PORT NICHOLSON.

New Zealand Colonist and Port Nicholson Advertiser, Volume I, Issue 50, 20 January 1843, Page 2

PORT NICHOLSON.

It is a frailty in human nature, that people are always apt to attribute, with much generosity, to others, those failings which they are themselves the slaves of. A drunken man, for example, always fancies it is any body else but himself, who is so. It is recorded of the madman, who had occasional lucid intervals, that he could give no other reason for his necessary confinement, but, that all the rest of the world were mad, and having unfortunately the majority in their favor, they had laid him by the heels, lest he should institute harsh measures for their recovery. Just in this spirit it is, that our contemporary of the New Zealand Gazette accuses us of a desire to disparage Port Nicholson. He is in an awkward, fidgetty, restless position himself, from his constant desire to make the world believe, that Port Nicholson is, what all the lying books,' published in London about it declare it to be—the Eldorado of the nineteenth century —like the capital city of Dick Whittington’s whimsies, upon the milestone at Highgate. The unhappy man is labouring under a monomania about Wellington (not the great Soldier, but the Raupo city), and fancies, that we, and every body else, have' nothing to think or muse upon, but the subject of his mental thraldrom : like the man that Charles Mathews, of immortal memory, used to tell of, he is “ haunted by a tune,” and whether he is knocking at a door, dissecting his porkchop, or squeezing out the last lingering drop of his half-pint of Cape,—“ ’tis all the same, ’ —his involuntary muscles beat time to the De tanti palpiti, or whatever other musical hobgoblin may have possession of him pro hac vice.

We ourselves set forth with a very natural respect for the enterprise and the capital of the New Zealand Company, and, if we were not bother’d about it, should be ready to say every possible thing that is handsome of Port Nicholson, —that is, in conscience ; —but, when it became a mooted question, whether Hobson s choice or the Company’s was properly the Capital one, it behoved us to be persnaded in favor of the balance of testimony. The case is well made out by Mr. Heale’s book; but there are a thousand-and-one decisive witnesses besides that gentleman : much of this has induced us to believe that Port Nic itself, would some day be converted to the universal opinion, arid, as “ coming events cast their shadows before,” we pronounce, that conversion is not far off. Col. Wakefield, we have a notion, will tell the Port Nieholsonians, that Auckland, if she must be considered a rival, is, at least, one that they may wisely conciliate. But why should all this draw the wrath of the Gazette upon us ? We have never made invidious comparisons ; if, by very chance, we have mentioned the respective merits of the two places, it has been in mere incidental reply to some furious onset of the Quixotic Gazeteer himself. We have not the honor of knowing the writer, and if we had, we would not fall into the error of imputing to him improper motives, without better authority, than an accusing conscience of our own : common sense would teach us the very very shallow pretensions of any cause, which needs to be propped up by unprovoked personalities. We might have expected that we should lose nothing of an accustomed courtesy, from a brother of the broad sheet, by reason of our writing without any anonymous defence, —but there is no accounting for tastes. The proprietor of the Times, and the reverend gentlemen whose name the scribbler in the Gazette so coarsely drags into hi? ungentlemanly invective, mav possibly be of sufficient consequence to make it worth while of the latter to be abusive of them ; but they cannot recognize him under any other than his professional cha* racter, which, if he is so heedless of it as to indulge in these sort of sallies, will soon be too threadbare for any one to take hold of. We have other “ brothers-in law” in our native England, and other parts of the world, but, the most remote of them all cannot possibly have less art and part in the conduct of the Auckland Times than Mr. Churton. It is inconvenient, we know, for a political writer to have no avowed party, and we feel this disadvantage, in the notice we have received from both sides of the Wellington press, for the Colonist quotes whole columns of our pages, and insultingly ascribes them to our printer. Those persons in Auckland, who communicate such j-mean-spirited attempts, are welcome to all the advantage they may reap from them. The effort that has been made by the Government in Auckland, to gag the press, ought not to have met with connivance from the public journals of Wellington ; it is, however, of less consequence to our equanimity , than it will be to their own reputation.