COLONIAL LIABILITY.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 7, Issue 374, 7 May 1866, Page 2

COLONIAL LIABILITY.

(From tlie Hawke's Bay Times, 3rd May.)

Beyond question, the item of intelligence of greatest importance to the Colony of New Zealand that has come to hand by the late mail is that which declares the Colonial policy of the Home Government, and which is contained in the despatches of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Mr Cardwell. We made a passing allusion to this in our last issue while summarising the news to hand, but it deserves a more detailed notice than we then had either room or time to bestow upon it, and we now purpose again taking up the subject. We can scarcely expect the British people to look at this subject from a Colonial point of view, or to understand the matter in anything like a truthful way. They have had the colonist held up before them by the Church Missionary party as unscrupulously covetous in the matter of the lands of New Zealand, and the Native has been placed before them by the same party as being oppressed, robbed, and down-trodden to an extraordinary degree by the Pakeha. But this is not so with her Majesty’s Government. The whole case lies before them in its entirety; they know that the Colony has from its first settlement been under the rule of the Queen’s representative, and that this rule has invariably been exercised in favor of the Native race to the retarding of the progress of the Colony and its constant detriment; so much so, as to cause a celebrated ecclesiastic to assert, only a few years since, that these islands were colonised for the benefit of the Native race. Native interests and Crown interests have indeed always taken a primary position before Colonial interests ; and whatever may be pretended to the contrary, the Forces of Britain have been sent out as much to awe the Colonist as the Maori. The item for New Zealand Fencibles, now again brought forward to the debit of the Colony (£40,000), is one that has been long since repudiated, and, we make bold to sav> considered as accepted in that light by the Imperial Government, and consequently settled, by every old Colonist. We can fancy we see the look of surprise on the countenance of the Governor when first that item appeared before him as an actual charge against the Colony. It must have been something like a visit from the dead. The sending of that body of men from the mother-country to form the pensioner settlement of Auckland was purely an Imperial

affair, conceived and executed by the Crown, without the will or advice of the Colony, a gigantic error in design and execution, and one that it could not possibly in justice charge to the Colony. Accordingly it has been permitted to slumber for years as a settled affair, but only to be awakene d at last and brought against the Colony in its hour of need. So long as the celebrated treaty of Waitangi stands (and we opine that it cannot easily be annulled), so long must the British Crown hold the true control of Native affairs in this colony. It is this that has made every attempt to confer responsible government upon New Zealand a sham, and it is this which will and must continue to do so. The Crown cannot give up its duties voluntarily undertaken, and while it continues to retain a hold upon them, it must submit to bear the cost of its mismanagement. It has been the fashion with many to referto Governor Browne and his action in the case of the Waitara as the origin of the war in New Zealand, and to argue, that as his action was taken in support of her Majesty’s supremacy, the war was an Imperial war. As far as the argument extends, it is good; but it does not extend far enough. Little, indeed, had Governor Brown to do with the matter; at the most he could but have delayed it for a short time, and this only by the exercise of that very policy that brought it about—a policy of temporising to rebels, of condoning murders and other crimes,—of rewarding the violent, and submitting to untold aggression, humiliation, and injustice. This was the policy that brought about the war, as it was calculated to do, and might have been foreseen if her Majesty’s Government and Representative had had but eyes to see. Every concession was attributed to fear, every indulgence to cowardice, until the white man had utterly lost that position in the esteem of the Maori he at first possessed, and was looked upon merely as a victim for the Maori to despise and fleece. It was a policy’ that in the nature of things could not last for ever, and its effects had reached their culminating point in the defiant attitude assumed by W. Kingi in the matter of the Waitara purchase and Governor Browne, Here was the root of the evils under which we groan, and hence the responsibility of the Imperial Government, They have brought the present state of things upon us, and the cost of it is theirs in all equity. But being tired of the course of misrule conducted in ignorance by an authority on the opposite side of the globe, and groaning under its results, the Colony has cried for deliverance from this state of bondage, and humbly begs permission to manage its ownhusiness, promising cheerfully, even in its poverty, to undertake the cost, and so relieve the mother-country of a burthen which, unpleasant to her, has been of detriment to us, and the response we get is the information that we are debtors for all the long course of misgovernment which we had no power to prevent, as well as sufferers from the evils it has entailed upon us, and further, that pay it we must, and to'the uttermost farthing. Further than this, when we had submitted to the demands of the Home Government so far as to accept our liability, and actually forwarded debentures that, once endorsed by that Government, would be easily convertible into cash for a great part of that amount, even this endorsement is refused, and these debentures are retained as security only for the debt, instead of being converted into cash and applied to its partial discharge. There is also the threat of withdrawing all the remnant of the troops for which the Colony may decline to pay the stipulated sum of 440 per man ; and as it seems quite certain that the Colony will so decline, being quite unable, as well as unwilling, to submit to this injustice, it follows that the said troops will all be taken away, and the Colony left to manage its own affairs in its own way—“ a consummation devoutly to wished,” . I

It appears to us that there is but one course left for the Colonial Government to take, and that is simply to inform the Imperial Government that we are wholly unable to comply with demands such as those they have made; that which has already been admitted on our part will be paid—subject, of course, to reduction by the amount of our contra account —as speedily as it can be done ; but as to all beyond this, it must be repudiated in toto. Even if we were willing to submit to imposition so unjust, we could not do it, as the burdens we have undertaken, and are about to undertake, are as great as we are able to bear.