WORK! WORK! WORK!

New Zealand Graphic, 27 June 1906, Page 32

WORK! WORK! WORK!

For not even the list of Mr. Seddon’s multifarious duties, imposing as it is, gives any just measure of the amount and quality of the legislative work that he performed. It was never in his nature to be satisfied with knowing that his coadjutors and subordinates were doing their duty. His conscientious love of duty, his intense earnestness and thoroughness, and that egoism which is the main source of power in all strong natures impelled him irresistibly to monopolise worls and to concentrate all the Ministerial and legislative duties of the Cabinet upon himself alone. During the thirteen sessions of his Premiership, Parliament passed nearly 800 Acts, or an average of about 60 per session; and he rarely failed to take a hand in drafting and shaping even those to which his own name was not attached. “His strong point as a legislator was not so much the origination of new ideas as the knaek of elever selection and adaptation of those of other minds, great boldness in advocating them when he was satisfied that they were workable and congeuial to the public taste, and boundless persistence and resource in pushing the measures in which they were incorporated through every stage of the Parliamentary process. Whoever was the originator of a particular scheme, there was no doubt whose it was by the time it was before the House in a Bill of which Mr. Seddon had charge. Even of those technical parts of a measure which any layman must rely upon professional skill to shape for him, he had as a rule an extraordinarily accurate grasp. Not uncommonly he showed himself a better lawyer than the lawyers themselves, and his range was so great that there were few men whom he could not teach something on their own particular subjects.” This tribute to Mr. Seddon’s extraordinary capacity for “running” Parliament and the country on his own account is the more convincing, because the “Evening Post,” the journal from which it is quoted, will hardly bd regarded as prejudiced in his favour. It may, therefore, serve to indicate ths reasons for the Premier’s success as a legislator, and may at the same time suggesC the terrible strain that he endured while gaining and maintaining his reputation.