The Akaroa Mail. FRIDAY, MARCH 21.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 3, Issue 279, 21 March 1879, Page 2

The Akaroa Mail. FRIDAY, MARCH 21.

The mission of the Premier of Victoria and one of his colleagues to England is not without interest and significance for us in New Zealand. This mission is at present the final outcome of a struggle which has been going on in the sister colony for the last twenty years. It is the i old, old, struggle, so old that it is perfectly astonishing how those engaged in maintaining it can be so blind as to profess to see anything new in it. It is the question of the supremacy of the few or the many, of the superior claims of men as such, or money as such, whether in the form of sheep or otherwise. In this struggle such little events as a Great Rebellion, an American War of Independence, a French Revolution have taken place, to say nothing of Peterloo masscres, and State Trials. The party of the few against many, by whatever name known, have been in times past able to surround their cause with a certain amount of poetic glamour and heroism. But in these days no such disguises are possible, and the cause of the monopolist stands out in all its naked selfishness. Especially is this the case in the Colony of Victoria. " I want the Crown lands to feed my sheep on," says the pastoral magnate, "no vagabond selectors and cockatoos shall interfere with my runs, if I can help it." I want no ' Colonial Industries,' " cries the merchant prince. "It suits me that you shall import everything you want, and buy it of me." And so on, and so on. The whole question has been one of money v. men. Now in Victoria, as with us, " There's a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft, to keep watch o'er the ' rights' of ' rich' Jack " in the shape of a Legislative Council. Space will not permit us to go into the ruthless manner in which this body has steadily persisted in its endeavors to conserve the privileges of the order it represents at the expense of no matter what confusion in the body politic, the studied insolence with which it has again and again set at naught the most unmistakeable expressions of the popular voice. Suffice it to say that its power is greater than that of i any similar body owing to the peculiar ! means in which the Constitution Act was framed, and after vainly endeavoring to induce Honorable Members to consent to a modification of those powers, the Assembly finally authorized the Government to send a mission to Eugland to endeavor to procure some power from the Imperial Parliament to enable the people of Victoria so to amend their Constitution as to be able to work out their destiny as a democratic community. From the advices which have reached us it appears likely that the embassy will achieve its object, but a collateral incident of the mission is deserving of every consideration in consequence of its so completely falsifying the dismal predictions of the obstructionists.

If there is one doctrine which these gentlemen are more prone than another to reiterate till it becomes sickening, it is that liberal measures tend to injure public credit, and. frighten away that particular god of their idolatry—Capital. Now, if these dismal prophecies were even true, we should be reminded of the well-known lines— "111 fares the land, to hastening, ills a Prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay;" but they are not true, and the great guns of the money market know full well, that no State is so truly solvent, as that in which the fullest liberty is given to each individual to acquire and preserve the wealth which he calls into existence by his labor. The Argus, the most unscrupulous organ of a most unscrupulous party, has long been trying to persuade the world that under the present regime the colony is rapidly ap proaching bankruptcy. The best answer to those jeremiads lies in the fact that the same mission which visited England for the purpose of obtaining a virtual alteration in the Constitution in a democratic direction has also succeeded in floating a large loan on the most favorable terms, we believe, ever yet obtained for Colonial securities.. As we remarked, at the opening of this article, these circumstances possess a special interest for ourselves. When this bugbear of " Capital " is raised to bar the way against necessary reforms (as it most assuredly will be) let us remember the Victorian mission, and the Victorian loan of 1879.