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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 72

Otago Daily Times

Otago Daily Times.

How eagerly would Mr. McKenzie scan the columns of the newspapers day by day after his new system had come into operation! We seem to see him, pencil in hand, glancing with lynx's eye over a collection of reputedly anti-Ministerial journals, and getting an appetite for breakfast by adding gleefully to his black list of marked journalists. What a wealth of Gaelic mutterings, choice and euphonious, would be devoted to page 36 the leader writer who dared to criticise, say, a Land Bill, and how carefully would the name be stored in view of possible opportunities! The Minister would be in his element; he would be following his native bent. For the moment we are almost inclined to regret the hopelessness of the Bill, and the inevitable thwarting of this pleasant design. But, truth to tell, Mr. McKenzie has come a century too late. As a secret-service superintendent in Pitt's time he would have found a proper outlet for his abilities; or had he flourished in the Paris of a hundred years ago he need not have gone idle. Here is a description of a state of matters which would have evoked his liveliest co-operation: "Only one journal of the first rank, the Mercure, continued to brave unpopularity by a steady defence of liberty and order. . . . But again and again self-constituted critics, deputations from the Palais Royal, representatives of the mob, and even the agents of the local authorities, denounced, remonstrated, and interfered with the writer, and plainly threatened with violence and death anyone who dared to use the freedom of the press to defend unpopular, though liberal opinions." Citizen McKenzie would not have been backward among the self-constituted critics, the deputations, and the representatives of the mob: he would have done his full share of denouncing, remonstrating, interfering, and threatening. He would have helped to bring about the calamitous result—viz., the almost complete (because forced) enlistment of the power of the press on the side of turbulency, the Reign of Terror, and all the horrors of the Revolution. But Mr. McKenzie's destiny was ordered otherwise, and at that time he was not even feeding his flock beyond the Grampian Hills. He was reserved for the New Zealand of the end of the nineteenth century, and doomed to stretch out arms of impotent longing to the tyrannical power which has gone for ever.

We have animadverted so often on the illiberal and tyrannical tendencies of the present "Liberal" Government that the theme might be thought to be exhausted; but fresh offences call for fresh comment, and something must be said concerning the latest Ministerial freak. We say "Ministerial," for the Ministry as a whole cannot escape responsibility for the extraordinary legislative abortion which the Minister for Lands has proudly fathered. We shall not, however, make the mistake of treating the new Libel Bill too seriously; indeed, our only temptation to do so would arise from the consideration that the follies of New Zealand Ministers must to some extent make New Zealand itself ridiculous in the eyes of the world. As for Mr. Reeves' complaisance in allowing this absurd Bill to issue from the Cabinet, we can only suppose that he is gratifying his humorous tendencies without considering too closely the propriety of his attitude. We mention Mr. Reeves because, as a journalist of some repute, he is well aware of the impracticability and unsoundness of his colleague's empirical proposals; but there are other men in the Cabinet who might have been expected to decline complicity in such arrant tomfoolery. Surely less senseless ways of humouring Mr. John McKenzie's ignorant boldness could be found than this. It goes without saying that the Bill will not pass even the Lower House, but we sincerely hope it will come on for its second reading. It would be provoking to miss Mr. Reeves' defence of the anti-press proposals, while Mr. McKenzie's own speech is sure to be rich in self-revelation and unconscious humour. The fundamental motive of the Minister for Lands in introducing this Star Chamber measure must, of course, be found in his bitter chagrin at realising that the majority of the newspapers of the colony are unable to abjure sound political principles and swallow holus-bolus all the crude schemes of the present Government. If circumstances were otherwise, if the press of New Zealand were page 37 generally Ministerial in tone and tendency, we should have seen nothing of this splenetic Bill: nay, the press would probably not have looked in vain for that full and enlightened reform of the law of libel which is one of the needs of the day in this colony.