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[Received Sunday Evening, 7th April, at 9.40 p.m.] Youp Excellency,— Wellington, 6th April, 1889. I have the honour, for reasons which are fully set forth in a letter of even date herewith, which I have addressed to the Honourable the Premier, to tender to you my resignation of the offices I hold as Minister of Education, Commissioner of Customs, and Member of the Executive Council of the Colony. As I treat the letter above referred to as a document of State, I venture to express the hope that it may be officially laid before your Excellency. I have, &c, Geo. Fishek. His Excellency Sir James Prendergast, Acting-Governor for the Colony of New Zealand.

The Hon. the Premier. - — • 1. It is far from my intention to avail myself of your suggestion that your letter of the Ist April may be withdrawn, inasmuch as, in my opinion, it is calculated to raise an entirely false issue. 2. To suggest that some trumpery brewery prosecutions can have created a Ministerial situation so serious as to necessitate the retirement of a member from the Ministry is the purest pretence. 3. There are other and very much greater reasons involved in the present case; but, before touching upon these reasons, I have to offer a protest against the unreasonable desire manifested in your letters to hasten my retirement from office. When a Minister's honour is impugned, perhaps the natural instinct would be to act impulsively and on the spur of the moment; and I should have placed my resignation in your hands at once upon the receipt of your letter of the Ist April but for two most important reasons, which demanded calm and grave consideration. (1.) My Education Bill, to which I had devoted many months of care and thought, was then in the printer's hands, and I wished to see it finally completed. In justice to myself, as Minister of Educa'tion,T think I was entitled to this delay. (2.) I had to regard the situation from a constitutional point, as affecting not only myself but all future Ministers. 4. I cannot agree that the Premier is to be regarded as the sole arbiter and dictator in questions of the nature involved in the present case. The future is all before us. The precedent of to-day becomes the precedent for all time. When, therefore, it is demanded of me in terms expressive of unusual and unreasonable haste that I shall retire upon a false issue, I feel entitled, not only on my own behalf, as a matter of justice, but also in the interests of all future Ministers in this colony, to demand that I shall have a sufficient time for reflection and consultation with my friends, to enable me to place on record what the true issues in the present case are, from my point of view. 5. Constitutionally speaking the position is a grave and serious one; and having in view the establishment of a precedent which will rule in future Cabinets, I feel bound to say that I cannot concede it to be the unquestioned right of a Premier to select a particular and subsidiary question, in which no point of policy is involved, upon which to demand the resignation of one of his colleagues. There must be equal rights in these matters, and equal freedom of speech and action, under a sense of responsibility to Parliament. 6. I have differed with the Cabinet upon many large questions of policy, but I have differed, as you yourself have frequently remarked, with great courtesy and forbearance. As one ought to do who has any true conception of the functions of Government, I have from the first regarded the Cabinet as an impersonal whole, from which all individual considerations should be rigidly excluded. No personal differences, therefore, have been of my creation ; nor have any such differences in any way concerned or affected me in the discharge of my public duty. 7. The large questions upon which, at various times, I differed with the Cabinet were, — (1.) The composition of the Eailway Board, and the peculiar treatment of Mr Eec, the English expert; (2.) The appointment of a Judge in succession to the late Mr Justice Johnston ; (3.) The proposed appointment of an Engineer-in-Chief; (4.) The attitude of certain Ministers in the matter of Gasparini; (5.) The attitude of certain Ministers in regard to the leasing of the Canterbury runs; (6.) The necessity of proposing a modification of the property tax; (7.) The Te Kooti expedition ; (8.) The public declarations by the Premier of his views on the questions of land-nationalisation and pauper farms. 8. If asked why I did not secede from a Government from which I differed upon so many and such large public questions, I answer— (1.) That, as a unit in an impersonal whole, it is a Minister's duty to submit to the opinions of his colleagues where the point involved is not so serious as to justify his assuming the responsibility of breaking up the Ministry. (2.) My most reliable political friends whom I consulted insisted tha.t I should remain in the Cabinet as long as possible, and as far as possible to represent the views we hold in common. 9. Certain other members of the Cabinet have not been content to proceed upon these principles. Ido not feel called upon to characterize their plan of procedure :it is sufficient for me to say that it has induced disruption. 10. Having now stated the public grounds upon which I consent to retire from the Ministry— for these differences upon large public questions form the real cause of my retirement—l proceed to make a few observations upon the subsidiary question, that of the beer-duty prosecutions in Wellington.