The Lyttelton Times.

Lyttelton Times, Volume III, Issue 154, 17 December 1853, Page 6

The Lyttelton Times.

December 17, 1853.

In; fulfilment of the intention we expressed last week, aud then partly carried out, we proceed in our present number to consider the business transacted by the Provincial Council. Having referred to the Ordinances they have enacted, we now pass to the Resolutions they have adopted. The Council twice considered the question of the Waste Lands, and^ both times they came to the same result. Indeed, had they come to any other, they would have strangely belied their protestations on the hustings. The result is this : local and responsible management for the Waste Lands. 1. That the power of legislation at present rests solely with the General Assembly : 2. That that power ought to be conferred by the General Assembly on the Provincial legislature : 3. That even before the present laws on the subject are altered, the administration of the present law ought to be confided to the local Government. Upon the last occasion of discussing these principles, the day before the prorogation of the Council, very considerable difference of opinion occurred. The resolutions of the Government were carried only by a majority of one, and a protest against them was endeavoured to be entered by the minority. There seems, however, to be some misunderstanding on the subject, since the object of those who protested appears to have been exactly the same as of the movers of the resolutions, namely, that the administration of the Waste Lands should be carried on under responsibility to the Provincial Council. Upon that principle, the Government and the Provincial Council have been unanimous throughout. And in the assertion of that principle, they certainly represent ninetynine out of every hundred of the inhabitants of the Province. Upon the subject of the Waste Lands it was manifestly impossible not to consider the conduct of the late Commissioner of Crown Lands. And the Provincial Council exercised the high privilege which belongs to every Legislative body, by petitioning for the removal of an incompetent public servant. Here too was shewn another valuable right pertaining to representative institutions. One Thomas Adams comes before the Council by petition, stating that he has grievously, suffered.] in* fortune, by tlie oppression and injustice of a public servant. The petition, simple and forcible 'in its narration of facts, does its work on the minds of tlie Council, and is referred by them to the Governor in order that His Excellency may do justice thereon. So, too,

comes the Memorial of the inhabitants of Akaroa, praying His} Honor's protection against [the; acts of the servant'of; the Government, who was seeking to dispossess them of their lands to make way for another claimant, without due recourse had to the legal tribunals of the country. This Memorial too ,lies on the table of the Council, bear., ing witness to the downfall of arbitrary misrule, and the restoration of English rio-hts and English laws. a

On Finance questions, the Council appeared to be sorely puzzled. His Honor lays before them a tangled case of illegality with which those only taught to delight in the mazes of the law would care to deal. But dealt with it must be. The Revenues of the Province must be disposed of. The Government must be carried on. And yet this must can only be satisfied by a Council of law-makers conspiring to be law-breakers. The Government at Wellington would seem to have satisfied its conscience, and , so to have shrank from the ; unfortunately we think : for some of those who have grown grey in the battle for the Constitution, seem to have fallen into the trap at last, and become defenders or apologists for its most fatal breach. The Provincial Council have not met the difficulty. They have only postponed it; but not we hope with the view of abandoning their position. They have asked Sir George Grey whether he intends to call the General Assembly together 91- not. Should be say yes, —then they may well consent to a temporary inconsistence. Should he say no, —iCwill be for them to consider whether they will sanction the Governor's illegality. They have voted that no public Revenues ought to be touched till the General Assembly shall have met. Will they stand fby that resolution ? ■ Or, will they take the other position, and assert that as the 'only legislative body, they have the power to seize the whole Revenues ? And will they try to enforce their authority at law ?£At all events, they have escaped committing themselves to a breach of the Constitution, so far : we shall see whether they will shrink from the conflict to come. Another trap too, they have avoided. In the Departments of the Supreme Court and Registration, the General Government proposed that the officers should pay the fees to themselves, and that the deficiencies in the expenses of the office should be defrayed by the Province. To this the Provincial Council have replied by resolution, that they would grant no money in aid of any department whose accounts were not subject to their control and audit. Another distinct enunciation of Constitutional doctrine. They have dealt 100 with the Post-office, recommending its improvement, and offering suggestions which will no doubt be attended to. They have pledged themselves to the great principle that a general educational system ought to be adopted for the Province. And they have considered and pondered over the Estimates, and have provisionally adopted them. Can it be said, then, that the Provincial Government has done nothing, because they have not ordered roads and bridges? We are satisfied that they have done a very large amount of work in two months. Chiefly, they have done this : they have recalled the public mind from that, slate of lassitude and inaction into which if was unavoidably falling, to an earnest consideration of the public welfare: asserting, steadily and consistently, the greatjmnciples of Constitutional Government; and so restoring the community to a sense of the privileges it once enjoyed, and which it lost by being transplanted to a despotically governed colony. Again, and not the least, it has tneo. public men, and opened up a field in which the abilities needed for the public service

*«- —-^ " ' ■ ■ ■ ■. . may be fairly tested ;• it, has shewn that this settlement is not wanting in the store of practical sense and public spirit, inherent in our race; that men, called by the popular voice from their farms and from their merchandise, men no way specially qualified by previous practice or experience to deal with affairs of Government, are not, when the time comes, found either unwilling to sacrifice time and to incur considerable expense, in furtherance of the public interest, or wanting in the exercise of the great powers confided in them. It has justified the wisdom of Parliament in declaring that colonists are able to govern colonies. And little as has yet been done, great promise has been given for the future,—that when jthis Council comes to deal, as it will-in future have to deal, with matters concerning the practical welfare of the Settlement, it will satisfy the wants of the Public. We may safely assert that the experiment of the Constitution Act, has, from the time of the elections onwards, been eminently successful, so far as relates to this Province.

In considering the business done in the first Session of the Provincial Council, we have elsewhere in our columns remarked upon the law affecting the Public Revenue as at present raised. We have not specially referred to an article which we observe in the Wellington Independent of November 19th, on the finance message of His Honor the Superintendent of Canterbury. We cannot discuss in detail all the matter brought forward to show that the Superintendent and Council of this Province had no ' good and sufficient grounds' on which to base their conclusion. Moreover, as the article bears unmistakable marks' of having been inconsiderately and hurriedly written, we will only as cursorily as possible notice it. For the credit of our contemporary, and for sake of the good old cause, we would fain persuade ourselves that the writer is as much a novice in the \?se of consistent arguments as he is a stranger to those broad principles of Constitutional Law which the Independent so long and so stoutly defended. It is asserted that under clause 1, of the Constitution Act, all laws existing previously to its passing continue in force; and that— "Until the expiration of the time appointed for the return of the writs for the first election of the Members of the House of Representatives, the Legislative Council >f New Zealand, or what in effect is the something, the Governor and Executive Council (!) shall continue to exercise all powers which such Legislative Council would have had if the Act had not passed." This would seem enough said on the question. If the Governor and his Executive Council may make laws, do in short just as they like, necessarily it is impossible for them to act illegally in any way; and consequently it was quite ridiculous and superfluous in the writer to pretend to argue any further. But he goes on, nevertheless, for the space of a column and a half to defend the Governor from a charge of illegality. He asserts that His Excellency " Ha« made over to each Province the whole of tlie Revenue derived therefrom, except such portions thereof which were already legally reserved or appropriated." Zeal for one's cause is praiseworthy, if tempered with discretion and restrained by reflection; yet it is not at all times prudent to prove too much. In this superfluity of [> reasons we detect a defence as weak as that the old woman made, when accused of returning the borrowed tea kettle with a hole in it. As to wit: " firstly, it had a hole when borrowed; secondly, it was sound when returned ; lastly, it was never borrowed at all." Less sound even than °ur old dame's kettle, the arguments brought

to the ' support; of the assertions quoted, won't "hold water" at all. We cannot help believing that they were borrowed by mistake, in a very unsound condition from the Spectator office, by some mischievous ' devil,' attached to our contemporary's staff. However we will join issue with the writer on his own terms. Be it so : the J[Governor and the Executive are " in effect the same thing as the Legislative Council." Then the Governor alone is not so. He planned and ordered all the recent changes at Wellington, while his Executive Council innocently vegetated at Auckland. A part is not equal to its whole : he, at any rate, is not the " same thing " as the Legislative Council. And we have yet to learn that His Excellency and Executive Council are, like the ' sympathetic snails,' electromagnetised to the pitch of interchanging sentiments on the instant at infinite distances. The writer has the advantage of us if he has seen any law, either of the " undissolved" Legislative Council, or of the " same thing," on recent finance measures. None such has ever been promulgated here. Even the old Legislative and Executive Councils were by Royal Instruction bound to observe an outward decency in their proceedings. There were rules laid down for their assembling, for their conduct when assembled ; for making public Bills to be introduced, and for promulgating them when become law. Have any such rules been observed in the present case ? But granted that they have—let it be noted that never, even in those days, had a Governor lawful power of himself to appropriate one farthing of Public Revenue. How then has the power lapsed to him now ? But in fact, he is not the " same thing " as the Executive Council, and both this body and himself are a very different thing indeed from the old Legislative Council. We have said it is imprudent to prove too much. If the old laws continue in force, and the Legislative Council at the same time has full power to legislate, among the sums " already legally reserved or appropriated " is a certain £6,000 yearly, payable to the Civil List by each Province. Wellington may be content to make such payment; this Province is not. We will quote further, to show how completely the writer of the article discards the fundamental principle in regard to taxes on which Representative Government is based :— " There is nothing arbitrary in the affiair at all. He (the Governor) only takes (!) certain specific sums which he is by law entitled to." When a big thief only takes fifty sovereigns from you, is there then, nothing at all arbitrary about the affair,' because he leaves you your purse and a hundred or two of Bank notes, knowing that you would raise all the stir and outcry of a stuck-pig about the latter, but think yourself too lucky to escape with the abstraction only of the former ? Your being " entitled by existing laws" to a sum of fifty pounds in no way confers the privelege to insert your hand into your debtor's till, thence, without process of law, to " only take" the amount due. Lawful authority to collect, by no means includes lawful authority to appropriate, Public Revenue; and this is the real question on which to try the merits of the case. At best, if the Governor is [by law entitled to any specific sums at all, the law is so exceedingly doubtful and obscure as for public safety to require a distinct declaratory enactment in explanation. But we deny in toto the right assumed to expend, while fully admitting the power to collect. We quote again,— "He (the Governor) has not arbitrarily fixed these sums at one-third, but it so happens that they just now amount to one-third.'' This is simply rank nonsense, I^ so

happens that Public Revenue can neither be ascertained beforehand, nor has it any inherent capacity for self-adjustment. If the method of arriving at •' these sums" be fixed, not by Law, but by the Governor, then either he has adopted it arbitrarily,— and nothing else, —or the word arbitrary has lost its meaning. But after all the wiiter arrives at a disposition ''to think that the Provincial Councils alone are the only legal authorities which can deal with the Public Revenue of the colony," and thus shatters to pieces the whole fabric of an argument set up against that inward conviction of a wrong existing, which the instinct of an Englishman forces upon him in spite of himself. In these " only legal authorities," the Governor is not included ; and, taking as their motto " Aut Csesar aut nullus," they should, to be consistent, either vote away, by law, the whole Public Revenue, £16,000 Civil List and all, (thus -giving a legal sanction to His Excellency's plans in their integrity,) or abstain from touching one farthing of it. Now let it be understood we do not quarrel with his Excellency's plan—very far from it. It appears to be one in the main calculated to work well: but what we do want is to have it confirmed by competent authority. With the Independent we desire the fullest powers for the Provinces. But we wish to have these powers confirmed by positive enactment; notgrasped'under cover of doubtful interpretations of a law upon which a higher legislative body may place their own interpretation, differing widely from that of the Provincial Councils. ,The Provinces want security, not the fictitious semblance of it; real power,.not the shadow of it. We cannot believe that the article we have referred to, could ever have emanated from the pen of those staunch friends of responsible government and popular liberties, who once had sway over the columns of the Independent. It is equally unworthy of them, and of the principles upon which that journal has been conducted. We must attribute it to one who has negligently studied his task, and who has yet from the former pages of the journal to acquire the true spirit of constitutional freedom, more intimate knowledge of New Zealand Ordinances and clearer views of the Legitimate manner in which plans of a Government, good in themselves, are to be set working : namely, under that sanction which is conferred by laws enacted with due and fitting solemnity. We hope soon to find the Independent back again in the path on which it first set out, and has till now kept, in close alliance with the sister press of Nelson, of Canterbury, and of other settlements.

By the " Admiral Grenfell," we have two days later intelligence from England. The RussoTurkish dispute is still enveloped in mystery and doubt, and until authentic news is received of the evacuation of the Danubian provinces by Russia (a sine qua non with England and France), it is idle to talk of any satisfactory and permanent negotiation. The grand naval review by the Queen on tlie 1! th August is described by the Times as '* a spectacle unprecedented,aiid that could be produced nowhere else." The fleet consisted of 27 line-of-baltle ships and large war steamers, mounting 1,076 guns, manned by 10,423 men, and employing 9,680 horse power. This demonstration, considering the peculiar state of foreign affairs, carries great significance. Great sensation has been created at Sydney by the intelligence of the occupation by France of New Caledonia. This important island was formally taken possession of on the 24th Sept., by Admiral Feborier dcs Pointes in the name of Louis Napoleon 111. The Sydney Herald suggests the immediate occupation, by_ Eug laud, of the Fejees, as a "counterpoise to French ambition in the Pacific. It is believed that New Caledonia is intended to be made a penal Settlement by the French Government,