A.—No. 1

5. In the case of Lord Carnarvon's remarks about the relation in which General Chute and the Governor stood to one another, and the manner in which his Lordship had degraded the Governor by requiring him to serve under General Chute, I think his Lordship misled both the House of Lords and the country. 6. Lord Carnarvon in no way alluded to the difficulties and embarrassments in the removal of the troops, and in the settlement of the country, which had arisen from General Chute persistently neglecting to obey the orders given by the Governor with a view of establishing frequent and speedy communication between the General and the Government. Lord Carnarvon also knew that a charge had been brought against General Chute by the Colonel commanding the 50th Regiment, which charge has never been withdrawn, of ordering a Native Chief, who had been taken prisoner and detained four days in custody, to be cruelly shot to death on the 11th January, 1866. His Lordship also knew that this fact had never been reported by the General to the Governor of the country* who was the proper guardian of the lives of Her Majesty's subjects. His Lordship was also aware that the Governor and his Ministers, who knew nothing of this circumstance, had been blamed by many as being the authors of it, and of other acts. In the very nature of tilings a General who was so dealing with a Governor wholly unconscious of what had taken place, could never co-operate heartily with him in a spirit of entire confidence, in the removal of the troops or in any other matter. 7. Again Lord Carnarvon must have known that in subsequently requiring a Governor who had been so treated, to serve under the General whose conduct his Lordship was aware of before he deposed the Governor, his Lordship had subjected the Governor, for the supposed good of the service, to a most serious degradation, and by the open encouragement thus given to disobedience and to violent acts, had much embarrassed the position of the Governor in a country still in a state of partial rebellion; and that the man who had borne this without complaint at the time until the duty of removing the troops was successfully accomplished, had borne much for the good of the service. 8. I will trouble your Grace with only one other remark upon this part of the subject. Lord Carnarvon's Despatch of the Ist December, 1866, which placed the Governor under the orders of General Chute, was printed and laid before Parliament. It is to be regretted, for the sake of the Governor and the Government of this country, that his reply to that Despatch, No. 22, of the 12th February, 1867, which had been for a long time in England when the debate in the House of Lords took place, was not also printed and laid before Parliament, in order that their Lordships and the country might be able to form a just opinion upon the case. 9. As that Despatch contains the replies in detail to the objections which Lord Carnarvon has made upon the subject of the delay in the removal of the troops from New Zealand, which, I am sure, will satisfy any unprejudiced person that no undue delay which I could have avoided took place in that removal, it is unnecessary to repeat them here. Lord Carnarvon might, however, have justly said, what his Lordship well knows, that I was amongst the first to counsel the Colonists to dispense with British troops, and that I was the first to aid them to show by acts how they could, themselves, easily accomplish what the leaders of British troops (not the troops themselves) hesitated to undertake; and his Lordship might also have justly said, that it should be remembered that in removing the troops General Chute and myself occupied very different positions: I was responsible for the peace and welfare of the country, he only had to send troops out of the country. He brought what dangers and difficulties he pleased on New Zealand; myself and my Ministers had to meet these. He might hastily entail want and privation on large numbers of families who had had nothing to do with an unnecessarily prolonged civil contest, or a vast useless military expenditure, which had disorganized the whole country and its trade and commerce. The care of providing for those dangers and sorrows fell on my Ministers and myself. It is difficult and misleading to institute any comparison between the performance of such different duties. Men will too often act recklessly or counsel reckless action where others have to meet the consequences of such acts. 10. I am afraid it may again be said by some, as Lord Carnarvon told me before, that it is impossible that the Government of the Colonies can be carried on 6

21

ZEALAND TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE.