MR. ADDERLEY'S PAMPHLET.

Lyttelton Times, Volume II, Issue 87, 4 September 1852, Page 4

MR. ADDERLEY'S PAMPHLET.

We notified last week our intention of publishing Mr. Adderley's remarks on Mr. Godley's speech at the public meeting; at Lyttelton, in August, last year. They were in type prior to our receiving the intelligence of Sir John Pakington's proposed constitution fov New Zealand: we believe, however, that they will not be read with less interest on that account, being written for the purpose of affording Members of Parliament full information ou our affairs, and it is fair to assume that they have not been without effect in inducing Sir John to introduce this Session his bill granting us Representative institutions. " Mr. Godley's speech at the Public Meeting of August last, at Lyttelton, exhibits the free political spirit of the first colonists in that rising settlement, and the manly and enlightened language natural to genuine English founders of an offset English community. Such people go out from England determined to be free, indeed, but in no wise radical or bitter against authority. Too soon, alas ! frustration of their hopes, wastings of their resources, and petty vexation of their free spirit from the bootless interference of a distant and ignorant control, work up colonial agitation, ruffling the calm aspect of that dauntless energy which alone can fairly cope with sucli arduous enterprise as theirs. • Then have succeeded to constitutional aspirations, disloyalty, fretfulness, bitterness, abuse, and democratic yearnings. A few years of our present treatment have been invariably found sufficient to turn loyal colonists into chartist missionaries ; and a few days of such treatment tried upon Englishmen at home would drive them into frantic rebellion. The imposition of anomalous and illsuited constitutions, the arbitrary appropriation of hard-wrought revenues, the dilatory reference to a distant and useless sanction of the most ordinary, and needful, and urgent requirement of industry and commerce, are enough to break down the energy, perplex the enterprise, and, at last, exhaust the vitality of even England's offspring. - The spirit which animates English colonization is the very effervescence of that essential spirit of freedom which characterizes and animates the institutions of England's home. English colonies, above all other colonies, have ever claimed the greatest internal freedom, and required for their sustenance and successful development the highest political independence. The general principles, says De Tocqueville, which are the groundwork of modern constitutions—principles which were imperfectly known at the time in Europe, and not completely triumphant even in Great Britain— were all recognised in the seventeenth centuary by the laws of New England—the intervention of the people in public affairs, the free voting of taxes, and the responsibility of authorities were established without discussion there. We consider ourselves now the champions of such principles against absolute power throughout the world; yet we select this advanced period of our country's history to invert them in our colonies. We vaguely connect in our minds the separation of our older colonies with the development of these principles, instead of their first infraction, which was* really the cause of separation ; and we cling to their sustained infraction as the right normal condition of the retention of our present colonial empire. Let a minister be ever indiscreet enough to exaggerate the tyranny of such an inversion of constitutional principles as this, by any one such extra stroke of impolicy as the late attempt to enforce our convict service on the Cape, and we see the latent spirit of English freedom bursts out from ever-smouldering discontent into a convulsion of resistance which needs but the further irritation of obstinate ministerial caprice to shake the little settlement to its foundations, invite surrounding insult and aggression, and involve the whole empire in bootless war. When colonies were strong enough, this struggle ended in separation" and in these days Canada acquires repose only in sullen, thankless immunity from further molestation, and South Africa frets itself into dismemberment. Possessed of free institutions and self-government, our colonies may indeed incur internal agitation, or frontier aggression, or native insurrections; but the prudence and vigour of self-reliance have never

failed against the attacks of far worse foes than those which now so costlily and interminably engage our imperial forces in FrenchAlgerian butcheries. The 200 freemen who first settled Connecticut repulsed within the first month after their arrival, an army of 700 of the most warlike Indians, organized, set on them, and supported by the Dutch. Far, indeed, from their thoughts or inclinations was any call on England for men or money: they were satisfied with their institutions ; and their self-management involved their self-defencs. When the Lords of Trade asked the New England colonies to consult for self-defence, they proposed to unite themselves for the purpose under a President appointed by the Crown, and a Council elected by themselves. England thought this too independent and democratic a proposal, and substituted a plan for the Governors to assemble and order what means of defence they thought right, drawing on the English treasury for the expense, which was afterwards to be refunded by a tax on the colonies. We know the result. We have repeated the same mode of defence for our Gape Colonists; —we have tried the refunding system in asking from them in return to accept our convicts, and the result is similar.

Denied self-government, with its correlative self-defence, our Colonies, discontented, divided, corrupted, insulted, hang drooping and vitiated on the paternal arms, which they might rather support; they invite attaok and job in their defence; nor are they less injured than injurious by^such a system.

Worried by governors, whom nothing- but a corrupt economy of patronage could inflict upon any people, whose official instructions are a quackery of governmental experiments, and whose chief occupation is intercepting consequent complaints, our colonies are, one by one, estranged from us. And foreign nations console themselves for their inferiority of national destiny by the contemplation of England's voluntary wasting of her own peculiar birthright of empire. A late ungarded expression of an actual Governor, descriptive of the system he is himself administering, is invaluable. In a recent despatch from New Zealand, Sir George Grey defends his adoption of wholly nominated Provincial Councils, by alleging the necessity of dovetailing his plan with the existing wholly nominated General Council, which, says he, is composed of Auckland gentlemen, who had no knowledge of the requirements or tvishes of the inhabitants of other portions of Neic Zealand. One would have thought the ten years wear of such a government would have sacked a settlement as effectually as a Trojan siege. The vitality of English colonies is truly astonishing ; and if emancipated from the Down-ing-street incubus, would no doubt encircle England with a brotherhood of first-rate cognate nations, faithful to the same Crown, cartying the same flag, and co-operating with similar institutions, identical interests, and joint enterprise, throughout the world.

I should add, that His Excellency afterwards came round to the opinion that real representative institutions might be granted, but he foretels great discontent on the withdrawal, inseparable from such a grant, of the Imperial Government's expenditure, and great risk of his favourite schemes for military roads and native civilization being dropt by the narrow parsimony of self-administration. What a satire on the system is this old type of a rotten and effete imposture of government, fearing lest emancipated nationality should tread, in its giant advance, on his pottering little schemes and plans, or lest Englishmen should hesitate, for the sake of the free control of their own affairs, to relinquish the miserable perquisites of a corrupt dependence !

Unfortunately for Sir George Grey's calculations, the colonists already know that his plans of government for them involve, with all their other evils, a wild extravagance of their resources, outweighing all possible gains from government expenditure. He recommends £10,000 a-year to he reserved as civil list from the. revenue of each of the settlements in New Zealand—that is, nearly their whole revenue ; and he naively adds to this suggestion, that if a larger civil list could be reserved—which must mean the whole revenues—he thinks representative institutions might be earlier introduced. On a balance of this wholesale appropriation and waste of revenue against the perquisites of government, the inducements held out to New Zealand to put up with'a system of government

which obstructs all their ordinary and most needful business, are certainly not large. Englishmen who will not investigate these subjects, do not believe in the gross obstruction of a colony's interests by our government. I will give one instance. In 1842, I read a despatch, in which Lord Stanley acknowledges a petition for a lighthouse at Port Nicholson harbour, with offers to pay the whole cost, amounting to £1500, if made chargeable on dues. The Secretary of State replies he can form no opinion on the subject in the absence of any report upon it from the Governor, but he will apply for the Governor's opinion. The wholly useless delay of this reference would have been enough provocation ; but the lighthouse is not yet permitted to be built, and several wrecks have taken place on the spot. Can the history of French centralism instance so abominable and gratuitous a local injury?

The; habit, the pride, the security of a free and energetic people consist in the ready perception and self-exucution of its own requirements. When a free people are fully possessed of an idea, they feel themselves sure to realise it: the only calculation in estimating the probability of any national event, is the hearty acceptation of its desirability by the mass of the people. God, indeed, overrules the issue; but no ordinary human obstacle is supposed to stand in the Avay of a free people's attaining their national requirements, or ridding themselves of an acknowledged national grievance. It is said that when a year's success on the part of King Charles had reduced the cause of the parliament to the very verge of extinction, Sir Harry Vane and his colleagues never for a moment doubted of ultimate success; for in their minds the king's cause had become condemned by the main body of the people. Consider for one instant, a race of men habituated to such a mode of calculation placed in an aspect of such dire reverse as to have to admit into the constant estimate of their probable supply of daily local requirements, the incalculable caprice and unscrupulous jobbing of a distant government, not only uninterested in their prosperity, not only unchecked by any popular remonstrance, but absolutely living on their plunder—though themselves* practically the most plundered of the two—existing only upon the mockery of governing them, and feeding the hungry and worthless followers of an imperial retinue out of the very bread of their daily existence and necessities.

It is not emancipation of the colonies from British allegiance which these thoughts tend to. If it were, still I would not that her Majesty should retain colonies merely to injure them, and ourselves through them. But it cannot be, that treating our dependencies with the justice, recognising in them the rights and liberties, and allowing them the local means and powers by which we confess ourselves their fellow-sub-jects to live, to breathe, and have a political existence, proud, and 1 happy, and superior to other nations—it cannot be, that giving them this breath of heaven will alienate and separate them from us. Must we reduce them to the lassitude of inanition, and suffocate almost their last life-breath, before we can feel sure of retaining them in our power? And is this, after all, the meaning of Lord John Russell's sublime orations, and of all Earl Grey's transcendental flights of lip-homage to the cause of colonial liberty ! The calmer calculators, moreover, now begin to think we may as well let the colonies go. They use Pharaoh-like language over these serfs of their own blood and lineage, degraded, by a selfishness as short-sighted as cruel, from free dependents to a weak but angry helotry.

I have often reflected, with bitter vexation, how much this thwarting and jobbing of colonization have, together with the degrading influence of transportation, frustrated the natural tendencies of our energetic race to spread over and occupy other lands, and how fully they account for the dismal aspect of fertile possessions wanting hands to fructify them, while the hands intended by Providence for- those purposes are reduced to picking oakum, or digging and refilling holes, or carrying cannon-balls round our prison-yards. So has England's fiction of colonial government and defence reduced her celebrated colonizing people from being pioneers of England's civilization, religion, wealth, and power, into becoming only her disgrace, burden, and affliction.

The Act which suspended Lord Grey's universally condemned Constitution for New Zea-

land expires next year. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that a new Constitution Bill should be passed this Session. It must fairly meet the now enlightened and determined demands of the Colonists, and abandon the miserable old pettifogging ideas of official patronage and jobbing. But Earl Grey is not the man to do this. Those Members of Parliament who see the vast importance of an immediate and proper adjustment of our dealings vvith our Colonies, must be on the alert."