Page 5 Advertisements Column 1

Lyttelton Times, Volume IV, Issue 218, 2 December 1854, Page 5

[advertisement.] To the Electors of the Christchurch Country District. G ENTLEMEN, YOU have lately received at so many public meetings such lengthy accounts of the occurrences at the late meeting of the General Assembly at Auckland, that I feel that it is perhaps unnecessary for me to call you together to hear the same story again, and to listen to a fresh account of scenes and debates which are already familiar to you. But at the same time as I have differed so widely from my colleague Mr. Jerningham Wakefield, and have almost invariably been opposed to him, I feel that I should be wanting in respect to you and in justice to myself, if I did not take some means of giving you an account of my own line of action, and shew you my reasons for taking it. In doing this I shall endeavour as far as possible to avoid allusion to all personalities or topics of an unnecessarily irritating nature, and confine myself to giving my reasons for the votes I gave on the principal questions ; and I trust I shall show that I have acted throughout in accordance with the principles I professed before my election, and m the manner I considered best for the interest of my own Province and of New Zealand in general. In the first place I must state that the great differences on points of general interest between myself and my colleague, consisted in my support to the Fitz Gerald ministry while he invariably opposed it: my opposition along with the rest of our party to the anomalous and unconstitutional position of his father; the vote which, together with the same party, I gave against the Working Settlers' Amendments ; and the support I always endeavoured to give to any measure giving a Legislative and Executive control over the Waste Lands to each Province. Apart from my general concurrence in the policy of Mr. Fitz Gerald's ministry, I was also anxious to support them for the same reason that Mr. Gibbon Wakefield gave when he said he would " vote black was white to keep thtm in," because I was anxious that our first responsible ministry should nrt be a failure, and that they should be enabled to carry on the Government with as Utile opposition as possible, considering the difficulty they had in forming a policy and preparing measures in the short time allowed them. The policy of the ministry appeared to me from Mr. Fitz Gerald's first speech to be a very liberal one, and one calculated to be of service to the country, and the measures they proposed were well adapted to carry that policy out, had they been allowed to do so. The Executive Government Bill was one of iheir first measures, and this being, in fact, the very one calculated in my opinion to establish that responsible government we had been demanding, I voted for its second reading, leaving details to be altered in Committee. At that time I expressed myself as considering that, though I was pledged by my first address to you to do my best for the economy of the expenditure of the revenue, ihe payment of pensions to the old officers of the Executive on their retiring was not only a piece of justice, but also but a small juice to pay for the abolition of a despotic and incompetent government. The Empowering Bill, another of the most important of the measures they introdoted, was one to assimilate throughout all the Fi^hu-es the powers of the Superintendents, ami ti:<-;<-by to render their general position moiv u:^< no. In this bill was partly introduced thai -y-:em of delegation of power in ceiiaiu > a-- unii the General Goxernmeut to the Piiu-^e^ ■■■■oernments, which, amongst otlu-ss. >..i. '-'' -c-