The New-Zealander.

New Zealander, Volume 5, Issue 321, 27 June 1849, Page 2

The New-Zealander.

Be just ami fear not: Let all the emls tliou aiins't at, be thy Country's, 'i'liy Onn's, au<« I'rutli's.

"WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27, 1849. In the Downing-sheet system of Colonization — of Australasian Colonization, at least — there are two principles, like steam and the engine, intended to act each upon the other. Like the Admiralty steam experimentings, this system has proved to he one of the most egregious and costly blunders of an age with ■which economy is the precept, a rash and an inconsiderate expenditure the practice. It lacks, however, one of the main appliances of the latter, and that a most essential one, — the ability to generate the needful, but wasteful, steam : — the fuel is awanting, — for the absurdly fictitious value imposed upon these remote territories of the Crown is so excessive that the supplies have been diminished and curtailed, until the engine lies powerless from premature yet absolute exhaustion. These well known but most fallacious principles — to raise a land fund by sale of the Crown's Colonial demesnes, and to apply the proceeds of such sales to the purposes of emigration, so that capital and labour may become subservient to each other, have been tolerably extensively and disastrously tested. The scheme itself, however specious, is crude in conception and ruinous in execution. Its results have been a direct exemplification of the old fable of the goose and the golden eggs, which, we must again repeat, has been conclusively shown by the gigantic insolvency of New South Wales, and by the utter stagnation, if not prostration, of this most capable province. Were the positive abstraction of capital, derived from the sale of the soil, a loss even of but comparative moment, surely it is one which should be compensated by something verging towards an equivalent 1 But, is this so "? Is the class and character of emigration, paid for out of the first elements of colonial prosperity, at all commensurate with the colonial necessity 1 View these emigrants, shipload by shipload — examine into their qualifications as colonial servants, and what will be the invariable result ? Worthlessness will be found to be the rule, utility the example ! And wherefore 1 Simply because the funds are not honestly disposed of. Because more consideration is paid to shovelling away incumbrances from the "o'ercloyed" estates of obliging ministerial supporters, than to the selection of suitable labourers for the fleeced and struggling colonists. Let any one who has bestowed the least attention to the elements of the stream of emigration now flowing into, and at the cost of, New South Wales — to its laziness, its ignorance, and its impudence — to the shoals of idlers it is casting upon the already over popu ■ lated towns, to the few available hands it is circulating amidst the clamorous rural districts. Let any man bear faithful testimony to this medley, and decide whether in designating such emigration a fraud and a deceit we deal in fiction or in fact ? Whatever the ruinous tendency of these forced land funds, they are imposts from which the northern province of New Zealand has been comparatively exempt, be it in consequence of the clear-sightedness of its settlers, or be it because of the price demanded for the soil, which in most respects exceeds the twenty shillings an acre minimum of Australian exaction. From one or other of these causes, the lands possessed by' the Crown have been so very sparingly disposed of, that the amount of sales have barely compensated the cost of survey, if they have even accomplished so much. As -ft means of raising a fund they have therefore been valneless. English emigration, consequently, there has been little or none, the population of Auckland having been almost entirely augmented by drafts from the neighbouring colonies. To this circumstance a large town, and a little— a very little—country is attributable ; and because of this little employed country, and lesser rural population to turn the native richness of its prolific soil to the advantage of its colonists, the settlers of the neighbouring colonies are enabled to reverse the natural order of things ; to profit by our restrictions, and to sell and to supply our j markets with the bread stuffs and other foods ( ■which our own vastly superior fields could more abundantly and more certainly produce — ay, and largely export, if the industry of man ivere only j emitted to redeem the wastes at such a price as would render purchase profitable. The subject is somewhat musty, we confess; for we have dissected it in its every shape and bearing, and we should not have returned to discuss it now, but that we have learnt from unquestionable authority that we do possess a land fund, and that that land fund, limited and lamentable as it is, has been applied to defray the importation of emigration of a class and character for which no colony in the world would voluntarily disburse a single shilling — tliose emigrants being the pensioners just arrived per " Berhampore,'* and the funds to bring them hither being the cash realised by the few miserable perches of town lands sold at famine prices in March last! Verily, this is amending the Wakefield system with a vengeance ! What ! Fleece an infant and a struggling settlement ? One which has

scarce recovered from the. state of depressed impoverishment to which it was so recently reduced, and which, even now, owes its little importance, to wholly extraneous causes :—: — Mulct that settlement of its poor, paltry, means of procuring legitimate emigrants, '{in conformity with the already sufficiently injurious plan of Downing Street Colonization) , to apply it to the deportation of Chelsea guardsmen ? To compel us, the youngest British offshoot, to pay for a worse than questionable pensioner protection, is a species of oppression of which we little dreamt that even the Whigs could have been capable ! Who after this, will venture the foolhardy question — "Of what use are the Colonies'?" We certainly, are no alms-takers, if we can at our own proper charge import the war-worn veterans of the parent state S Monstrous as it is, — it is to the iniquitous principle involved that our bitterest objections apply ; because, as we feel pretty considerably certain that the disbursements of the first division must have well nigh beggared the treasury, it must be evident that when the next detachment shall arrive, and the bill for their passage money shall be presented, the casual and contemptible source being drained, and the spring exhausted at the fountain head, the drawee will have but the bankrupt's alternative, to write " no effects," and so dishonour the draft. The doubly grasping spirit of this notable project is the retributive instrument of its own defeat. The monstrous restrictions prevent the sale of the soil ; the want of a sale precludes the possibility of a fund, and the ministry whose sordid desire would lead them to " coin our blood for drachmas," must eventually find the ways and means of liquidating claims which no colony should ever have saddled upon it. When British senators indulge in parrotted eulogies of New Zealand, they would do well to pause and to ascertain the true condition of a colony on which they bestow so much " mouth honour breath." If they would devote the little time and trouble requisite to master its actual position, they would see that it well merits its hacknied appellation " The Britain of the South:" — not because of great and extensive operations in development of its vast inherent resources, but because of its genial climate, its facility of cultivation, its extreme fertility, the ease with which fern can be converted into the richest pasture and tillage lands, the absence of droughts, the abundant supplies of water, the unquestioned existence of mineral treasures, and the ample scope of providing for a dense and diligent population, such as the most favoured of the Australian colonies would be totally unable to support. They might easily learn all this, and they might discover that with the finest soil in the world, and in a where failure of crops is unknown, some eight or ten thousand Englishmen, dwelling in a settlement now in the tenth year of its existence, are compelled to import their daily bread from the immeasurably less agrestial fields of Australia; and all this because it is the will and the pleasure of an oppressive Colonial Office to close those lands by the imposition of an impossible purchase money — an interdict to capitalists, and a means of expulsion to many who would have gladly cast their lot in a spot by nature blest, but by Downing-street banned. A very moderate share of study would suffice to convince our Humes, our Cobdens, and our Molesworths that these are facts as demonstrable as they are detrimental to the Nation. They would be able to prove the injustice and the impolicy of paralyzing the Colonial arm, of embittering the Colonial heart. They might show that the abuse of the colonies because of the incompetency of the Colonial Office is an evil which operates most injuriously upon British prosperity, and that the impoverishment or enthralment of the one must militate greatly to the injury of the other. If Senators would only disentangle the Colonial qustion of the complicities with which it seems to be the aim of every Secretary to mystify it, and deal with the colonies as one upright man would deal with another, it would speedily be seen that the remotest and most insignificant of them, if left to their own industry and intelligence, would spring from beggarly and clamorous dependency, to a state of happy and contented prosperity, such as could not fail to react beneficially upon the commercial and social integrity of the empire at large. Let any rightminded Englishman cast but a glance at the present affairs in this Northern province of New Zealand, and say if things should be suffered to go on as they are now doing. The lands of the Crown and the Natives are so fettered and restricted that neither for purchase, nor lease, nor squattage are they so available as to be sought after by men at their wits ends how to employ their industry and their means. Ex nihilo nihilfit is a truism here most unnaturally illustrated. We have a fruitful country compulsorily continued in a state of barren wilderness. — We have able farmers driven from their legitimate pursuits to become hucksters and jobbers in the unhealthy purlieus of an over crowded town. And for the want of the necessary rural labour to speed the plough (thirty and forty pounds a year, with rations, ; are a common rate of wages,) we have men

relinquishing an avocation in which they delight, some realising, and following fortune to other shores - others working the smaller farms — to which they are necessitated to confine themselves — hy their own labour and that of their children, if they are fortunate enough to possess them. And, as if all these evils were not sufficie it — as if the Ministerial screw were not sufficiently grindingly applied — As if the system practised in other colonies were much too liberal to be permitted in ours — the wretched pittance wrung from our land sales and which we had reasonably and fondly hoped would have been devoted to the importation of a small modicum of the much wanted labour, — that pittance is lavished in the conveyance of a handful of worn out pensioners, a class of men who from previous habits would be the very last to be selected by a people permitted an interest in their own affairs. If England is solicitous of experimenting upon Military Colonization it should be at her own expense and risk. Is it just, is it honest, in our misery, to pounce upon us ?

" You will, probably, have heard," (writes a gentleman in England to a friend in Auckland, under date of the Ist of March) "of the mighty efforts made by the New Zealand Company to induce a removal of the seat of Government toJVVellington. No sooner did intelligence of the conflagration of Government House reach the Broad Street Directory than every engine was set at work to accomplish that much wished object. Earl Grey was pestered with useless solicitations. It is now affirmed, upon what I believe to be unquestionable authority, that the Company will dissolve at the expiration of their mortgage, which, as you know, will terminate with the current year."

Intelligence has been received in town that the schooner "Thomas Nixey," which was feloniously carried off, on the 6th instant, by Crowe and his confederates, put into the Barrier Island, where these pirates remained for five or six days, plundering and laying waste the property and effects of Captain NaglejJ; whose house they stripped of its doors and French windows, and appropriated a quantity of Van Diemen's Land treenails, a number of casks, together with everything loose, or which they could break up. From this, it is perfectly clear, that had the smallest energy been displayed by the local authorities the capture of the runaways must have been easily effected. We cannot understand the causes of the neglect thus evinced. With a frigate and the Government brig and schooner in port, there were ample available means, and the stolen property could have been recovered, and the thieves secured, by the mere despatch of one of the " Havannah's" cutters. It, therefore, appears very unaccountable that no steps should have been taken, especially as Mr. Combes lodged an information the very day the vessel was carried off, and expressed an opinion that she would put into the Barrier.