ORIGINAL CORRESPONDENCE.

Otago Witness, Issue 48, 17 April 1852, Page 2

ORIGINAL CORRESPONDENCE.

To the Editor of the Otago Witness,

Sir, — The letter copied into your last number from an Otago " Johnny Newcome" to the Lyttelton Times has given no small amusement. Without surmise as to the authorship, which might, perhaps, j be irreverent, the writer, as you have indicated, has I certainly shown himself to be but a sorry listener j and a worse observer. Spite of annual statistics i and his own senses, he sets down the Otago settlers j at 3000 strong. Thank you, Master Johnny ! but j we are not so vain as to reckon our humble 1600 equal in any sense to 3000. He makes a ludicrous j jumble between our Settlers' Association here and ] the Association at home, and having knocked them into one, he coolly states that " its dissolution is desired by all save a very feic, }> &c. ! So, Master Johnny ! but what will your correspondent think of you when he sees petitions to the contrarysigned by 346 male adults, whilst the Jury List of j the Otago district is only 330 in all ; and that these petitioners include our Minister, certain Justices of the Peace (let the Lyttelton Times note this), 140 resident land-owners, and, in fact, the overwhelming majority of the respectable settlers of all classes ? But my object in this letter is not so much to show that the present Johnny has been a bad listener to Otago malcontents, for even they must be ashamed of him, but to put it through your columns to the Lyttelton Times whether our friends in the Canterbury are saddled with anything so dishonourable as a little fraction who have changed their minds and set themselves to sell the body of the settlers and all their dearest interests into the hands of an hostile and unscrupulous Government ? "We, like the Canterbury, agreed upon our scheme in all its parts. With the sanction of the Crown and Parliament we obtained a little section of the wilderness on which to carry it out, but none were excluded who signed their adhesion to our scheme and desired to live in our borders. And most nobly, and to their own satisfaction, has this minority adhered to their engagements ; but a few of them have done otherwise, and -with a versatility and assumption that would be simply ludicrous were it not also unprincipled, have set themselves to say — " Walk out, gentlemen ; don't you see we have got the Government on our side and can do what we please ? Away with your musty principles — we shall have none of them ! We have it from the highest authority that the body of a people are only tax-payers for the benefit of taxeaters — you are the former, we the latter ; so bow your necks to us at once !" Has anything like this appeared in the Canterbury, and if so, -what would

be thought of it ? Here it is regarded with ineffable disgust, and in a spirit of determination which, if it does not bring the iron heel of the oppressor upon his own tools in order that he himself may escape, must with unerring certainty, and earlier perhaps than they imagine, bring one and all of them under the lash of universal execration, each in his own name, and with his specific share, whether as a political or religious renegade, or as both. Every man of them who has a name at home is already being weighed by his own party, and will find it vain to practice at the antipodes what would have excluded I him at home. A Subscriber.