tically withdrew from the appointed committee.
Mixed Opinions and Personalities
The Rev. J. A. Hatchard, in reply to “Let Well Alone’s” insinuation that the harbour question was dying of inanition, wrote – “Mr Let-well-alone seems to write in your journal as though if he lent a hand to give the Harbour Association what he is pleased to call the coup de grace there must necessarily be an end of it altogether. Whether the plan is a good one or not, if Mr. Let-Well-alone disapprove of it, he evidently supposes that the bantling must die of inanition forthwith. It is all very well for the ‘fine old English gentleman’ (‘one of the olden school’) ‘who sits at home at ease’ to draw his easy chair before his table in his snug study, and write about the nuisance of a harbour; but had he been one of those who were exposed to the storm of last Monday I strongly suspect he would not have voted a harbour ‘an intolerable nuisance’. It sounds not a little selfish for a gentleman who can afford to spend ‘many thousand pounds’ in excluding the rough blast from beneath his warm comforters to hear him growl out a dyspeptic ‘Let well alone’. If your correspondent’s position is so influential why does he always discharge his pop-gun from behind his gauze screen? There may be occasions when only measures and not institutions or individuals are the theme. When a man is perfectly justified in withholding his name; but I esteem it to be an unwarrantable infringement of the law of liberty and fair dealing when an anonymous writer makes pointed public attacks upon literary or other institutions and allusions of a personal nature, if not direct, yet sufficiently pointed for the community generally to know clearly who the person referred to is. [It may be here explained that whilst “Let-Well-alone” (Mr. Montgomerie) was an ardent Conservative, Mr. Hatchard was a restless Liberal; and that whilst the St. Leonards Mechanics’ Institution, with its professed neutrality in politics and religion, declined to receive a Conservative Journal as a gift from Mr. P. F. Robertson, the Hastings Mechanics’ Institution, under the same rule of neutrality accepted as a present from Mr. Hatchard a Radical paper known as the Morning Star. Hence the allusion to institutions &c.] Mr. Hatchard continued – “As I have before now, if I mistake not, been the subject of anoymous(sic) attacks by Mr. ‘Let-well-alone’ and another anonymous writer I consider it just to myself to protest against conduct so truly un-English... I suppect(sic) that the composer, writing accurately, cannot describe himself as belonging to St. Leonards township. [Mr. Montgomerie’s usual signature afterwards was “S. Leonardis” as a contradiction to Mr. Hatchard’s assertion.]...Numerous as are the topics on which he writes, his signatures are nearly as nu-
