SPEECH OF THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P.

Lyttelton Times, Volume II, Issue 99, 27 November 1852, Page 9

SPEECH OF THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P.

ON THE SECOND READING OF THE NEW ZEALAND CONSTITUTION BILL. Mr. Gladstone's speech has been published as a pamphlet, corrected by himself, and is of such immediate consequence in connection with our recently granted Institutions, that we feel we shall be doing our readers a service in publishing it at length.

Mr. Gladstone said: I consider it, sir, before all things essential to the formation of a just opinion of the several details upon this measure, that the house should consider its general position. I assume that there is a prevalent, indeed almost an universal, opinion, that the existence of the present Parliament ought not to be materially prolonged, either by actual contests, or by the expression of possible differences of opinion, upon the details of a bill relating to the Constitution of New Zealand. If this be so. then it appears to me that the question which we have before us is, in its first aspect, this—whether we shall, each of us following out that particular scheme for a colonial constitution which he may prefer, proceed to develop and urge upon the house the adoption of suck scheme in its various parts; or whether, upon, the other hand, we shall be content to view the proposed plan of her Majesty's Government as a whole—to say we like or dislike it as a whole, and as a whole we accept or reject it. It seems to me that this is the real alternative before us. As practical men, having a practical object in view, and weighing together, as well as we can, several advantages which in some, degree conflict with one another, we must in the main be content to forego many things in. order to gain an 'object more eminently and comprehensively important than these things, however much we may esteem them. This being so, I shall endeavour to judge of the merits of the bill viewed strictly as a whole. I shall state the points in which, as I think, it is a beneficial measure, and in which, considered with reference to previous colonial measures, it appears to me to be a decided advance upon our previous recent legislation. I shall also state with freedom the points in which it appears to me to be seriously faulty or doubtful; and shall endeavour to strike the balance between them with equity. But, sir, before I proceed to do this, I cannot consent to pass by an occasion of this kind, when we are called upon to deal definitively with the constitution of an important and remote colony, without calling the attention of the House to the false position in which, as I conceive, we stand with respect to the government of that colony, and of many others of our colonies. I am not aware, for myself, of any one case of a colony with which we have dealt by recent legislation, and in which we have at the present time arrived at a just, and what I may call for the sake of precision—l hope I shall not be considered as making a pedantic use of the word —a normal relation between the colony and the mother country. By the term " normal relation," I do not mean a relation founded upon the speculations of philosophers or economists alone; but I mean a relation which has been developed in the world of actual life, and which, with regard to its leading outlines and all its essential features, was the old relation that in former times —though you are accustomed to ridicule those times as having been comparatively unenlightened—subsisted between the mother country and the North American colonies.

The idea which we entertain of a colony at the present moment, as it appears to me, is this —we think of it as something which has its cen| tre of life in an executive government —we think of the establishment of a colony as something which is to take effect by legislative enactments, or by the executive power of the Crown, and by tho funds of the people of England. This administrative establishment, according to our present colonial system, is the root and trunk around which by degrees a population is_ to grow, under which by degress that population is, according to our modern and in this case most unhappy phrase, to be trained for freedom, and to which in course of time some modicum of free institutions is to be granted. That I think is a true description of the manner in which, and of the idea under which, the foundation of our modern colonies has been ordinarily conducted.

Now, sir, I conceive that this fundamental difference prevails ■between the colonial policy

pursued in this country of late years, and the policy pursued in other great departments of the State. If we look at the policy which prevails in the Home department, if we take the iinancial policy of the Government, or if we take the foreign policy of the country, as was well stated hy my noble friend near me (Lord Palmerston) upon another question in the earlier part of the evening, we find upon the whole, that with various differences with respect to matters of fact and to details, certain leading principles are continuously followed out, and that upon these leading principles there is a general concurrence of opinion ; so that no person ever proposes seriously to alter the fundamental principles upon which the foreign policy of the country has been conducted under a long succession of ministers. But that which I think requires still more and more to be presented to the mind of this House and of the people of England, until it become with them a living and practical conviction, is this proposition, that in the policy we have pursued in the foundation of colonies—l speak now of our free and planted colonies, not of military posts termed colonies, nor of colonies whose social relations are disturbed by questions of race— we have proceeded on principles fundamentally wrong ; and that the acts introduced and passed by Parliament for the purpose of raising, by slow and reluctant degrees, the structure of freedom in those colonies, have not been so much recognitions of a right principle as modifications, qualifications, and restraints imposed upon a wrong principle. (Hear.)

Now what is this right principle of colonization to which I refer ? It may be enunciated in my view by one word, or at least one phrase, to which I will presently come. Your ancestors, two hundred years ago, when they proceeded to found colonies, did not do it by coming down to this House with an estimate prepared, and asking so many thousands a year for a governor, a judge, an assistant-judge, a colonial secretary, and a large apparatus of minor officers. What they did was this. They collected together a body of free men, destined to found a free state in another hemisphere, upon principles of freedom analogous to our own, which, should grow up by a principle of increase intrinsic to itself, and, enjoying that freedom under the shelter against foreign aggression from civilized powers which your imperial power was to afford them, should in process of time propagate your language, manners, institutions, and religion in distant quarters of the globe.. (Hear, hear.) But it was not on artificial support from home that these institution leaned ; and the consequence was that they advanced with a rapidity which, considering the undeveloped state of communications and of commerce at that time, was little less than miraculous. (Hear, hear.) That was the consequence to them; and the consequence to you was this, that you never heard of pecuniary charges brought against this country for their maintenance ; that, on the contrary, you found them ready to assist you in your foreign wars, and that instead of being called on to send regiments, service companies, and I know not what besides, to maintain the domestic police of those colonies, and keep the peace for them against unruly members of their own communities, or against savage tribes upon their borders, such was their admiration of freedom, and such their profitable use of it, that not only did they not ask you for your regiments and service companies, or petition you for means to keep the peace, but they held it as a grievance if you attempted to impose on them your little standing armies, and they considered that, having been educated in English habits and ideas, they were perfectly competent to follow out the paths in which those habits and ideas conducted them for themselves. (Hear, hear.) Such was the then state of things. Departing from that scheme ,of policy in later days you have implanted a principle, if not of absolute, yet of comparative feebleness in your distant settlements. You have brought upon yourselves enormous expense; and, by depriving them of the fulness of political freedom, you have deprived them of the greatest attraction which they could possibly hold out to the best part of your population to emigrate; because Englishmen do not love to emigrate to countries where they cannot enjoy the political franchises which they enjoy at home, and where the regulation of their interests will be committed to the hands of a Government which, however mild and equitable, must still be called

injprinciple despotic. (Hear, hear.) Whatever we may say as to despotism—and I am not given to take an over severe view of despotism, where it is adapted to the habits of a country and its social state—yet as regards free-born Englishmen, such a system is most monstrous and most irrational ; and the consequence has been that there is a subject of complaint present and familiar to us all, namely this, that you have been unable to get the superior classes of the community to emigrate; for the high-minded, welleducated men, who would have been themselves the centres of a valuable social influence, have been reluctant to leave the shores of England, because they were unwilling to forfeit the advantages of a state of high civilization, and to incur a certain deprivation of the great bulk of their political liberties.—(Hear.) And thus our modern colonists, instead of remaining, as formerly, in continuous and hereditary possession of their liberties, after quitting the mother country, instead of keeping them, and handing them on as the regular and unquestioned heritage of their children in another hemisphere, go out to Australia or New Zealand to be deprived of these liberties, and then perhaps, after fifteen, or twenty, or thirty years' waiting, or yet more, to have a portion given back to them, with great and magnificent language about the liberality of Parliament in conceding free institutions—(hear and a laugh)—while during the whole of that interval they are condemned to hear the whole of the miserable jargon which has grown into use about training them for free institutions, and fitting them for the privileges thus conferred; whereas, in point of fact, so far from thus training and fitting them, every year and every month during which they are kept out of the possession and familiar use of such institutions, and retained under the administration of a despotic government, renders them less fit for free institutions, and the consequence is that the introduction of them at length is attended with great embarrassments ; liberty comes to them as a novelty; its working is something strange and unknown, attended with hazard, uncertainty, and excitement; and thus you have inconvenient or disastrous consequences brought upon you by your own fault, which you might have avoided if you had only followed that which in this case no one need be ashamed of holding up to commendation as the wisdom of your ancestors—if you had only walked in the path they struck out for your guidance. Let the people you send out to colonize a distant land take root unmolested in their new ground as the seed of a future community, as the natural and living centre around which population is to grow; and instead of training them for free institutions, rely upon it that the best training they can have is the training they have already received before they left your shores, and while they are still British citizens ; let them carry their freedom with them, even as they carry their agricultural implements, or anything else necessary to establish them in their new abodes ; so let them hold it for themselves, and so let them transmit it to their children. This is the true secret of subduing the difficulties of colonization. (Cheers).

(To be continued.)