New Zealand Spectator, AND COOK'S STRAIT GUARDIAN. Saturday, December 22, 1849.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VI, Issue 458, 22 December 1849, Page 2

New Zealand Spectator, AND COOK'S STRAIT GUARDIAN. Saturday, December 22, 1849.

If we may judge from the whining tone of their last number, our strictures on the articles recently published in the Independent have not been without their effect. The galled jade winces, and, smarting under the infliction, has attempted to parry the force of the blow by taking refuge behind the nominal conductors of that journal. Necessity brings strange bedfellows together, and certainly the familiar compact between the Company's Principal Agent and his present colleagues of the Independent, the alliance, offensive and defensive, between them could only have been entered into from some necessity to him apparently inevitable. But whatever equivocations or subterfuges may be resorted to in attempting to meet the charge, neither Mr. Fox nor those who act under his direction can deny there are sufficient grounds for believing that the greatei number of the articles which have appeared in the Independent during the last six months in abuse of the Governor- in- Chief, the officers of the Government, and the non-official members of the Council, have emanated from his pen, and that this opinion is generally entertained in Wellington. We shall not descend to any personal altercation with- these men, or bestow any notice on the falsehoods they choose to reiterate respecting ourselves, which have been so repeatedly exposed and refuted ; we write not for them but for the public, we have no hope of convincing those who deliberately sin against their own conviction, and assert so often what has so often been proved to be untrue, but leave our readers to judge between our arguments and their unsupported assertions. We may, however, remind Mr. Fox how derogatory to his present position, how injurious to the interests of his employers, is the course he has chosen to pursue. His desire for meddling in local polities is so inveterate that, as we hinted in our last number, if he had accepted office under government, as was at one time probable, his ready pen would have been actively employed in upholding all its measures, and in maintaining that all it did or proposed was "wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best." But in thus following the strong bent of his inclination, perhaps to the length of abusing his former employers to show the sincerity of his conversion, it is probable he would have received from .Sir George Grey a similar hint to abstain from newspaper controversies as that given to a former legal adviser of the Government who used to attack the Company in the same journal which is now so implicitly the organ of Mr. Fox. And we are greatly deceived if the Directors of the New Zealand Company do not view the subject in the same light ; they cannot but think it unseemly and injurious to their interests that their Principal Agent should take advantage of his position to try and thwart the local Government by an intemperate and unscrupulous opposition to its measures. It certainly seems strangely at variance with the Company's position in its subordinate dependence on the Government, that its Principal Officer should be the author of attacks against the Governorin- Chief, more remarkable for their virulence and the coarseness of their language than the truth of their statements or the elegance of their composition.

The names of Lieutenant- Colonel M'Cleverty, commanding the troops in the Southern Province, and of the Officers of the Commissariat, were inadvertently omitted in the account of the funeral of the late Capt. Smith, published in our last number.

Wb have been favoured with the loan of a few Auckland papers to December 4, extracts from which will be found in this day's Spectator.

Cricket. — We understand a match will be played to-day at Thorndon, between the officers of the 65th regt. and the civilians on one side, and the non-commissioned- officers and privates on the other. Wicket's to be pitched at 1 1 o'clock in the 'forenoon.