"ARE WE BRITONS OR BASTARDS"?

Wellington Independent, Volume XXVI, Issue 3143, 9 March 1871, Page 3

"ARE WE BRITONS OR BASTARDS"?

As many of our readers may not have read an extraordinary effusion which appeared in our evening contemporary of Tuesday in the guise of a leading article, we make a few selections. The reasoning we dispose of elsewhere; the* absurdity speaks for itself. We readily admit, and we hope our readers will also admit, as they must, that if the " Post" has been a little unsuccessful at times, ii has at least borne off the palm for unparalleled gush. To allay impatience, we give the extracts : — "The monarch is the centre and source of all state action, but if she legislate the law requires that to be done after deliberation in Parliament. Hey Majesty is the fountain of justice, but its stream must flow under direction of of its snges in their Courts. The Executive power, too, rests in her, and fov this she has the help of her Cabinet. This fruitful principle descends through every nook and cranny, and to every low level of the political frame. However distinctly the Royal will may be expressed for one purpose, that expression is insufficient for ony other purpose. Every function must be discharged, and every prerogative exercised as the law prescribes, and in no other way. If the Queen direct an arrest by warrant under the sign manual, and not by writ from her Supreme Court, that command is void. If her Executive advise her to exercise her prerogative of mercy, that must be done, as the law requires, after conviction, and by such warrant as the law prescribes." The prerogative of mercy can only be exercised by the Crown after conviction. The proceeding which the Government have been advised to take in this instance is neither more nor less than the revival of the old Dispensing Power. This most odious and dangerous prerogative did certainly once exist, but then only within narrow and well- understood limits. Within these, which in effect allowed of the King's making lawful that which was prohibited by statute, the power was frequently exercised both by Tudors and Stuarts, and was distinctly recognised on several solemn occasions. It was entirely abolished by the Bill of Rights. But in the very worst times of our history, on all occasions lawyers of all shades of opinion, whether high prerogative men, or favorers of liberty, scouted the notion that the power gave the King the right to interfere in the smallest measure with the Common Law. Even in the bad reign of the second James, C. J. Herbert, the same Judge who had incurred lasting odium for the decision in favor of the right over statute, firmly resisted the King's attempt to stretch the prerogative in question to the Common Law. ■ What then must we think, and what, too, is the bounden duty of every good man to do in the case we are now commenting on ? Here we have under our very eyes, in our infant colony, the Executive Goyernment, in order to secure its purposes in a singular prosecution of the press, attempting to revive a dangerous prerogative, which in the old land sank under the vigorous assaults of freedom ; nay, not only that, but even to revive it in a form the highest assertors of prerogative always allowed to be illegal. The attempt of the Government to prove their case by using anticipatory pardons, as they call them, to divest a witness of a privilege with which the law has clothed him for his protection, is a gross overriding of the law One is often tempted to wonder whether a single touch of the public spirit which the Constitution in every age breathed forth over the " islands of the sage and free" has ever reached our unhappy isles of New Zealand. The spirit has at home been ever vital from the day when the mailed barons at Runny mede inserted that simple but all embracing clause, of " nullus liber Jiomo" in their schedule of demands ; through the evil days and evil times of Tudors and Stuarts, when not even the cravenest of prerogative lawyers were able entirely to expel it from their breasts, down to that hour when it spake forth so proudly through the firetipped lips of" Erskine, defending our liberty, struck at through the sides of the humble shoemaker, Hardy. Do the grand names and spirits of our Hampdens, Elliotts, Somers, and all the noble army of confessors and martyrs live no more for us? or are we a poor crew of garbage-eating curs, hungering after the scraps that Julius Yogel, Fox, and Co. may vouchsafe ro fling to us '? Are we a mere corpus vile, to be cut and carved, to be lucked and spurned, bestrieddn the while by a hideous nightmare ? Are we indeed Britons ? or have we only been dreaming, and wake up to find we are but bastards ? We shall see. We repeat it, we shall see. One thing is certain, and that is, if we don't see in this present case, and sharply and promptly, too, we shall presently be astonished at what more we shall be compelled to see.