Mr. Frankland's Independence.

But, ladies and gentlemen, no man is good enough to be a God. If you should do me the honour of electing me, you will have in Parliament a member who cannot see his way to blind support of any Premier, however able. If you want one who will say "My party, right or wrong," you must vote for someone else. On some few points, even—and I don't say it with "bated breath," either—my long residence in America may have fitted me to see more clearly than those who are far my superiors in general political ability. "Onlookers see most of the game" is an old adage; and while my opportunity of comparing what we enjoy in New Zealand with what exists elsewhere may make me more keenly alive to the blessings that we have secured, I am perhaps also more on the alert as to possible and insidious ways in which we may lose those blessings than even some of the very men who have won them for us. In a few days I shall distribute among you a circular I have had printed abridging what seems to be an epoch-making article in the Wellington "Evening Post" on the imminence of the Trust peril. And if there is any important concrete question on which I can for see the possibility of voting, through what they might regard as an excess of democratic zeal, against the administration, and with the small party of Independent Liberals that already exists in the House, it is precisely here. It is in regard to setting up constitutional machinery which I know, from my study at first hand of the Swiss system, to be effective in checking evils that I equally know, from my residence in America, to be both imminent and alarming.

Thus my great object in trying to enter New Zealand public life is to bear my part in the service of democratic ideals. Of those ideals it is i sober truth to say that the Liberal Party here has been for long the most grandly successful champion in the world, and it is my hope and belief that it will remain their conspicuous exponent for many a year to come. But, ladies and gentlemen, an out-and-out tied down "party man," in the ordinary acceptation of the word, is what I do not see my way to become. It may be that my inexperience misleads me and that, were I familiar with Parliamentary procedure, I should appreciate more highly the value of party discipline. I well remember, many years ago, my dear old chief, Sir Harry Atkinson, endeavouring to impress this new of the matter on me—but in vain. "I never saw such a House." he once said, soon after a general election. "The new members can't seem to see that they have got to choose between God and Baal." Now, if the party chiefs were truly "God and Baal," I should agree with Sir Harry as to the imperativeness of enlisting under one or the other banner for life, and the position of an "Independent Liberal" page 10 would in that case be an impertinence, if not a blasphemy. But, my friends, in the best and greatest of actual party leaders there are faults; and in connection with those Oppositionists to whom we are, on the whole most opposed, there are minor points as to which one is compelled to agree with them against one's own political friends. For this reason it is that I call myself an Independent Liberal, though it is needless to say that my attitude towards the administration is far, far different from that of the men who constitute, under the term "Independent Liberal" or "New" Liberal, the existing "Cave of Adullam" in the House of Representatives.