THE CROWN LANDS' OFFICE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume III, Issue 126, 4 June 1853, Page 10

THE CROWN LANDS' OFFICE.

We have been requested to publish the following correspondence between the late Hon. C. A. Dillon and Mr. E. Gibbon Wakefield:

Nelson, April 5, 1853.. Sir,—My attention has been drawn _to a letter bearing your signature and addressed to Mr. Tancred, published in the Wellington Independent of March 19th, 1853. In that letter the following passages occur:—" Consequently, the Executive has provided itself with a potent means of punishing and disarming opponents and buying votes. If only half of that is true, which I hear about the Land Offices, favouritism and jobbing are already their established habits of business. Both in the Middle Island and here, I have fallen in with many persons intending to have pastoral runs under the regulations which this proclamation has superseded ; and I can declare that every one of them, without an exception, spoke of his hopes and fears, as an applicant, as depending on favour or ill-will towards himself or towards somebody connected with him. I know of one case, in which a run was applied for in the name of a different person from the real applicant, because the latter feared that an application in his own name would be refused on account of some past opposition towards the Executive by a relative of his. It may be all false, or a dream of mine; but assuredly the corruption of the Land Offices is taken for granted by all who talk about them, as if it were a fact in the due course of nature, like the rising and setting of the sun."

Having filled the office of Commissioner of Crown Lands at Nelson since the resumption of the management of its lands by the Crown, and having been consequently in charge of the Land Office, I demand to be informed by you whether I am to consider myself as included amongst those against whom you have thus done your best to disseminate libellous imputations affecting both public and private character. An immediate and distinct answer to this question will oblige, your most obedient servant, C. A. Dillon. E. G. Wakefield, Esq. Wellington, 18th April, 1853. Sir, —I have just had the honour to receive your letter of the sth inst.

Its peremptory tone shall not provoke me to answer it in the same spirit. My answer to your letter cannot but be satisfactory to you. When I wrote to Mr. Tancred, I was unconscious that you held the office of Commissioner of Crown Lands at Nelson. I knew that you held some office in the Government ; but my ideas on the subject were very indistinct. If any one had asked me what your office was, I should have said Colonial or Civil Secretary at Auckland. Such is the ignorance of new comers from a place sixteen thousand miles off; so complete the isolation of every New Zealand Settlement! However, after this statement, it is hardly necessary for me to say,

that in my remarks about the Land Offices addressed to Mr. Tancred, I did not intend any sort of allusion to you. Neither, indeed, was I even thinking at the time about the Nelson Land Office, concerning which specifically I had not heard one word, good, bad, or indifferent.

But having given you this assurance for the sake of truth and justice, I must now add something in order to guard against letting myself compromise an important public question by my frank apology to you. If your office had been in my thoughts when the" letter to Mr. Tancred had been written, I should have plainly told you that it was so. I should, at the same time, have protested against all attempts to convert a public complaint on a subject of the highest moment to the public, concerning a public office, into a personal difference: and I should have avowed that it was my intention, as it actually is with regard to other Land Offices, to seize the first opportunity of calling respectfully upon the Governor-in-Chief for inquiry into the management and proceedings of the Nelson Land Office. Such a call might very likely be resisted : but it might surely be made without being treated as a personal attack upon a servant of the public, unless, indeed, we are to acknowledge that we live under a government as perfectly Algerine in its spirit and conduct, as it will remain in form until our withheld constitution shall come into force.

It has appeared to me the more necessary to add this explanation to my statement of facts, that the tone of your letter savours of an intention, such as has been carried into effect by the Land Commissioner here, to turn a public complaint of wrong done to the public by public servants into a matter of personal consider tion. I have the honor to be, Sir, Your most obedient servant, E. G. Wakefield. The Hon. Constantine Dillon, Commissioner of Crown Lands, Nelson.