CANT AT A DISCOUNT IN THE COLONIES.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume IV, 21 June 1845, Page 64

CANT AT A DISCOUNT IN THE COLONIES.

[From the John Bull.} A spirit of determined opposition to Exeter Hall — its saints and its sinners — its Buxtons and its Scobles — its cant and its nonsense — its earwigging and its slanders — is, we delight to perceive, spreading throughout the colonies. Hitherto that spirit has been confined to our tropical possessions, but now it is circulating through all our transmarine possessions, cold and hot. They are at last finding out their common enemy, and in their knowledge of it there is safety. In an Australian pamphlet, published by a Mr. Hamilton, as excellent in matter as it is admirable in manner, we find the following passage : — " Now that the slavery question is disposed of, and that the ruin of the finest colonies and their planters is accomplished by the meddling philanthropists of Exeter Hall, the energies of these people are exclusively directed against Australia and New Zealand ; &ad the protection of the savages against the inroads of civilization has become the avowed system of our imperial rulers, whether Whig or Tory. God forbid that I should be suspected of advocating any harsh treatment of these benighted tribes ; but if it be the paramount duty of Government to carry the arts of peace, and the wealth of civilization into the remotest corners of the country over which it presides, we must not allow our progress to be stopped by the supposed rights of the savages, as the first occupiers of the •oil." And in a speech delivered near Graham's Town, in the Cape of Good Hope, at a meeting of the frontier farmers, held in August last, a Mr. Bowker thus commenced : — " Brother Frontier Farmers— l beg to call your serious attention to the misdirected sympathies of the people of England, for there lies the tap-root of all the evil we complain of, and from thence comes all the misgovernment of which we have so long and to bitterly complained." After quoting a succession of outrageous calumnies from the Exeter Hall libellers, Mr. Bowker proceeded : — " Men never leave the land of their birth without heartrending causes, which well deserve the attention of the Government they may have lived under; yet what has been the endeavour of our Government with regard to these men ? Why, to blurt forth false, infamous, and lying assertions as the reasons why they left their homes, assertions which they knew tallied well with the spurious philanthropy of Exeter Hall. Oh, that England would but look at home ! Nothing can be more baneful, either to her or to us, than these ignorant and ruinous good intentions ; formerly she was satisfied with relieving the distress at her own door, but it is now the fashion to listen with intense interest to tales of woe and oppression from afar. All ranks delight to have their feelings harrowed up by stories of woe from distant lands ; they are implicitly believed; their indignation is thus soon roused, and their purses put in requisition. The flogging of a sulky negro, the wrongs of the Kafir nation, the oppression of the Hottentots, are what they are now-a days gulled with ; these are the things which excite their pity, and call forth their charity; upon these they legislate with a blind, ignorant, and ruinous perseverance ; their morbid imaginations cannot conceive that either pity or compassion, benevolence or charity, enter into our composition. These common attributes of civilized humanity they will not allow us to possess. In these things they had better let us alone : we have hearts to feel for any misery that may be among us. They had better turn to the poorhouse and prisonhouse of their own land, where guilt and poor misfortune pine ; let them look to the back streets and alleys of their own unfortunate towns the coloured classes within and without the colony have nothing to equal that ; amongst them there are no poor, over-laboured wretches, who nightly turn in from their work to their wretched pallet, meagre crust, gaunt and half-famished wives and children, to return in the morning to the monotony of their daily task— the only things that bring change to which are loss of health, the poorhouse, and a premature grave. We know nothing of these things." Only let this spirit be universal in the colonies, and there is strength enough at home to purge the Colonial Office of Exeter Hall Tenom. ____________

South Australian Wheat in London. The South Australian publishes account-sales of Adelaide wheat, shipped per Francis Spaight and East London. Prices ranged from 545. to 58s. per quarter. The highest price appears to have been got in London ; but the greatest nett returns in Lifcetpool. The nett proceeds in London, o§ one parcel, which was sold at 58s. ppr quarter, are 38. 54d. per bushel; bags retufted very little the worse: the nett proceeds of a parcel sold in Liverpool amounted to 4s. 6d. per bushel, allowing for loss on bags sold in Liverpool. The price at which it sold was 565. per quarter, the freight is. 3d. per bushel, and the duty 4s. per quarter. Letters have been received, guaranteeing a profit on wheat shipped at 245. per quarter ; and parties here have been authorized to draw for 255. per quarter on any shipment. — Itaunceston Examiner, April 26.