I.

The first fault with which we charge the Ministry is over-govermnent.

One of the great wants of the colony for the last six years has been rest—rest from excessive legislation and interfering administra- page 2 tion. Our Ministers seem to think that the more laws they make, the more they deserve praise, forgetting that laws are simply necessary evils; and the fewer of them we require, the better for us all-laws being, like the clothes which cover our nakedness, only the symbols of our lost innocence. Instead of the rest we have so long needed, we have been afflicted year after year with a plethora of legislation, with volumes upon volumes of new laws so full of blunders and contradictions that learned judges declare them often unintelligible.

The cause of this over-legislation is easily explained. The most of our parochial politicians who get into Parliament are really well-meaning men, and so are many of the members who get into office; but their crass ignorance, especially when they are faddists and fanatics, renders them utterly unfit for the work they have to do. Well-meaning, they see some unquestionable evil in the community—such as intemperance or uncleanness—and they fancy a stringent law will suppress it; and, being legislators, they propose and pass such a law, but find that their law has not the good effect intended, or that it creates far more evils than it cures. For all human laws have two sets of effects, the effects intended and the effects not in-tended. The effects not intended, or never dreamed of, are often far more numerous and vastly more important than those intended. The well-meaning but ignorant legislator may secure by his law the good, or some portion of the good, he intended, but in the great majority of cases he produces tenfold more evil than any good he has done. A plethora of experimental legislation, which possibly may accomplish a certain amount of good in one direction, but ten times that amount of evil in other directions, is what we allege against the possibly well-meaning but certainly unwise and ignorant Ministry now in office.

There is also an analogant plethora of administration. A large number of the experimental laws passed require one or more persons to work them, who have to be paid, and paid at a high rate, by the Government. The officials thus appointed and paid are unprecedentedly numerous, and their number is still increasing. Every session more and more offices are being created, and more and more State employment and salaries provided for the leaders of the cliques and rings and unions which are thick-and-thin supporters of the sham-Liberals now in office.

Ancient history tells us of a wise people in Greece, the Locrians, who found themselves over-legislated, like ourselves. They put an page 3 end to the evil in a very simple way. They required every proposer of a new law, or of a change in an old law, to bring forward his proposal with a rope round his neck. If any member of their Legislature—and all the Locrian people were members—objected to the proposal, the rope was tightened and the proposer strangled or hanged. We do not recommend the adoption here of this old custom, and yet when we think of the excessive legislation and administration from which we suffer, we cannot help admiring the wisdom of the Locrians.