THE LATE INTERCOLONIAL CONFERENCE.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2244, 11 June 1881, Page 3

THE LATE INTERCOLONIAL CONFERENCE.

[FBOM THE OWN OOBEBSPONDBNT OF THB “ PEBSS.”]

, WELLINGTON, June 10. In the papers relating to the late Intercolonial Conference the only thing not previously published is Chief Justice Gome's memorandum, appended to that by the High Commissioner Sir Arthur Gordon, which I telegraphed some weeks ago. In reference to the report of the Conference, after discussing the different charges. Chief Justice Gorrie says in conclusion:—“lt has occurred to me as possible that the delegates have been influenced by the libels which they reprint and have appended to their report. If so, then the proposal would not merely be one to insure a better administration of justice, but is a little disguised impeachment of the High Commissioner’s Court itself. Your Excellency will recollect that “ Vagabond,” who signs some of these productions and appears to have inspired the remainder, is the person who was last year brought down to Fiji for a few weeks and, without knowing anything [of the colony or the affairs of its Government or the administration of justice in it, sought notoriety by assailing your Excellency and myself in a public lecture with abuse so foul and violent that even the local journals most hostile to the Government shrank from reproducing it in what purported to be a report of the proceedings. The respectable part of the audience rose and left the hall, and he was thereafter shunned, even by most of those who had taken him by the hand when he first came. He left the colony baffled and most bitter, and to that bitterness borne of bis failure to stir up sedition here he has given abundant evidence through the Australian papers. No doubt the writer saw many things in this colony which could not but shook a person of his views. He saw that no means were taken to encourage or cajole the natives to strip themselves of the possessions solemnly guaranteed to them by the Queen, and that the maxim that (as he puts it) ‘ The land is for the white man,' was not one accepted by the Government and the colony. He saw her Majesty's Fijian subjects a well ordered society; he saw their rights and property respected ; he saw them contented and peaceful and industrious, with a fair prospect of rising with that rising prosperity of the colony—a prosperity which the contentment of the natives increases, and which their discontent would imperil or destroy. He saw an absence of all those costly precautions which elsewhere mutual distrust has rendered needful, and of that sullen iilwill which a sense of injustice has too often elsewhere engendered. Offences such as these were not likely to be forgiven by this manor ethers of bis sort, but I think we are entitled to ask why the delegates should have received, and without inquiry as to their truth, reprinted his outpourings of bombast and falsehood. It is a maxim with public men at home that they do not take any serious step in grave concerns without having well ascertained facts upon which to stand. Hero we have a resolution of a meeting of colonial delegates, supported apparently by nothing better than anonymous libels or the random charges of an alien adventurer. I must enter my protest against the character and good names of Judges who have grown grey in her Majesty’s service, and who fill positions such as those which for many years I have had the honor to hold, being thus trifled with either by colonial delegates or by any other body of men. The delegates are now more responsible for the libels than even the author himself. As his, they would rapidly, and before this time, have sunk into oblivion ; accepted and recirculated by the delegates, they may live some time longer, not, however, to my hurt, but to the shame of those who have reproduced them.”