PRESUMPTUOUS UTTERANCES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 203, 23 February 1877, Page 10

PRESUMPTUOUS UTTERANCES.

The Dunedin Town Council is nothing if not dignified. A solitary member in his private capacity, it is true, may now and then trip a little ; he may, for example, act so as t . appear to prejudiced people not quite up in his A, B, C, and as if he were not fully qualified to distinguish upon parchment one name from another. Yet how excusable is this in an age when all are affected by the sentiments of Tennyson's * Modern Farmer,' and "property " clanks from the hoofs of every man's hobby, causing a bewilderment and general obfuscation in which it is but natural, that the distinctive marks that separate meum from tuum should now and tben be lost or totally confounded together. Or a councillor, in his official character, may inform a man, who i 3 certainly in affliction, and believes himself, at least, to have cause for complaint, that he, the honorable councillor, " would see him hanged " before he would consent to his not unreasonable request— a response which coarse people might be disposed coarsely to qualify, and to % prefix by such an adjective as we care not to chronicle. ™ But, on the whole, take them altogether the city fathers are a venerable band of elders, and a godly withal ; for, is it not recorded in the annals of the metropolis, so that it may b» handed down to posterity in testimony of their worth, how they rebuked the impiety of certain misguided proprietors of Dunedin who, seeming in their atheistical presumption to confound, in a manner, this worshipful association with the rainmakers of heathendom, and believing that through the action or negligence, as the case may be, of the said council, they had