Colonial.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XII, Issue 703, 3 August 1859, Page 3

Colonial.

HAWKES BAY,

By the northern mail we received a month's file= of the 'Hawkes Bay Herald,' from which we are able to make several interesting extracts relating to the Separation question, and the.ppsitipn of the New Provinces Act at home. ':■'.'..

On the* llth of June, the; first session of .the Provincial Council was closed by an address from his Honor, who rose in his place and addressed the Council to : the ..following, effect:-— '■'.

"Mr.Speaker and Gentlemen of the Provincial Council,—By the next mail for Auckland I shall transmit to his Excellency the Governor the Executive, Education, and Appropriation Acts, passed by you this session, with a request th at he will be pleased to .grant his assent to them, as required by one of the clauses of the act by which the province has been called into existence.

"" I have to thank you sincerely, not only for realizing the anticipation I had formed that your general conduct would not only justify the claims advanced by the people of Hawkes Bay for local self-government, but also for the very practical and business-like mariner with which you have; treated many important matters that have engaged your attention. .

" I accept with cheerfulness-the Executive Act you have thought fit to adopt—regretting only that by limiting the number of the Executive Council to two members, the utility of the measure has been somewhat endangered.

" The Education Act I believe to be one that will meet with general approbation, that will •be largely taken advantage of', and that will effect much good within the province.

" During the time that will elapse between this and our next meeting, my, best attention shall be given tOiSee that your wishes are faithfully carried putin regard to the very liberal appropriations you have made for public buildings, roads, bridges, and immigration^ and, with the advice of the ,■ Executive; Council,.will- use, every endeavour, to put the Survey! Department into a thoroughly efficient and satis/actory state.

,;"The propriety of deferring action on any of the alterations of the land regulations suggested in my late address to, you, till the. next meeting of the Council, must be apparent to all who are aware of the present state of things, and the fact that, her Majesty's assent having been, withheld from the Waste Lands Act of 1858, the whole subject will have to be ; dealt with anew at the next meeting of the r Greneral Assembly. 'But the subject is one that: I shall not fail to call your attention to next seesion,;before the meeting of the General Assembly,, and with, I/hope, satisfactory results. "Ilxaveonly again to tender my sincere acknowledgments;,for. the fair, moderate, and.earnest manner in which you hare conducted the business of this session, and..:for your evident desire to assist me in every way possible to discharge the duties you have been pleased to impose upon me. ■ „'" I now declare,the that first session of the Provincial Council of Hawkes Bay has terminated, and that this Council stands prorogued. "T. H. FITZGERALD, . "Superintendent." The New Provinces Act.—From a letter received from Wellington, per Wonga Wonga, we learn that, by the April mail, a communication had been-received in that city from a reliable quarter, in which it is affirmed that the New ; Proyinces Act would receive, hei' Majesty's assent. The reasons assigned; harmonise very strikingly with tte tenor of the able article from the 'Lyttelton Times' which we copied in our last. The ; Home Government would not interfere with a meas.ure which had passed both branches of the, legislature and received the .Governor's assent—justly considering, we doubt not, that suchja course would ";be;a precedent very dangerous to the .principle: .of, self government." .'lt is said, however, whether on sufficient grounds we know, not,; that had the act been.reserved fori her Majesty's assent, the Secretary for the Colonies .would have yielded to the pressure from without, and recommended its disallowance. We do not think ;that. the position of Hawkes Bay would have been;, at,' all affected by the;disallowance of the act.lt has,, says ,the 'Lyttelton Times,' " been acted upon in such a manner as to make it ialmost impossible to return to the statu quo ante" /In the worst view of :the case we think we could safely laugh, at the triumphant assertion of the 'Independent' that 1 Hawkes, Bay would be again spart of the old province,within two months. r ßutrwe are glad ; that, by the intelligence we now communicate,,all.cavil has been set aside, and our -newly Required and much ■valued position established beyond the shadowiof a doubt.—July 9.

Mobb Land Purchases.-i-We are glad to find that the anticipations expressed in our last have already to some extenfrbeen.realised. There has been a large concourse of natives at Napier for the last weeli-— Lambrig them 'two' influential.chiefs from the Wairoa'. We hear that their visit has resulted in the sale-of a block,pf land, containing ten to twelve thousand ; acr<3B,..at., .Moengi engi. . This land is rather hilly, but its,proximity ; to Napier—being, it is said, within seven miles (distance by water and fifteen by land—and the fact of there being,a good deal of timber upon it, renders the purchase one of no inconsiderable importance. Another considerable tract of country has also been negotiated for within the last few days. It lies to the north-east of the Ahurirrblbck, arid includes, some, extensive graWy plains. X is.supposecL to contain about 40$00 acres, Tn addition to these purchases, some dis-r ; puted sale's (such as the Okawa) have been finally adjusted!— Mid. . : ;

We.reprint from the 'Herald' of June 18, the following article discussing: the letter of Mr.'J. E. FitzGerald. upon the New Provinces Act; We this morning devote a considerable portion of our space to ; the re-publication of a letter addressed by Mr. J. E. FitzGerald to Mr. John Hall, and which appeared m the .' Lyttelton Times' of ; the Ist inst. The writer, as few of our. readers are not aware, was formerly ; Superintendent of the Province of Canterbury, and a distinguished me'mher of the House : of Eepresentatives. He is now in England for the benefit of bis health/where he is looked upon, it is said, as a high authority in JSew Zealand, affairs. The object of the writer is ! twofold: first to show the present position of the colony in the matter of its'wasto lands, consequent upon the of the Waste Lands Act, 185»; and, second, to give expression to his views upon the New Provinces Act.* With the first we do not now deal although we may remark, enpas«m*,that Mr. FitzGerald gives a clear and able exposition of the whole matter, and that ii> would be difficult to rise from a perusal of his letter with. , any other impression than that the Waste Lands Act, 1854., now the law of the colony, is the one best adapted to meet the varied requirements of the different provinces. To the second portion of Mr. FitzGerald's letter, we must, however, record a decided protest; and the grounds upon which we do so shall be briefly stated. He begins by designating the " New Provinces Act," a " most unconstitutional measure.'.' This is a vague term, but we inNew Zealand would regard it as meaning something diametrically opposed to the Constitution Act. Now the framers of the Constitution Act , expressly provided for the creation of new provinces—the General Assembly having been so em* powered under clause 69, with the proviso that a bill for this purpose should be reserved for the sig- . nification of her Majesty's pleasure thereon. And the Constitution Amendment Act, while repealing the 69th and two other clauses, does so, says the Secretary Jot the. Colonies, lest,- giving " certain limited of amendment," they, should; if continued,., appear to clash with the .more general authority now given." The -lesser ■powers gave place to the greateV. Mr, FitzGerald .proceeds to say'that, in the United States, "Congress bas kept in its own hands the final act of declaring any new territory or .state to be admitted into the Union." But we can trace no resemblance whatever between the admission of a new territory into the American federal union, and the creation of a new province within the-Bri-tish colony of New Zealand. The one is an independent state, in 'm any cases far larger than the whole of Great Britain, with its own distinct laws; the other an integral portion of one colony, protected by the British crown and subjeqt to British rule—although in the enjoyment, by delegation, of such local powers as can best be exercised by persons resident on the spot. J Mr. FitzGerald, however, like his contemporary in power, Dr. Featherston, regards the six original provinces as six colonies, and holds that they were'intended to be Governkents, not Road-boards or Vestries. Bufc how can we reconcile this with the sixth paragraph of Sir John Pakington's despatch/accompanying the Constitution Act, wherein he writes,—"lt has been thought advisable that the Provincial Councils should consist of a single chamber, consisting wholly of elected members; they have been led to this conclusion by the comparatively unimportant nature of these councils j which will be limited to local objects, such as would be considered here to be of a municipal character, rather than partaking of the higher attributes of legislation." And, in. the tenth1 paragraph, he writes of Superintendents, "But they should at all events be included in the Commissionof.the Peace fortheir respective localities. Mr. FitzGerald's great cause of complaint, however, is in not having a separate act of the Gehersl Assembly for every new province. This sounds plausible enough ; arid such might be the state of the law were it not for the long-and uncertain interval betvyeen each session of the General Assembly—precluding the possibility of applications being met with anything like promptitude, and. placing the revenues of the district so applying afc the mercy, meanwhile, of the province from which it is desirous of being separated. That this is no imaginary danger is shown by the late attempt of the'Otago Government to;dispose of some 600,009 acres at the Bluff, a district, the settlers of which were, then, as they are now, agitating'1 for separation. And, in our own case, what would be the consequence of our. being .compelled to wait for separation till next meeting of the Assembly—why that, in addition to the large sum (over £30,000), already substracted from the revenues of the district, perhaps £50,000 more would be swallowed up by the Wellington Government, never to be disgorged. We therefore think that the General Assembly, in having taken every precaution to prevent unnecessary'or useless subdivisions, have acted with a due j regard to the interests of the older provinces; and that, in leaving the practical part of the measure in the hands of the Governor in Council, they have taken a just and proper view of the exigencies of rapidly increasing out-lying districts. Mr. FitzGerald, like many others who appear to be ignorant of the true state of the casfy asserts that the Ahuriri lands were "pledged to the. debts of the Wellington province." This we emphatically deny; the Wellington Provincial: Government had no power to pledge the waste lands—the loans contracted by them having been secured upoh; the general revenue of the province. But to. a fair adjustment of this question of debt between themselves and the Wellington Government, the settlers of Ahuriri "are by nO means averse; all that they want is a settlement based upon a debtor and creditor account, and they rely with confidence on the justice of the General Assembly—the only tribunal before which this cause can be tried. The writer proceeds to say,—"lf the subdivision be extended beyond the real natural separate colonies into! which New Zealand is divided, the constitu-" tion will have undergone a radical change. There were six colonies, all formed.separately from England," &c. The. inference is, looking especially to the words we have italicised, that six divisions of* the colony are : so indicated by natural boundaries, that further subdivisions must be an encroachment, as it were, on the prerogative of nature. .This position, however, is quite untenable—the original provinces, being .surrounded by no well-defined natural barriers sueh1 as to render them—what Mr. FitzGerald and others would gladly see them—the impregnable strongholds, of. ultra-provincialism. Nay, we believe, had the Constitution Act not been passed,/.and the .New Zealand Company's operations not been brought to a stand, that, without running counter to nature, other and separate settlements would have been formed-r-one of them, probably.in the present province of Hawke's Bay —as, indeed,.was. actually ,proposed to the NewZealand Company by Capt. Thomas. And we have the well-known declaration of Sir G. Grey that this woulcLhave been ope. of the; original provinces had it then been inhabited to a sufficient extent. If ,a settlement; formed .after the introduction of the Constitution Act is, as ; independent, geographically, of the original settlement, as,the, six original settlements'were of each other, we cannot see a shadow of reason in that new settlement being condemned to the perpetual spoilage and neglect which ' are the inevitable fate of outlyiug districts—its lands sold,, and, the [proceeds, as well as, the revenue from other sources, disposed of by the right of numbers .at'a distance, without reference to the wants or wishes : of, those by,whose..energy as colonists such revenue had been created. We will put a case, by way of illustration, more especially addressed to the settlers ; of Canterbury. We will suppose that their

•"6-wrr province—which is no more separated by natni'iil boundaries ' from" the Provmco :of Nelson .than AlHiririisfroin Wellington—had not been in- - habiteff before the' Constitution Act was passed, ■: and that it Was, in consequence;•incorporated in the Province of Nelson.' 'We will further suppose that, ■ shortly afterwards, Canterbury became -peopled and ■ prosperous-its fertile lands -yielding; thousands above thousands of pounds to beappropr.atedby the Province of Nfelson, mid spent, it may be in the; 1 iVnprovement-Of Nel.on; harbour. Would _the settlers whoso indomitable perseverance alone had. •tiveritiiis value to the hitherto waste viands, ;fce; satisfied.under such circumstances, with the reasonin" of Mr. FitzGerald, and quietly- look on,-not merely while their money was being <;spent, but • while they were being-made jointly responsible for " heavy loans, in the expenditure jof which-.their-very ■ existencewas an incident*almost unrecognised ? We rather think not. " TNor'do we imagine that a fear of breaking-up the real natural separate colonies .•« first-formed, ■ would have prevented them from, " protesting against such monstrous injustice, or : from seizing the first opportunity of securing to themselves a separate political existence. We would ■earnestly ask the people of Canterbury and-pur fellow-colonists generally who have read Mr. FitzGerald's letter, to ponder well these sayings, and, as respects this province, to judge fairly between Mr. J. B:- FitzGerald and - us—or rather, between the' position :io which he would wish v'to see the new province reduced and its fair-aim linnest claim to manage its own-affairs and dispose • of.its own local revenue "for its own advantage. In so judging,'we would ask them to bear in mind :■ that we have now'direct trade -with Sydney—that Wo shall be able' to load a vessel _at Napier this; season with wool of our own growing to the value ■of over £65,000—that our population is at present nearly 2000, andrapidly increasing—and that there; is no physical reason why we should be connected' with-Wellington an y more than Lytteltbn should, be with Nelson. We do not doubt the result: the! verdict of the enlightened and dispassionate colonist' must be that we have acted quite right in seeking separation, as the: General Government was, wise in granting it; and that on no p>inciple/of. justice < or equity can we be required again to submit to.th'ewile/we might well say theyoke/of■.Wellington.