RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT IN THE COLONIAL OFFICE.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume IV, 21 June 1845, Page 63

RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT IN THE COLONIAL OFFICE.

[From the Colonial Gazette.} The original administration of Government in England was by the privy council in the name of the king. Departments wero not so sharply defined in early times ; business was more scanty and less complex than in modern times, and called less imperatively for the division of employment and combination of labour. As the multiplying business of the nation introduced departments, the heads of these departments came to possess more importance in the deliberations of the privy council than those councillors who, to borrow a phrase from the French, " hold no portfolios." Greater frequency of intercourse among themselves, more free access to the royal presence, was a necessary consequence of being heads of an executive department. Much business was despatched without troubling the privy council. This is " the rise and progress " of the cabinet council in the state : and the cabinet council, once fairly established and recognised, soon contrived to shelve the privy council, which, except in the business of legal appeals, has of late been kept up more for ornament than use. The existence of the cabinet council — its arrogation of all executive functions to itself, in the first instance — is, in the slang of diplomacy, a fait accompli. And the new arrangement undoubtedly has its advantages, so long as the despatch of business is intrusted exclusively to the cabinet council in the first instance only. But the gradual discontinuance of the exercise of superintendence — of a kind of appellate control over the cabinet council by the privy council — has been productive of great mismanagement and injustice. All legal questions in which an appeal lies to the privy council are received by the judicial committee as a matter of right ; but no administrative dispute is ever investigated by the privy council, unless the consent of the head of the department in which it arises is previously asked and obtained. The consequence is the despotism of the heads of departments, each in his own office. Even though the members of the cabinet council were inclined to exercise criticism and control over their colleagues, they have no leisure ; each is fully employed by the business of his own office. There it no check on the head of a department ; and the evil does not stop there : the frequent change of ministers, Under a constitution like ours, is constantly throwing into power men unacquainted with even the forms of the office over which they are placed. They fall into the leading-strings of the permanent head clerks or secretaries, and there is no means of revealing either to themselves or others their slavish subjection to their own underlings. It is in the colonies, in the remnants of the old duchy of Normandy in the Channel Islands, and in the out-stations and dependencies, that the evil of this emancipation of the heads of departments from the control of the privy council, to subject them to " viceroys " over them in their own bureaus, is most felt. Every little borough at home has its member of parliament or fraction of a member of parliament. Every officer in the army or navy has some professional connexion with influence to do battle for him through the Horse Guards or Board of Admiralty. But the inhabitants of our colonies and dependencies have no representatives in parliament, and no interest with any man or body exterior to the cabinet and Government offices, with authority to protect them. The consequence is, that the Colonial Office (and in affairs of the Channel Islands the Home Office equally) uses, or more properly, abuses its despotic, irresponsible power to the utmost. Parliament is too much besieged by home claimants to bestow continuous attention on colonial affairs. It is an unprecedented thing to hear of a ministry upset for the misconduct of its Colonial Secretary —he slips into office with hit party, and works his wicked will uncontrolled so long as his party can keep itself in. The appointment of a committee of the privy council (on the analogy of its judicial committee) to investigate complaints in administrative matters from each department would go far to remedy this evil. Let us suppose that it was made a practice to appoint men who had for a long time held high offices in the colonies (either by appointment of the Crown or election of their fellow colonists), and thus become intimately acquainted with colonial affairs, to be privy councillors ; that the privilege of appeal from the defile before him the colonist must feel proudly that the first impetus to Euroropean commerce as it now is was given by European colonisation; that the riches of Holland, Spain, and England have been mainly drawn from colonies ; and that the

beadroll of wealthy and civilized states must have been curtailed by one- half had not the colonies been founded out of which they had grown. And turning his eyes to the future he must see in colonisation the only means by which labour and capital, redundant in certain isolated regions, are to be scattered abroad to fertilize the whole earth, instead of being heaped up idly to cumber a part of it.