ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES. (From the Morning Chronicle, March 25.)

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume I, Issue 50, 20 September 1845, Page 4

ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES. (From the Morning Chronicle, March 25.)

The commerce of England requires, under existing and unchanging circumstances, two things to sustain and perpetuate its prosperity — the continuance of good harvests at home, and the security of our new markets abroad. The first is, of couuse, beyond our power ; the second is within our coutroul. With Hong Kong in our hands, and combined determination and conciliation in our conduct, there is little probability of the ports of China being closed ; and it rests entirely with ourselves whether or not we are to be beaten out of the field we have opened for all other nations. So jar every thing is favourable. We have ventured that lenght on the broad common sense road as to act on the conviction that the days of Turkey companies and Levant monopoly \ are now gone by ; and in that larger and almost boundless East, which even now is but revealing to us a new world, we have sought no exclusive advantages, have preferred no huckstering and foreclosing claims. Nothing remains for us, therefore, but to encounter the competition of other nations on the honest commercial principle of cheaper and better ; and with steady supplies of food at equitable rates, and raw materials, furnished as economically as they can be brought from nature to the manufacturer, British ingenuity, skill, industry, and energy, may rest satisfied with securing no small bhare of the profitable commerce of the world. % What has happened, and is still in progress in the East indies, may guide us to a conjecture as to the probable results of our commerce with China, Evei^body knows that instead of receiving mn&hns from India, their native seat, we now send them there ; and that in spite of restrictions and monopoly, our machinery has successfully mumplied over the wonderful bkill, the patient endurance, and amazingly low wages ot the Hindoo hand- weaver, whose products, instead ot finding a ready market in England, c n scarcely retain their own. It was> not, however, till the partial opening of the East India trade, in 1814, that the muslms and calicoes ot Paisley and Manchester could enter into anything like coiupetetion. In 1814, the value of our cotton goods exported to India, was stated at ±*109,4i>0. This amount slowly but annually increased, till, on the abrogation oi the Company's commercial charter, in 1833, it received a great impulse 4 and we now find it stated, that the volue of our exports of cotton goods to India, during the last year, considerably exceeded £4,000,000. We are not to infer from this, that the prosperity of the British cotton manufacturer has necesbjnJy been productive of ruin and misery to the Indian spinners and weavers. The enlargement of the field of commerce has developed new sources of wealth, by means of new applications ot productive power ; oi which Ceylon may be taken as an example. Here, by the experiment of good Government and fiscal arrangements, based on common sense, anarchy has been changed into order, and misery and despair into acfi-" vity and happiness. Good roads have increased cultivation, and therefore fhe market supplies; moderate imposts have changed ah unproductive into a fertile revenue ; education is altering the character of the people; and an island about the size of Ireland, but recently overgxown with jungles, and sunk into a state ot semi- barbarism, now affords to British manufactures a yearly increasing amount oi demand. With these prospects of extended commerce in the East, the Pacific will, ere long, become a great highway of nations, and our possessions in that portion of the world of teufold importance to us. Here we are now gathering the elements of future disturbance and war, or future prosperity and security from war, which, like a volcanic throe, may vibrate through the globe, and set the whole world in a blaze ; or of peace, whose triumphs may secure the happiness of our children's children, and uphold Britain where she must stand, or irrevocably fall — the first of maritime powers. The manner In which we are preparing for results so momentous, let the present condition

of New Zealand proclaim. A fine country, as larg£ aja,d as genial, more so than Great Britain, and whose position and productions are all but essentiafao our commercial circumnavigation, is now in a state of anarchy, a noble colonizing experiment, undertaken on the most approved modern principles, and with all the aid and appliances of modern science, and the combination of .capital and labour, has been ail but ruined ; a set of hardy, active, and enterprising savages, presenting in their constitution and character the finest materials on which to work out the problem whether or not civilization can absorb barbarism, have been fostered and tutored into discontent, sulky, treacherous, and vindictive enemies ; and that full tide of emigration, which, in a lew years, would have converted New Zealand into the Great Britain of the southern hemisphere, has been arrested in its How. The reproacues of Chatham* addressed to the administration 1775, may be applied to ourselves in the matter ot i^ew Zealand. Our management of it "has been one continued series of weakness, temerity, despotism, ignorance, futility, negligence, blundering, and the most notorious servility, incapacity, and corruption." But it is not New Zealand alone exhibits us m this disgraceful light, though it affords us the most recent and striking instance. The whole ot our Australian possessions have either been founded in blindness or by accident, or have beeu nearly ruined by ignorance aud mismanagement. It is not now as it was in the days ol the Pilgrim Fathers, when men went out, with their lives in their hands, with scarcely auy dependence but unquivenng iaith and undaunted courage, to encounter the dreary wilderness and the roaming savage. We live in more placid times, when human nerves are strong rather Jor pleasure and profit than perilous adventure, with misery or starvation at the end ol it. We live in days of theoiy as well as of practice ; of Wakefieldian principles as well as of steam-boats aud railroads. Perils in the desert there now need scarcely be any. W e can pack up all the comiorts and conveniences ot civilization, aud carry them out with framework models oi Great Britain, iv society, religion, literature, manners, aud laws. Failure in colonization, with all our past lights and experience, is at once a ludicrous shame and a burning disgrace. Swan River, or Western Australia, was hung up as a great beacon-light in the southern sea ; and j yet, m spite of it, South Austialia, built on | the -newest plan, with experisnced-offieersand , pilot on board, ran hard and tast aground, ! and was all but utterly vgrecked. Eveu Australia Felix, discovered by chance, aud settled by impulse, has been oppressed by the leaden weight ol an antagohistic and retarding influence. True it is that Melbourne and Geelong, with their ports, customs, post-offices, dnd newspapers, have sprung up, as if to show ttiai mature, in her terule moods, is a better coloniser than book-worm economists, even though armed with commissions and acts ot Parliament. But Port Phillip has joined lustily in that loud cry of distress which, has come from the whole of our Australian possessions during he last two or three years ; a cry which our own domestic embarrass" meuis have caused us to leave comparatively unheeued; and now -that it is subsiding, the atteuuou wmcb. it might otherwise have received will be absorbed in that which must necessarily be bestowed ou the afflicting condition of JS'ew Zealand. — But when all is said, it does not account for the general discredit and embarrassment which have afflicted our Australian possessions ; we must come home lor a potent and primitive cause, and we find it in the Colonial Ogiee, Mew Zealand itselt turnisb.es the articles of impeachment ; it is a text for a session and a season. It" tells us that our Colonial administration proceeds on scarcely any other system than that oi patronage ; and that the main business of a Colonial Minister is to couler appointments, write smart despatches, and always to say " no" when expected to say Ji-y es «" A cautious statesman has much to do simply to neutralise the mischief, which is the inevitable result ; a proud or an impetuous one has but to mov.e his Lttl.e finger, ia order to dash the prospects and endanger xhe security of thousands of his fellow-subjects. The Colonial Office is becoming too great responsibility for any one man. The cjr.edit and character ot the country — the future happiness and prosperity — nay, the luture peace oi the world, aie all involved in its pr.oper administration; and we hope that the discussion which is about to take place .upon ,the affaiis oi IV c* Zealand aiay.jMt be couiiued, iv its ultimate effect at least^to the obtaining of jredre&s ibr flagrant wrongs, or eveu to rescuing that settlement from its piesent deplorable position ; but that it may open some prospect of placing the government of all our Pacific possessions on some system worthy of their growing importance.