What benefit do you get in return ? I ask any of these wearied and disappointed men to come up on the stage, and ' recite to this audience one single benefit, — (Laughter arid applause.) You are getting nothing but a barren Abolition Act, which will be altered and amended in whatever way the majority in the House thinks, and what they consider the necessity of the Colony requires. I will tell you how they require it. As Mr Macandrew shows you, the Colony is going to the bad at the raie of LIOOO a day, and it will go still more to the bad yet if the present system be not changed. Where are the Provinces to get subsidies for their Counties ? " Oh," says the Abolition Bill, " they must be paid out of the Conselidated Fund." They are what is termed charged to the Provinces. The money will be got by the Colonial Government issuin<? Treasury bills. But where is the money to come from to meet them when they fall due ? Many of the Pro vinces will not hsve funds to pay for one year, far less for two or three. Of course, the money will have to como out of your pockets. That^ is what you will have to pay for, for what is neither more nor less than an ideal. If you wish your Provincial Council remodelled, you could have had it done without resorting to this. The Council could have made the changes itself by abolishing its legislative functions. You are asked to support Abolition, a thing which gives no real equivalent to this Province at all, while it deprives you of the benefits and the funds which you have hitherto enjoyed. You are losing everything for an ideal, and I think if you would wish an ideal, there is in Provincialism an ideal just as grand and , noble as any the Centralist can show. No doubt it is grand lo have a united Colony, and those Separation resolutions provided that. Mora than that, they provided that all those paro> chial affairs which now come. before Parlia ment should be" managed not in Wellington, but where they arose, and by the people best acquainted with them. They left to the Gene ral Parliament simply those federal affairs which such a Parliament could well undertake. 