the Treasury Department or anything of the sort. The first paragraph must be read in conjunction with the remainder of the clause, and the "trust" mentioned had nothing whatever to do with the general duties of a Post Office clerk, but related simply to his dealings with postal packets. Hence he contended that the declaration did not come into this question at all. A voucher was not a postal packet, transmissible by post, a telegram, nor anything else referred to in this declaration, which was therefore quite irrelevant. In reference to Regulation 44 :he knew that ignorance was no justification, but he would like to place on record the fact that he was ignorant of this regulation, and that, therefore, if a breach had been committed, it was not done wilfully and knowingly. As a matter of fact, however, the regulation was more honoured in the breach than in the observance : men were continually breaking it. The last sentence of Regulation 44 was the only one that could apply, and he wished it to be clearly understood that he was ignorant of this portion of the regulation. He also wished it put on record that the source of his Department's information relating to these charges, was his (witness's) own evidence before the Auditor-General. The Auditor-General had more than once requested him to omit the statement, that he had searched the records of the Treasury vouchers, &c, but he had insisted on its going in, as he felt it was necessary for the public good, to save misapprehension with regard to the Anderson voucher. In reference to the point of making the information "public." He had not made the information public: he had merely given it to a member of the House of Representatives as a trustee for the public. He contended that he deliberately gave this information to a member of the House of Representatives (Mr. Fisher), knowing that he might use it for political purposes. To charge No. 2he had given a qualified admission. He did not know at the time that he was committing a breach of the Regulation 44, and he did not now admit that he had done so. He thought at the time he was