The New Zealander.

New Zealander, Volume 8, Issue 651, 10 July 1852, Page 3

The New Zealander.

Be just and fear nut : Let all the ends thou aim'st at, be thy Country'b, Thy God's, and Truth's.

AUCKLAND, SATURDAY, JULY 10, 1852.

We return to our late English, files for the purpose of condensing and grouping some additional home intelligence, much of which, being scattered through various journals, does nst admit o£ being clearlygiven by any separate extracts, and can only be brought before the reader by the summaries in which we endeavour to present in a brief space the collective results of lengthened, and some times tedious, plodding through a number of — not always accordant — accounts. Several "Church Matters" were engaging deeply the attention of the large and important classes for whom they have a special interest. Mr. Gladstone had made an advance to meet the wishes of the claimants for a Church of England Constitution in the Colonies, by bringing into Parliament "A Bill to relieve Bishops in the Colonies, in communion with the Church of England, and the Clergy and Laity in communion with them, in respect to legal doubts or disabilities affecting the management of their Church affairs." A copy of this Bill in ecctenso will be found in another column. It will be seen that Mr. Gladstone proposes to legalize the meetings of Bishops, clergy, and laity, for the purpose of making, under certain restrictions, regulations for the better conduct of their ecclesiastical affairs. It seems to be intended to guard against undue assumptions or the exercise of a persecuting spirit by prohibiting the imposition of temporal penalties, and by limiting the binding force of their acts (as indeed it must necessarily be limited) to declared members of the Church of England, and, even with those limits, by confining the force of the regulations within the same boundaries as to legal effect

which circumscribes the laws and usages of other Churches and religious communions in the same colonies. It is observable, ! however, that the Bill reserves to the Bishop that power of veto on the decisions of the Meetings which has been so strongly objected to by many Churchmen in these colonies: "a majority of voices of the clergy and laity severally and respectively" — (the underlined words by-the-by seem designed to secure that if they do not deliberate, they must at least vote, separately), — cannot, as we understand it, do anything without " the assent of the Bishop." It will be noticed as remarkable that New Zealand is not included in the number of colonies specified in the Schedule annexed to the Bill as those to which it shall immediately extend; but the scheme provides that the Queen may at any time by an order in Council bring the measure into force in any other colony.' A case originating in hostility to Tractarianism was pending in the Court of Arches, and excited lively interest. The Rev. G. E. Gladstone, Incumbent of Long Acre, Episcopal Chapel, (a cousin of Mr. W. E. Gladstone, M. P.), in the beginning of December preached a sermon in which he said, — " Some of the Bishops, God forgive them, are traitors : I would say much more plainly to his face than behind his back, that the Bishop of this diocese is alarmingly responsible and culpable for what passes in it." The Bishop or London inhibited the bold preacher from preaching again ; but the inhibition was disregarded, and his Lordship was prosecuting a suit in the Ecclesiastical Court to enforce obedience. The clergy of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields addressed the Bishop expressing their approbation of his Lordship's conduct in maintaining discipline ; but Mr. Gladstone, unmoved from the ground he had taken, reiterated in a second edition of his Sermon the passage which had given offence to his superior, adding a foot-note, in which he characterises the course adopted by the Bishop of London as " infatuated and mistaken," and adds, — "It may well be asked how is it that in the year 1851, nearly forty clergymen (so called) of the Church of England, retired at their leisure from that Church into the bosom of the Romish apostacy, not one of them being even attempted to be ejected by those Bishops, who, at their consecration, said they were ' read} 7 , with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive .away all erroneous and strange doctrine, and privately and openly to call upon and encourage others to do the same' — whilst one man in zeal, even though mistaken (which it is not) keeps his vow, and with faithful diligence does what in him lies to * drive away' such doctrine, even if found in high places and encouraged by the great and mighty, he is told, that very week, by his diocesan, ' You cannot suppose, for* an instant, that I am going to allow you to preach in my diocese ;' and is told so, moreover, in a tone of domineering passion, totally unworthy of a Christian bishop, and that before he had satisfied himself that the grounds upon which he rested it were true, which they were not." Mr. Gladstone had appeared in the Court of Arches before Sir J . Dodson, who had granted him till the first day of the next term, the 16th 'of March, for arguing the question, which Mr. Gladstone meant to do in person. Meanwhile he was delivering Lectures on Tractarianism in Freemason's Ha 11 . .. .Ultra-Tractarianism had triumphed in Frome, so far as the fixing of Mr. Bennett in the Vicarage of that important parish, in spite of the protest of the clergy, can be deemed a triumph. He had already associated with him the Rev. G. F. de Gex, and the Rev. Sir Gore Ousely who had been his curates in London ; and it was expected that the whole Romanizing machinery which Mr. Bennett had worked at Pimlico would speedily be in operation at Frome, with the virtual sanction of the Bishop of Bath and Wells. The Protestant parishoners contemplated an appeal to the Arbishop of Canterbury.... A case of what the Times (in a leading article of the 3rd of March) calls " fresh Episcopal scandal,'' had been brought under the notice of the House of Commons by Sir Benjamin Hall, the Bishop of Durham being the prominent figure in the scene. The Bishop had appointed his son to a canonry under circumstances in which the right rev. father and the reverend son expected that the income of the dignity would realize £1,576 per annum, although the Ecclesiastical Commissioner's had fixed it at £1000. Fortun ately the Commissioners found out a mode in which they could legally compel the renunciation of the odd £576. Incidentally to this discussion it transpired that the j j Bishop himself, the income of whose see the ! Commissioners had declared should be £8000 per annum, had— by what the i Times calls " a judicious system of mining management, to which it is as unnecessary as it would be scandalous to allude more distinctly" — " contrived to secure for himself an income which in some years has amounted to £26,000 over and above the charge which was imposed upon it by the Commission.' We do not remember anyone amongst Lord Grey's many unpopular acts which excited ' so much deep and general disgust as his treatment of Sir Harry Smith, especially in the bitter and cruel despatch by which this veteran soldier was insulted as well as recalled. The censure which many did not hesitate to pronounce on Sir Harry's proceedings in the Kaffir war had been greatly mitigated by the all but unqualified approbation of his conduct which the Duke or Wellington took occasion to express in .the House of Lords, and by additional evidence respecting the Duke's opinions which the Marquis of Londonderry extracted from Lord Grey himself, — his Lordship having been obliged to acknowledge that the'noble Duke merely said, when consulted as to Sir Harry's successor, "If Sir Harry Smith ivas to be relieved from his command, there was no one more fitting to take it than Major-General Cathcart." But whatever difference of judgment there may have been as to the propriety of the step itself, there was a strong and general feeling of indignation against Lord Grey's mean endeavour to make Sir Harry the scapegoat of his own official delinquencies, —as the Spectator expresses it, "his ungenerous, not to say cruel and dastardly attempt to save himself by destroying his absent subordinate, when Parliament was •about to assemble, and his own position became dangerous." There was a time when Lord Grey's supporters loved to expatiate on what they called his chivalrous

sense of honour. If the boast ever had a foundation, it is now utterly laid in the dust. We copied in a previous number a short notice of the fearfully fatal inundation from the bursting 1 of the Bilberry reservoir, near Huddersfield, by which from ninety to one hundred lives were lost. Wo shall extract a graphic and painfully interesting narrative of the circumstances of the awful catastrophe. From the latest papers we learn that, in addition to the appalling loss of life, there was a destruction of public and private property to the value of at least £600,000, and that n© less than 7,128 work-people, the aggregate of whose weekly earnings amounted on an average to £3,738 were thrown out of employment. The distressing character of this melancholy catastrophe is greatly aggravated by the fact, now certain, that it was mainly attributable to misconduct or culpable negligence on the part of the persons entrusted with the oversight of the construction and management of the reservoir. The Coroner's Jury, after a very protracted investigation, to which the Government lent every aid, found a verdict imputing the gravest blame to the commissioners, engineers, and overlookers, and expressing regret that, because of the commissioners being a, corporation, they could not find them guilty of manslaughter. A subscription had been opened for the surviving sufferers, to which Huddersfield had already contributed £10,000 ; Holmfirth, £2,000; Leeds, £2 000, and many other "places proportionately liberal sums. Several other fatal accidents were reported, through inundations, railway collisions, fires, &c. Crime also occupied a dark prominence in the late English papers. Besides burglaries, street robberies, ingenious schemes of fraud, and outrages of various kinds, a number of murders of the most revolting) atrocity were recorded. — Strong arguments in their way for a more widespread education, of the people on sound principles of moral and religious culture ! The friends of public education we observe were very active, but as usual very much at variance in their plans. It is gratifying to notice the distinctness with which the new Premier expressed Ids views on the all-im-portant subject, those views being based upon the vital principle of the indispensable necessity of an education in Scriptural knowledge. We may infer therefore that Lord Derby will repudiate every scheme of what is called " secular education," such as is the leading feature of Mr. W. J. Fox's bill before Parliament, and*, of the system of which Mr. Combe is a chief champion in Scotland, — a system which excludes all provision for religious training, and which is therefore (let men try to gild it over with what specious sophistry they may) radically and essentially infidel in its character and tendencies. Imperial honours sometimes find their way even to Australasia. The following is from, the (London) Gazette of Feb. 27 : —

Whitehall, Feb. 25. < The Queen lias been pleased to direct letters patent to l)c passed under the Great Seal, granting the dignity pf a Knight of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland unto Charles Nicholson, Esq., Doctor of Medicine, and Speaker of the Legislative Council of New South AY"ales. Mr. 0. B. Adderley, M.P., had re-pub-lished, in a pamphlet entitled " Self-Go-vernment for New Zealand," the Lyttolton Times' Report of a Public Meeting- at Lyttelton, in August of last year, — himself adding- " Remarks,' 3 and an " Epitome of New Zealand Politics, with -Dates and References." The Literary Gazette says, " The appendix contains a useful summary of political events in the history of the Colony;" but so many statements pass current in England as truth respecting: New Zealand, \rhich we hnotv to be mistakes, if not intentional misrepresentations (as in the case of Mr. Pox's slanderous book) that we must suspend our judgment until the pamphlet reaches us, — if it ever does. The last number of the Forth British Revieiu (February), has an article on New Zealand, which we have had an opportunity of seemg 1 . It is conceived in a most unfriendly spirit. The writer has evidently had some acquaintance with the colony (he professes to have lived in it), and having acquired just as much information as enables him to be mischievous, sets himself with a hearty will to do New Zealand all the mischief he can. We may take another opportunity of exhibiting a few illustrations of his snarling, fault-finding temper, and of the injurious distortions of fact into which it leads him.

W% invite attention to tlie following extract from the (London) Daily JSiews of January 14. Much ingenuity and effort have been expended here in devising 1 means to turn the Pliormium Tenax to such extensive advantage as might be realized from its rich abundance in .New Zealand. It is at least wort \\ serious consideration how far the machine here described might supply the important desideratum: —

Manilla llesip and Pita Fibre. — A machine Ims recently been patented, and is now exhibiting at Messrs. Pontifex and Wood's factory in Shoelane, for extracting economically the fibres from textile plants. Manilla hemp and pita have for several years past been well known in the markets of Europe as a superior material, applicable to all the uses of hemp, for ropes, cordage, canvas, &c. : as a substitute for flax, cotton, and silk in the manufacture of damasks, tapestry, and other articles used in upholstery, and the refuse in the manufacture of paper. The plants from Avhich this fibre is obtained — as the banana, the American aloe, the annana or pine apple, the phormium tenax (New Zealand flax), and others of a textile character — grow, as is well known, in great variety in most of our West India, African, and South Pacific colonies, in many of them spontaneously and in injurious abundance, and in all may be cultivated at a very small cost. The great difficulty hitherto has been, to prepare the fibre ready for the manufacturer at a price that would meet the market. Seven or eight years ago the price of Manilla hemp in this country was from £22 to £25 a ton, but from the increased demand combined with the great expense of colonial labour, it has now reached from £45 to £50 for the average kinds, and for the fine white qualities which are in demand for many purposes for which horse hair was formerly used, froifi £06 to X'7(>. The object of the patentee has been to construct a machine to separate the fibi'e from the pulp, and thus to avoid that which is now the great item of cost — the employment of hand labour for that purpose ; and, in this respect, as far as we could judge from the experiments carried on in the factory, he appears to have been eminently successful. His machine consists simply of four grooved rol-

lers, fixed laterally one above another, and moving in iron cylinders. The leaves of the plant arc placed in' the upper cylinder, the fibre parallel to the grooA r es, and the motion of the rollers works them on, from one to another, crushing out their juices and sap, leaving the fibre (when thej r have passed through each of the four chambers) almost clean enough for the manufacturer's hands. The leaves are supplied to the top or receiving funnel by means of an endless ladd'ir. To Attend to i||is machine a couple of men would bo sufficient, ami itjmay be worked either with water, steam, or hor&opower. Its advantages appear to be efficiency combined with great simplicity, and consequently cheapness both as regards first cost and keeping in repair. It is calculated that by means of Kliis" in* vontion the Banaaa fibre may' be brought to #iis country cleaned and fit for use at a prime cost of £14 lOs.lOd. a ton, including rent for land, cultivation, freight, and all charges, and the Agave, or Aloe fibre at £15 3s. 4d. a ton. As this would leave a very ample margin for profit, the proprietors of the patent are contemplating the formation (ff a company for the cultivation oftex>tile plants, and the preparation of the fibre for manufacturing purposes, and in favour of their project they urge in addition to the remuneration for the capital invested, the impxilse it would give to colonial prosperity.

Provincial Council Election. — The days mentioned in our last for the nominations and elections here were accurately stated as then fixed ; but it lias since been taken into consideration that the Ist of September being the day on which the Supreme Court sits, it might be very inconvenient to many that the proceedings connected -with the election should be appointed for the same time. It has therefore been determined that the nominations shall take place on Monday, the 30th of August, — the place being the Market House, and the hours for the several electoral districts of which Auckland is the polling place, as follows, — the nomination for the City, ten o'clock, a.m. ; the Suburbs, one o'clock, p.m. ; and the Northern Division, three o'clock, p.m. The polling will take pla?e for the several districts on the next day, Tuesday, the 31st of August. Mechanics' Institute. — A Lecture on "The Writings of Charles Dickens" was delivered by Mr. B. Reynolds, in the Hall of the Institute, on "Wednesday evening, and was heard with much interest by an audience which we could have, wished had been more numerous; — but the attendance on the Lectures during the year have, we regret to say, with one or two exceptions, Le^n far from encouraging either to the gentlemen who kindly undertook the task, or to the Committee at whose solicitations they came forward. The expression of a general wish by those who heard the Lecture that it had been longer was in itself no inconsiderable tribute to the Lecturer's ability in, dealing' with his subject ...Apropos to the mention of Dickens, it; may interest his admirers to know that at our last Englibh dates he was just commencing the publication of a new work to be completed in twenty monthly parts. The title was "Blealfidd House."