The Sketcher.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 312, 13 April 1878, Page 5

The Sketcher.

<f MR. HUGH CARLETON. “ Friend after friend departs.” (From the New Zealand Herald.) The old politicians xvhose names are identified with, and xvliose actions have helped to form part of the histoi’y of Hew Zealand, are leaving us one after the other. Some have gone on the long, inevitable journey ; others, like Mi'. E. W. Stafford and Mr. Hugh Cai'leton, are leaving the colony to retux-n to Old England, there, probably, to spend their last yeai’S free from the turmoil aud Avoi-ry, the pettiness, and the disappointments which mark the experience of most of those xvho have engaged largely in the game of colonial politics. A man xvho, like Mr. Carleton, has, until a fexv years ago, occupied such a prominent figure in the his-tox-y of this province, and of the Legislature of the country, merits something more than a mere passing notice on the eve of his severing his connection with the colony. As he is departing, not intending to return, we purpose giving that notice noxv, as a fexv facts xve have learned xvill be intei'esting to our readers.

Mr. Carleton, though boi'n in England, is of li'ish descent, being the sou of Francis Carleton, of Clare, County of Tipperary. He was sent to Eton College, xvhich he left with high reputation for classical acquirements. Thence to Cambi'idge University, where he got a term’s rustication for xvhat he is pleased to call “axx affair of honor Axdth the long carpenter,” xvhich xve presume to be, in plainer English, a town and goxvn fight. From Cambi'idge he xvent to the Middle Temple, xvhere he kept his terms, studying under Sir John Bailey ; but, taking a dislike to the pi'ofession, he did not have himself called to the Bar, but took to studying high art in Italy, roaming up and down for about thi'ee years. In 1845 he came to Hexv Zealand. Thei’e, instead of settling, he took to importing stock from Sydney, alxvays a hazardous speculation. Three bad voyages, in the last of xvhich ship and all xvere lost (the Orwell, upon xvhat has since been called the Orxvell Bank, Manukau hax'boi'), put a stop to this. During this time he had, at intervals, edited the New Zealander newspaper, with the object of advocating the cause of the preemption land claimants and Governor Fitzroy’s grantees. To this he now returned, having suffei'ed severely in purse by the series of mishaps already mentioned in a more professional point of view. After cari'ying on the New Zealander for a further pei-iod, he started a nexvspaper on his oxvn account, entitled the

Anglo-Maori Warder. He had noxv to learn that something more than bi'illiant leading articles are required toxvards the success of nexvspaper enterprise. There is a commercial element involved, of xvhich he had no experience ; also, tact in catering for the taste of the geueral public, instead of for the editor’s oxvn particular taste. In the Anglo-Maori Warder he entered iqion a course of open opposition to the Government of the day. The paper paid its expenses, but nothing more, and was therefoi'e abandoned after a six months’ career.

Alxvays of an erratic disposition, he left the colony for a xvhile, cruising among the South Sea Islands, xvhere he made acquaintance xvith Fiji in in its primitive state of cannibalism. Shortly afterxvards the discovery ©f gold in Califoi’nia xvas made. Mr. William Broxvn, xvho xvas sending out the Hoble, offered him a cabin there and back. Mr. C. went on shore at Pitcaix-n’s Island, xvhere the ship had stopped to water ; and the captain, pretending to be bloxvn axvay, xvlxich xvas not the case, sailed axvay without him. Left behind, he beguiled tlie time by teaching the islanders to sing in parts, an accomplishment xvhich they still retain in high perfection at Norfolk Island. In about thi’ee xveeks’ time the Colonist, Captain Mai'shall, touched at Pitcairn’s Island, also for xvater. She was croxvded, but in the captain Mr. C. found an old acquaintance, having chartered a former vessel commanded by him, the Ilaidee, for stock. Accordingly he obtained a passage. Hmv, the Hoble xvas a dull sailei', and the Colonist actually reached San Francisco four xveeks before the Hoble, and Mr. C. found himself in Califoi-nia in the plight in xvhich he had gone ashore at Pitcairn’s Island. Many strange stories xvere current in Auckland of the straits to xvhich he xvas driven. Hoxv he took a contract to unload a coal bai-ge, &c., &c., the real fact being that he xvent on board a ship belonging to our townsman, Mi*. James Mackie, and remained there quietly till his oxvn tardy ship, the Hoble, arrived. Returning to Hew Zealand, he obtained a seat in the first House of Representatives as member for the Bay of Islands. Owing to the early date fixed for the nomination, and to the fact of his being elected without opposition, he at once became “ Father of the House.” There he commenced by taking an active part in the obtaining of responsible government, iu his oxvn opinion a political mistake, and the only one that he confesses to. This, of course, is only an expression of his oxvn opinion. Some xvill think this no mistake at all, aud supply its place by others —each critic according to his oxvn peculiar views.

In 1856, having long been a contributor to the Southern Cross, he took formal charge of that nexvspaper as editor, conducting it for some years, until the connection xvas severed, on account of his viexvs about the Waitara war, which were most unpopular at the time. Public opinion came round to him at last, as indeed upon other questions ; but throughout his political career he and the public have seldom been of the same opinion at the same time. When Mr. Broxvn was elected Superintendent of the province of Auckland, Mr. Carleton became Provincial Secretary, a position which he subsequently occupied under Superintendents Campbell, Graham, and Whitaker. But notxvithstauding his close connection xvith provincial affairs, he xvas from the first a determined enemy to what is called provincialism, xvhich he never ceased to attack until its final extinction in 1875. In this likewise, after incurring much unpopularity, he finally found himself in accord xvith public opinion.

It xvill be remembered that for years after the concession of responsible government, parties xvere so evenly divided, that the fate of Ministers xvas invariably decided by a majority of one. This, of course, afforded much opportunity to an active member. After turning out the Sexvell Ministry in 1856, he supported the Fox Ministry for the sake of their waste lands policy, namely, the provinces to sell the land at xvhat price they pleased, high or loxv, but to pay a fixed sum, half-a-croxvn an acre, to the General Government. When the Fox Ministry was turned out, he gave his support to the Stafford Ministry, and voted for xvhat is usually called “the compact,” under which the Land Fund xvas given to the provinces. Opinions must be alloxved to differ about that famous xmte. It xvas certainly in accordance with public opinion at the time, and the Superintendent of the Auckland province supported it. But the enormous advantage which it conferred on the Southern provinces was not then perceived by the North. Mr. Carleton has alxvays maintained that the vote xvas right in principle; that so long as the provinces had the management of immigration and public xvorks, they had a right to the Land Fund ; and that, on the same principle, xvhen that charge x\ T as undertaken by the General Government, under the Public Works Act, the l and Fund ought to be restored and made colonial. In 1858, he suggested the Hexv Provinces Act, xvith a x'iexv to destroy the provinces by subdivision ; and the suggestion xvas adopted and advocated by leading members xvho xvere opposed to provincialism, but under this Act professed to be so enamored of it as to advocate their extension, while plotting their downfall.

In 1860 all political alliances were broken up by the Waitara xvar. Mr. Carleton declared strongly against it. But xvhen a motion, tantamount to a vote of xvant of confidence, xvas moved, he gave a casting vote to the Stafford Government, on the ground that before the session he had incautiously committed himself to a promise of general support, and xvould not go back from his xvord. In the folloxving session, however, he considered himself free, and gave the vote, ao-ain a casting vote, that turned the Stafford Ministry out. The xvar, he alleged, xvas his sole point of disagreement, and he gave the vote xvith regret. In another of the great colonial questions lie received a fair measure of public support, though even this xvas not unalloyed xvith

strenuous opposition. This was the question of the Crown’s right of pre-emption over native lands, originally devised in favor of the New Zealand Company. He held that the Maori had a right to the market value of his land, which could only be obtained by throwing the land into open market, and destroying the Government monopoly of purchase. For fourteen years, taking advantage of his connection with the Press, he agitated for “ direct purchase,” under reasonable restrictions and Crown titles to natives, until both were granted by the Legislature in 1862. This being brought to a successful issue, he paid a visit to the old country, whence he returned in time for the session of 1864, in which Mr. Weld took office. In 1865, the Weld Ministry were driven out again by a casting vote, and Mr. Stafford returned to office. To him Mr. Carleton gave steady support throughout, until in turn that Government had to give way to the FoxVogel Government. He then remained in opposition to the close of his parliamentary career, strongly opposing the borrowing policy, until the House was irretrievably committed to it. Then he sought to make the best of it, voting for the second x-eading of the Public "Works Bill, which he considered to be a deathblow to Provincialism.

In the general election of 1871 he lost the seat which he had held continuously for seventeen years. This result was attributable, not to the defection of old friends, who stood beside him as staunchly as ever, but firstly to the incorporation of the Mangonui electoral district (which had formerly returned a separate member) with the Bay of Islands district ; and, secondly, to the large number of Maoris, who, now being entitled to votes in virtue of their newly-acquired Crown grants, had been placed upon the roll, and were turned against him. He thought it hard that these Crown grants, which he had been so largely instrumental in obtaining, should cause his defeat ; but gratitude is a word which Mr. Carleton thinks has no equivalent in the Maori language. At the election for the present Parliament he was nominated for the Eden district. He was told that his seat was secure if he would declare himself a follower of Sir George Grey. He said that he would cheerfully support Sir George Grey in anything for the good of the North ; but that as to following any man blindfold, a seat was not worth having at the price. He should exercise his own judgment as to what would really be for the good of the North. This declaration was considered not enough, and he accordingly withdrew in favor of Mr. Alan Taylor, whose votes he would otherwise have split, but who did not benefit by the retirement. Considering that Parliament was now finally closed to him, unless through abandonment of his conservative principles, Mr. Carleton resolved to return to the mother country, where he hoped that a fastidious disposition that finds no countenance in a colony might be indulged without reproach. Mr. Carleton was one of the scholarly men of the colony; he was always a bold and uncompromising opponent, and though many deemed him crochety, yet in departing from a colony where he has dwelt for nearly three and thirty years, he will carry with him the good wishes of both men of the old school and men of the new, who are now steadily supplanting the earlier generation of New Zealand politicians.

A SUCCESSFUL COLONIST. “ Anglo-Australian, ” in the European Mail, thus refers to the death of an old and very successful colonist of New South "Wales : I have to chronicle the demise at the age of 66 of one of the earliest and most succesful of the pastoral settlers of New South Wales and Riverina, in the person of Mr. John Peter, late of 30 Park-lane, who died at Torquay on January 28 last. His health for some time had been precarious, and since the year 1870, in which he sat on the Committee of Inquiry into the mode of conducting the wool sales in London as one of the representatives of New South Wales, he had been more or less an invalid. His life affords perhaps one of the most striking illustrations of the success attained by some of the early pastoral tenants of the Crown. The son of parents in the middle walk of life in the neighborhood of Glasgow, he emigrated in 1839 with the intention of advancing his interests in the world, but so certain did his family regard his speedy return that all he possessed on landing at Sydney was £SO, as his father expressed it, “ to pay his passage home again.” He was fortunate in his introductions, and still more fortunate in his indomitable resolution and clear forecast of the future. To the Hon. Alexander Macleay, the first Speaker of the Legislative Council, at that time Colonial Secretary, he addressed himself, and at once entered upon an engagement to superintend and manage his sheep station at a fixed salai’y, with a small percentage on the increase. Mr*. Peter’s acute observation showed him the extreme liking of sheep for rock-salt, which they were in the habit of constantly licking, and which contributed to keep them tolerably free from epidemic disease. With this clue Mr. Peter went farther a-field into districts hitherto untrodden by the white man, and as he journeyed he noticed that the vast plains of the Iliverina were covered by a small stunted, shabby-looking shrub largely impregnated with saline properties, which was afterto be known and appreciated for its fattening qualities as the “saltbush,” and here he took up extensive tracts of the finest sheep country, which he leased from the Crown for his patron, Mr. Macleay, and also for himself. Fortune favors the brave, oi', as the old Luke Duke of Wellington adopted for his motto Fortuna comes viriulis , and the same keen ap-, pieeiation of surroundings, and how to mould them to his purpose, induced Mr. Peter, upon the discovery of the great mineral wealth of South Australia, which was attracting a large population to Adelaide, to send thither some thousands of sheep, which, arriving at the nick i

of time upon a starving market, were sold by his agent at fabulous prices, and the proceeds invested in shares in the Burra Burra Copper Mine, which subsequently proved to be the richest in the world. Similar slices of that which is usually called “good luck” attended most of his operations, until at last Mr. Peter had accumulated so large a fortune that at his death it is counted by hundreds of thousands. It is believed that his real and personal estate in England and the four colonies of Australia will reach, if it does not exceed, three-quarters of a million, a very encouraging example of what may be done by men of steady, untiring perseverence, and shrewd common sense. His will has not yet been proved, but I hear that one of his executors is Mr. Alexander Donald Macleay, the nephew of his early friend and patron, a name with which my readers are tolerably familiar. The other executors, I believe, are Mr. Ducroz, of Dalgety and Co., Sir Charles Stirling, Bart., a former neighbor and squatter in the Murrumbidgee, and his solicitor. Mr. Peter is by no means a solitary instance of a successful squatter ; there are other’s, many, I may say, upon whom fortune has similarly smiled ; but it is only when their estates come to be distributed, upon death, that the extent of their wealth becomes known. As Sir Daniel Cooper very justly remarked, in his paper read before the Royal Colonial Institute last month, in a sketch of New South Wales, there now exist the same opportunities of making fortunes in this grand country as at any former period. It only requires the men of like mettle to make the effort.”

THE GREAT FOURFOLD WATERFALL IN INDIA. (From Fraser's Magazine .) These are the falls of Garsoppa, not so famous as they should be, for nowhere the world throughout can there be such another vision. From the lip of the precipice to the dark pools at its foot is an accurately measured distance of 830 ft., more than twice the height of the top of the cross that surmounts St, Paul’s Cathedral, and down this prodigious. descent pour the four cataracts, each arrayed in its own special robes of grandeur and beauty. First on the western side is the Great or Rajah Fall ; a branch of the river runs over a projecting ledge, and nowhere touching the Titanic wall, which hollows iD, descends in a stately unbroken column, gradually widening its shining skirts, into a black unfathomable pool, 830 ft. below. Imperially sublime, the transfigured water passes with majestic calmness through the void in fold after fold of ermine whiteness, spreading out its magnificence as it silently nears the end. The precipice runs backward, curving in an irregular bay, on whose farther side the next fall, named the Roarer, shoots slanting down a third of the height into a rocky basin that shoulders out, whence it boils out in a broad massive cataract, plunging 500 ft. into the same pool opposite its kingly neighbor. All the thunder and madness of the element are gathered in this writhing headlong flood, and it is the voice of its fury that comes up from the abyss, like the roar and tumult of hurrying multitndes in the face of some great monarch moving to his doom. Leaving the bay, next on the general plane of the precipice comes the Rocket Fall, running impetuously over the brim and down the face of the stupendous wall, to which it only just clings with a broad band of glistening foam-white water, speeding in quick gushes incessantly darting out myriads of watery rockets and vaporous arrows, with which all its volume seems alive, and pouring clear at last in a dense shining curtain into its own pool. Last and loveliest, La Dame Blanche glides down the grim colossal rampart in lapse after lapse of delicate lace-like veils, now blowing out in bright misty spray and again quickly gathering up the white folds, and so stealing downward with a whispering murmur, till gently sinking in a sparkling shower into a pool whose inkblack surface is hardly ruffled. At a point a furlong or two below the falls on the further side of the mighty ravine that cleaves the mountains from their feet, a platform has been hewn in the rock whence the whole overpowering precipice and the four falls are disclosed from top to bottom; the eye at once takes in the sublime column of the great fall, the wild tumultuous plunge of the Roarer, the impetuous gush and foam-sheaves of the Rocket, and the hesitating tremulous beauty of La Dame Blanche. All round the world there can be nothing to match the sight. The opposite side of the profound ravine, which maintains a uniform width and depth as far as seen, rising in tree-crowned crests higher than the line of the falls, sinks in a perpendicular drop of stern grey walls for more than a thousand feet to the floor of the colossal chasm; only here and there a dark rent or stunted tree rooted in a crevice breaks the awful uniformity. On the side where we sit the slopes, densely forest-clad,' descend with only less than precipitous steepness. Looking down the ravine, the gaunt x-ocky faces gradually disappear, and a majestic wooded mountain closes the view. Bxxt one cannot turn long from the sublime vision of the falls, and the long pillars of bright water —too long to be taken in at a glance, the eye must follow them—bathed in light, as the Indian sun darts its radiance to their feet. Small trees, patches of hei’bage and gi'assy shelves, kept fresh by the spray rain, soften the front of the abyss about the Rocket and the White Lady ; but gloomy cavernous recesses, which no sxxnshine reaches, lie hid behind the Gi’eat Fall as it pours from its beetling rim. Above in the background the higher summits of the mountains lift green peaks and darkly-wooded crests into mid-air, and at the bottom of the falls a sunbow, ever l’ising slowly higher as the sun’s -rays penetrate deeper, arches the dark pooh* with its beautiful soft splendour. In the morning it lies long and low, but ascends with the sun, and after noontide spans the ravine with a glorious lofty semicircle. Not much mistcloud arises except where the Roarer hurls

down its massive volume, but the air is laden with moisture, and often flushes with bi-illiant colors, as blasts of wind below scatter for a moment the symmetry of the sunbow, and fling wider the shining robe of the Great Fall. No, there can be nothing comparable to it elsewhere. The Staubbach dropping its single smoke-lilce veil from as lofty a brow, and the enormous flood and breadth and massiveness of Niagai’a, far less in height, belong to a different order of sublimity. The many toi’rents of the Zambezi Falls descend but 100 ft. into a long narrow fissure, “ a gigantic crack” only 80ft. across. One hears of marvellous cataracts among Norwegian hills and in Californian valleys, but nowhere else are all the wonders and enchantments of water in every aspect of grace and beauty, force, majesty, and terror, so gathered and set in such a frame of surpassing sublimity and awful grandeur amid all the magnificence of tropical mountain scenery.