H.—22

32

(I may add here—what is an indisputable fact, though you have not, so far as I know, admitted it—that if the information had been laid that day it would have been in time, and the case would not have lapsed.) The indictment which I have thus constructed out of your own admissions is one which needs no elaboration to heighten its effect. It proves beyond a possibility of doubt that you have been guilty in your official capacity of a deliberate, persistent, and in part successful attempt to interfere with the ordinary course of the law on behalf of a particular offender, and that you did your utmost to be faithful to the promise which, as you told more than one Minister you had made, that he should be allowed a lenient settlement out of Court on payment of a small sum, instead of being subjected to the "harassing proceedings of the law." I deeply regret having to write thus of one once trusted with perfect confidence, and deemed worthy of it, but your grave disloyalty to your colleagues, to the high trust reposed in you as a Minister of the Crown, and to that unwritten law without which Parliamentary Government would be impossible, leaves me no alternative. H. A. Atkinson. Geo. Fisher, Esq., M.H.E., Wellington.

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