The New-Zealander. AUCKLAND, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13, 1862. BRITISH AND AUSTRALIAN STEAM NAVIGATION COMPANY.

New Zealander, Volume XVIII, Issue 1714, 13 August 1862, Page 3

The New-Zealander.

AUCKLAND, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13, 1862. BRITISH AND AUSTRALIAN STEAM NAVIGATION COMPANY.

Be just anil fear not; Let all the ends thou aim -1 »t, be ihy Country's fhy Ooi/s, ;>n,l Truth's.

The subject of Postal and Passenger communication between Great Britain and Australasia, whether by steam or by sail, is one which, for many years, has been a matter of anxious consideration to speculators and projectors, at the same time that it has been the grand and most important question to every colony of the Australasian group. It has been tried, by means of steam, first by the Australian Royal Mail Company, then by the General Screw Company ; again by the Royal West India Mail Company, and, at present, by the Peninsular and Oriental Company,—the three last by the overland route, via Suez, the first—with disastrous and costly failure —by the long sea route round the Capo of Good Hope. It has been conducted, likewise, under sail, and with marvellous regularity, by those magnificent and stupendous clipper ships of the Liverpool White Star and Black Ball lines, whose achievements have introduced a new character and a new class of ships amongst every maritime nation. The problem, nevertheless, is still unsolved. Sail has worked wonders, but it is uncertain; and against wind and weather, however gallantly it may contend, it can only do so with more or less success. Steam, via Suez and Galle, although it may give quick mails, can uever become the medium of extensive mercantile or passenger traihe; in fact, as far as the latter is in question, it is only they, compelled to urgent dispatch or to whom " money is no object," that can take advantage of such costly conveyance To expedite, to economize, and to bring the colouies and mother country into loss expensive but more rapid and more constant intercourse with each other has long been matter of scientific solicitude, and, with that object in view, a new Company, to be called the "British ami Australian Steam Navigation Company" is at this moment being about to lie organized in Melbourne. This Company propose to establish an economical, expeditious, and thoroughly mer'cantile route by long sea passage round the

Cape of Good Hope. They contemplate a capital of £2,000,000 to commence with,— power being given to extend it to £3,000,000 (in £5 shares) as tho traffic extends, and their fleet shall lequire augmentation. Their ships are to be of from 7000 to 8000 tons register; they are to commence with six or eight such, at an estimated cost of £240,000 per ship. They will be constructed with every modern improvement, will carry sufficient coal for the entire passage, reckoned at 44 days; and they will be able to bring a very large number of passengers at the low price of from £lO to £l2 per head. The project is attracting great attention in Victoria. Practical men and capitalists regard it as a safe card not only in itself, but as a cevtain means to " Advance Australia" by a la ,e and wholesome introduction of capital and labour. Tho Victorian Government, who have been applied to to guarantee an interest of 4 per cent., and to subsidize the Company^ have received the application most favourably, expressing their willingness to promote the undertaking by evci/ legitimate means, whenever the Compauy shall be in a position to tender their services. As far as the p.oposed operations of the Company are before the public, in common with the colonists of Victoria, we are disposed to regard them in a very favourable light. Vessels of such magnitude and power can neither fail to make rapid passages, nor so greatly to improve the quality of passenger accommodation and at the same time so marvellously to reduce its expense that not only will an enormous impetus be given to immigration, but so speedy and so light will be the disbursements of tho way bill, that a trip to the parent country will bo placed within the general reach, and travelling by steam of such a character become nearly as common as inland voyaging by rail. The British and Australian Steam Company is a grand and, we have little doubt, will prove a highly successful idea. To Victoria, to Tasmania, aud to South Australia, the prospect it holds out ought to be conclusive in commanding their support. Steam has been said to have bridged the English Chain: >1; aud in Australia these Colonies have a feasible project offe.'ed for their acceptance by means of which tho Atlantic and Southern O eans may be bridged for their especial behoof. A provisional committee has been formed; initiatory measures have been taken, to set the Coir pany agoing in the Colony, and to bring it under the speedy attention of the commercial and monied interests of Great Britain, with whom wish it a large and liberal measure of success. In what will this Company, assuming it to be established, affect New Zealand interests? —indirectly it will benefit us; but, directly, unless Ave desire to remain subservient aud subsidiary to Victoria, unless we be content to put up with her leavings, to follow abjectly in her wake, we must look to a postal and passenger route of our own; and that route beyond every possibility of question, whether for celerity, or the connecting commercial links of North and South American, West Indian, and North and South Pacific trade and intercourse must be via Panama. In desiring that route every Province of New Zealand is agreed. New South Wales, Queensland, and the more Northerly settlements of Australia, are not less interested in opening up this invaluable channel of mail and mercantile communication. Victoria, too, could not fail to profit quite as much by it as New Zealand would by her great steam ship compauy; but even were it otherwise, we consider the present condition and the brilliant prospects of New Zealand are more than sufficient to justify her in aspiring to the establishment of a route whereby sho shall be placed within the bounds of commercial and social intercourse, instead of continuing to be thrust as heretofore to its fag e:.d. We have come forward without' means whenever there was a prospect of their being turned to account. Wo are as ready as ever to do so again. We are persuaded that the subject only requires to be taken up with energy and industry to insure success. The time is opportune. Our Postmaster-General, Mr. Crosbie Ward, who has done so much in improvement of our inter-colonial and intcrprovincial system of steam communication, is said to be about to return to England. The Panama route is one which has engaged much of his attention, and, with proper credentials, it is a question which he might, very legitimately bring under discussion in fitting quarters. It has been alleged that Mr. Ward, being a Canterbury colonist, might be apt to sacrifice Auckland. We have witnessed nothing of the kind in his former arrangements, nor tlo we see any cause to doubt his integrity now; besides, the ports of arrival and departure will be determined more by the advantages to be obtained by any Company undertaking t\m service. These, however, are matters for after consideration. The opening of the Panama route is New Zealand's great aud urgent necessity, and we ought never to slack our efforts to accomplish its early and advantageous establishment.

Nothing is easier to write, and nothing perhaps takes so well with the unthinking reader, as a " sensation article," more especially when it tends to foster prejudices already conceived, and adroitly tickles the sense by means of a well concealed undercurrent of adulation. It is not often that Ave caro to turn aside from our own track to notice the vagaries of our mercurial contemporary, yet his article of Saturday last—a flippantly written resume of the past political and social history of the Province, complete in one column—is so essentially a lucubration of this nature, and is so highly spiced with a wilful misrepresentation of ovents, and of the motives and actions of our public men, that we are disposed to take out and air the literary straight-jacket with which we have more than once been reluctantly compelled to invest our brother journalist, in order that the public peace might be conserved. In the article alluded to, a recapitulation of the events of the last tAventy years is thus summed up—" Our success is only partial, however. We have no patent right to the first place even in New Zealand." The 'public should be thankful for this outspoken expression of the inward convictions of the Southern Cross, and if ever the question shall bo seriously raised as to the right of Auckland to remain the Capital of Ncav Zealand, it is well that it should be knoAvn by whom Avcapons, which may bo used against us, have been placet! in the hands of our rivals. " Save us from our friends," the late Stafford Ministry and the supporters of Southern interests may well exclaim, when they listen to the outpourings of their Aucki laud organ! Truly somo bungling novice must havo taken possession of the tripod

during the absence of the Pythoness. The oracle has spoken. But through unskilfulness it misses the very effect it would'produce, and draws down condemnation on the heads of those by whom it allows itself to be suborned. Now, the question arises (says the Southern Cross), have our representatives in the General Assembly been true to their constituents ? We contend that a portion oi them have not stood up for the interests of Auckland as they ought to have done. Without reflecting on the consequences of their votes, they blindly followed the lead of men avowedly inimical to the prosperity of this city and province. We know, of course, that our contemporary is the organ of the war-party and of the Stafford Ministry, and we know also that a cry has been raised against Mr. Fox because of his assumed Southern sympathies, although the existence of such sympathies has not been specially manifested in anywise in any single act of his administration; but, as nothing more than a general condemnation of our representatives is expressed, we are somewhat at a loss to determine to whom it properly applies. If the article of Saturday have any meaning, or point at all, it is this—that, instead of voting upon the usual division, nine on one side and six on the other, the fifteen Auckland men ought to have marched into the " same lobby," and should vote together upon all questions, in order "to exact fair dealing with Auckland in the House of Representatives." But into which lobby? The leaders of both parties are men with " Southern sympathies," and judged of, as the Cross judges them, by their respective steam postal arrangements—the Stafford " sympathies" were infinitely less favourable to Auckland than the Fox " sympathies." This admits of the clearest demonstration, and thus the nine men must have voted rightly according to tho Cross rule, and the six wrongly, which certainly is not what our contemporary means, although in his new and unusual jumble of words he says it. But let us look at the conduct of Auckland members on the late occasion, without reference to this southern leader or to that, and enquire which side represented the feeling of this community in reference to Sir George Grey, and to the Native policy. "In the attempt," said the Governor, in his opening speech to the Assembly, " which it is my duty to make to restore the friendly relations which formerly existed (with the native people), my hope of success rests mainly (under Divine Providence) on the co-operation and support which I may receive from the colonists, and the resources you may place at my disposal." Now regarding the resolution proposed by Mr. Fox as e.nbodying the answer of the House of Representatives to Sir Gearge Grey's appeal for " co-operation and support," we ask whether tho six who voted on tho side of Mr. William Mason, or the nine who voted for the resolution, were the representatives of the public feeling of Auckland upon that appeal. If the public meeting lately held here, and the address of the Auckland people to the Governor have any significance, the answer is plain; the nine men who showed that they would not trade with the Governor for " peace and order" in the spirit of Yankee clock makers or pettyfogging attorneys, are the representatives of the popular feeling of this Proviuce. It is true, quite true, that these "same gentry" (tho blunt coarse tool of the novice is here evidently substituted for the keen polished blade of the ordinarily officiating priestess) "hold strong views on certain matters which we (the Cross) will not now name." And well is it for the Cross, and for the generality of its readers, that these "same gentry" did hold strong views on this matter. We do not deny that to have transformed Auckland into a military camp, and to have entered on a long and bloody struggle, might have been profitable to some; but we do know that such a course would have been ruin, utter ruin, to tho majority of our outsettlers and citizens. We have the opinion of Governor Browne as well as that of Governor Grey on this matter, as conveyed in their several despatches to tho Duke of Newcastle on the subject, and we do trust that our contemporary will have the candour iind moral courage to publish also these Government papers, and so assist in disabusing the minds of a portion of the public of the belief, that the European inhabitants of this country were of themselves, or with the assistance they then possessed from the Military, able to conquer the Natives or even to hold their own. But the grossest and the most unwarrantable of the many misrepresentations which make up the sum of the article we allude 10, is contained in the assertion with relation to the existing postal arrangements, that by the votes of these objectionable members "Auckland has been deliberately sacrificed to benefit the settlements on Cook's Straits." Wo are not prepared altogether to disagree with the remark that "in nothing, perhaps, has the monopolising spirit of the Southern representatives been so manifest as in the steam postal arrangements of the colony" ; but let it be remembered by whom those postal arrangements, so notoriously unfair towards this Province, and which gave such an undue advantage to Nelson, were introduced and maintained,—by the Stafford Ministry, and its organ the Southern Cross. So long as these Auckland members, whose imputed naughtiness is so offensive in the nostrils of our moral contemporary, were members of tho weaker party in the Assembly, this state of affairs necessarily continued; but with a change of Ministry came an altered postal arrangement, and we would advise the Cross, when it cavils at an existing system which gives to Auckland a fair share of advantages, to come forward at tho same time with some more feasible plan as a substitute, lest it placo the Auckland public, whose feelings it might be wrongly supposed to represent, in the unenviable light of appearing to wish for a monopoly as unjust as that from which the very men whom it maligns have saved us. Thus far have we written, moved by tho wantonness of the misrepresentations sought to bo imposed upon the public, without any hope of being able to affect tho primary cause. Such cure we look for in the eccentricity of the journal itself. Six weeks ago, and Sir George Grey was the incubus under which the colony labored—to-day, Sir George is the sun which wakes it into life! On the Sabbath morning a reporter is sent to a placo of Worship, and the sermon of an eloquent prelate is, that same afternoon, set up in type and published in its Monday issue ; and lo! before the week is out, in the own " correspondence column," it fights the battle of " Infidelity," under the nomme de plume of " Excelsior." Next week, possibly, the Auckland men who support the Native policy of Governor Grey and his late advisers _ may wmo into favour, and iu the dearth of subjects, bo made to figure in an " article."