IRRESPONSIBLE COLONIAL GOVERNMENT. [From the Hobart Town Courier.]

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume IV, Issue 193, 15 November 1845, Page 148

IRRESPONSIBLE COLONIAL GOVERNMENT. [From the Hobart Town Courier.]

The history of the Colonial Office furnishes an instance of the gradual conversion of delegated authority into almost unlimited power — of the establishment of a species of absolute despotism within a limited monarchy. Hence, while the British constitution imposes restraints on the Sovereign, and gives the people a voice in the measures of Government and the administration of affairs, the destinies of the British colonies are, in a great measure, controlled by a department of the State that seems, in its acts, to own no responsibility and to recognize no restriction. As an inseparable consequence, the interests of communities, scattered and remote, are extensively subjected to individual caprice and to an arbitrary exercise of administrative functions which the people of England would not allow even to the sceptered hand that claims the homage of the nation.

There is something in this directly repugnant to the genius of British freedom — to the general spirit of the British constitution. It is neither consonant in principle nor sound in policy — neither correct in

theory nor safe in practice. In its immediate operation, it engenders discontent and disaffection. In its ultimate effects, it tends to the disruption of the bonds that unite her distant possessions to the parent-land and to the final curtailment of the empire. The individual emigrant feels that, in his adopted country, he is placed under a new system of Executive agency, and that, by transference

to other regions professedly under one great Legislature, he has forfeited, without any criminal act, many of the privileges which he had been accustomed to enjoy. Communities thus formed of individual emigrants are not slow to discover that their political welfare and social happiness mainly depend on the views and purposes of an official organ that appears to be detached from the complex machinery of Imperial Government

— that seems to have, within itself, a distinct set ol movements, and to aim, in the strength of its own separate influence, at a different series of results. Connected, by an indivisible link, with the local authorities placed over distant dependencies, it reiulers them the automata of its pleasure and the agents of its will.

The consequences inevitable under such a system, as colonies progress in intelligence and strength, are not without instructive illustration in the brief history of colonization. "In the volumes of Horace Walpole's

Memoirs of the Early Years of the Reign of

George 111., already published," says the London Atlas, "that acute observer and faithful gossip — faithful as to things, if not always as to men — writing before the quar rel with our American colonies had grown into a revolution, records the common opinion of his day — that so long as the old Duke of Newcastle threw the despatches addressed to him by the Governors of those possessions into a closet unread, their affairs prospered; but from the moment George Grenville and his colleagues began to read and answer the despatches, confusion became worse confounded in the American colonies. The cause of this apparent inconsistency is not obscure. Those colonies had representative assemblies, and, when unobstructed by home ignorance and prejudice, they governed themselves well ; but when their

self-government was interfered with, inter-

rupted and overruled, disputes arose, the Governors ceased to act in concord with the colonists, a spirit of disaffection was encouraged, unjustifiable pretensions on the part of the mother-country were formed, and their application to the colonies forced them into armed resistance." From these plain facts is deduced the important corollary that " colonies to he well, must be, mainly, self- governed. That large and liberal representative institutions must be given them. That those institutions must be left to their free action. And that

the spirit of freedom therein must be encouraged, not repressed."

The impossibility, iudeed, of efficiently administering the details of Government and advantageously directing the minute internal affairs ot a remote possession, in almost utter ignorance of local circumstances, requirements, and necessities, is obvious at a glance. It is as preposterous as the demand that a patient, subject to sudden and dangerous organic disease, should be compelled, on every fresh derangement of the system, to seek Uie advice and await the prescriptions of a physician unacquainted with the symptomatic peculiarities of the case and stationed at the ends of the earth.

We are aware it has been asserted that, as a penal colony and an insignificant comn unity, it is absurd of us to talk of " constitutional rights " and representative Government. But to this we are content to reply in the words of the authority which we have already quoted. " Away, then, with the stupid cant that Englishmen in any colony are unfit for that system of representative Government they enjoy at home ! Wherever Englishmen are * gathered together ' under their Sovereign's auspices, there they are entitled to possess the great privileges they left. Nowhere is it constitutional to rule them by Governor's ordinances or Colonial Office despatches !"

The Screw Victorious. — In the trial between the Rattler and Alecto, the most conclusive results as to the screw superiority were proved, when the vessels being fastened to each other, and their heads put in opposite directions, the Rattler towed the Alecto at the rate of two miles and a half an hour.

Lord F. Egerton has retired from South Lancashire, and Mr. Macaulay from Edinburgh, because their constituants disapproved of their support of the grant to Maynooth College.