MADE BY COLONEL WEARE, C.B.

13

A.—No. In

On these passages several remarks cannot fail to suggest themselves. The ground of the expostulation —I should rather perhaps say reprimand —which you have thought it not unbefitting to address to Her Majesty's Government, is, that they have not properly censured Colonel Weare for having sent through an unofficial channel to the Secretary of State, a complaint which ought to have been forwarded, if at all, through his official superiors. But when you wrote this Despatch you must have had under your eye Mr. Cardwell's Despatch of the 26th March, in which the following passage occurs : — " It is due to Colonel Weare that I should repeat to you what is stated in " the letter addressed by my directions to the War Office, that it was not at " his desire that the statements made by him in a private letter were communicated " to me." The letter to the War Office, a copy of which you also possess, contains the following passage: — " These statements arc made on the authority of letters received from Colonel •• Weare, now commanding the Fiftieth Regiment, though not communicated by " his wish or permission." I do not consider this the place for expressing the opinion which I may have formed of Colonel Weare's conduct, in making such communications to a private correspondent in this country. Whatever may be the impropriety of his proceedings on the whole, I do not think that the Secretary of State was called upon to reprove him for an offence which he had not committed. In the next place it is no doubt the practice of the Colonial Service to discourage the transmission of representations from a Colony otherwise than through the Governor, by sending back such representations to those who make them. In the value of that rule both to the Secretary of State in England, and to British Authorities acting in distant parts of the world, I entirely concur. But it would be merely vexatious to apply such a rule to communications received from persons in this country. In such cases the practice is, as reason requires, to send the communication at once to the Governor for his explanation or report, and to take no decision (except in matters of exceptional urgency) till that report is received. This practice was accurately adhered to by my predecessor in the case of Mr. Weare's complaints. You consider that Colonel Weare should have been required to make his complaints through the usual channel. But this in effect was done. The complaints were sent back to his Commanding Officer, with instructions which obliged Colonel Weare either to withdraw or substantiate them. He chose the former alternative. But in any case Ido not see what more regular or effectual method could have been adopted, to secure that truth should be ascertained and justice done. Lastly, I must observe on your statement, that Mr. Cardwell ordered you to make a complete reply to the imputations made upon yourself and your Government. That statement, though not perhaps inexact in its letter, is yet so framed as to convey an impression very opposite to that which I derive from perusing that passage in Mr. Cardwell's Despatch to which you refer, and which I have quoted. All these inaccuracies—for so I am obliged to call them —acquire an importance which might not otherwise belong to them, from the place which they occupy in your Despatch. They furnish the only justification for your repeated and studiously direct refusal to comply with what you represent as being the Secretary of State's instructions to you, a refusal which becomes even more pointed, because what on the 30th of June you thus peremptorily refused to do in compliance with instructions, you seem in fact to have done, independently of such instructions, on the 29th. I wish that it were open to me to misunderstand the character of that refusal, or to put a more favourable construction upon it. My strong sense of the public services which you have at various times rendered, and of your high character; my recollection even of the circumstances attending your temporary recall from the Governorship of the "Cape, during my former connection with this department, all combine to make it personally very painful to me, that my first communication 4