Page 5 Advertisements Column 1

Lyttelton Times, Volume IV, Issue 174, 6 May 1854, Page 5

[advertisement.] To W. Gr. Brittan, Esq., Commissioner of Crown Lands, Province of Canterbury, Registrar Generals Office, Christchurch, 18th April, 1854. Sir, IT is to be regretted that, not availing yourself of information! would readily and in compliance with the wishes of the General Government have afforded you upon points on which you can have no knowledge, you should us hastily as indiscreetly have given in the Lyttelton Times of ; the loth, your Public Notice dated the 12th instant ; and that too, after what I so recently communicated to you, at your request, for the information of the officer administrating the Government of New ZeaJiiiid. I have taken care, however, to send to the Colonial Secretary by the Government Brig, copieb of these communications, in order .that they may be laid entire before His Excellency Colonel Wynyard, whose instructions, as you acquaint the public, you have received to act as you announce ; and which amounts to this, that in place of the public inquiry by competent persons, into the reasons fov my removal by Governor Sir George Grey from my appointments of Commissioner of Crown Lands and Commissioner under the New Zealand Company's Land Claimant's Ordinance, which I have anxiously courted from the General Government, you declare yourself authorised to make a sort of discretionary inquiry into my acts as Commissioner of Crown Lauds, and also, as you would have it appear, you are to remedy the wrongs I have done to certain occupants of pastoral runs in this Province. ■' Armed with due authority as Commissioner «f Crown Lands, and after mature deliberation, I decided—and you have no power to reverse my decision—that none of these complaining occupants shall hold a run pf greater extent than 25,000 acres! I derive my power to come to this decision, and which is in strict conformity to regulations, by being duly commissioned by Her Majesty the Queen under Sir George Grey's signature and the Public Seal of the Islands of New Zealand, to hold both my apppointments, and from which His .Excellency had no power to remove me without trial. It is for you to show ■whether you hold such commissions, and likewise, when you took the oaths prescribed by the Ordinances. And I beg to remind you that in the case of Mr.' .Hempelman, at Akaroa, and when, certainly,'you had neither re-: ceived a commission nor taken the oathe of: office, you acted in the'same'hasty and indiscreet manner, without having ever perused the important documents which, for your information and guidance, I had previously, through Mr. Dampier, placed in your hands. In this instance you announced that you a^ted under the instructions you had received from Sir G. Grey himself. But on the 18th of November, being made aware of the extraordinary and unlooked for manner in which I had been removed from my appointments, and though the same salary which I before received was secured to me, and I was apparently rendered independent of the Provincial Government, yet I wrote pri- j A-ately to Sir George Grey and officially to the Civil Secretary, remonstrating against my removal from office, and at the same time praying for reconsideration before the duties of the offices of Registrar General of Births, &c, and Segistrar of Deeds were, without my knowledge or consent, imposed upon me. I also remonstrated against what the Civil Secretary had written to the Superintendent of the Province of Canterbury, dated 11th of November, 1853, as to a decision having been come to, and communicated to me in the case of Mr. Hempelman. Such a decision I never before heard of. I however demanded from the Civil Secretary an authenticated copy of it; but to this day I have not received it, and I now conclude I never shall. But as these matters, as well as others of much importance to this Province, have gone not only before the General Government, but also the Secretary of State for the Colonies, at present it is unnecessary to say more upon the subject than that when the result becomes known, I have no apprehensions but my public as well as private character,, which have been so grossly and unwarrantably aspersed, will stand completely justified. On my remonstrating with Sir George Grey, and complaining of the conclusions which His