POLITICAL CRISIS.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume V, Issue 674, 20 October 1891, Page 2

POLITICAL CRISIS.

That grand old opportunist Sir Henry Parkes has got into a political bog at last, after skilfully steering his course for some distance along a path beset with many obstacles. There has been a great deal of smoke, and the same dreary show without result that has characterised the New South Wales Parliament for years. The Labor party made it plainly understood that it was not with them a question of Dibbs or Parkes, but a question which would do the most to further the carrying out of the Labor programme. Sir Henry Parkes was profuse in promise and slow in fulfilment, and this is the real cause of the crisis that has arisen. A significant feature of the crisis is that it was stated in a number of the Radical paper the Bulletin to hand that the Premier was purposely shaping his course for a crisis. This shows that if the trouble were not premeditated it was anticipated. If all the hard things that the Conservative papers have to say about the Labor party were true, there is no doubt that a few dozen printers, shoemakers, and other tradesmen, applying themselves in a business-like manner to the carrying out of fixed principjes, would run the Government of New South Wales in a far more capable manner than it has been carried on for years past. If Sir Henry Parkes quietly sidled off to a back seat in the political world the colony of New South Wales would manage to keep on as well as ever it did. As a politician who has always had interest Centred on him by his going to do something which, like the policeman in the “ Pirates of Penzance,” he never even attempted to do, Sir Henry has not an equal in the colonies, and by his bidding for popularity he has perhaps done more than any other man in the colonies to damage the principles of party Government.