THE CANTERBURY BONDS.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume IX, Issue 814, 21 May 1853, Page 4

THE CANTERBURY BONDS.

;[From the Auttralian and New Zealand Gazette-] We have received a communication from Mr. Adderley, in which he informs us that Mr. Selfe would reply to our wish of staling more generally the relations of the Canterbury Association with their colonist*. That gentleman has done so in a long letter. Mr. Adderley, m a private note to ourselves, stated a ground for the non-paymeut of the bonds, which we cannot but wish that Lord Lytielton had given to the limes and Herald. We subsequently requested Mr. Adderley's permission to make use of a portion of this note as he himself was too busily occupied with his Parliamentary duties to enter fully into the rout-

ler. The permission was at once granted, md wo append the portion of the letter alluded to, 11 Yon speak of two Frances of £25,000, the first such sum being in no respect an advance by the Company, but an amount of shares of land sales, guaranteed by four bondsmen to the Company, which liability the bondsmen never hare repudiated in any possible sense. On the contrary, they contest they have paid all that is due —that is, that the Company has received all that was guaranteed to|them; if not, they confess them- ! selves bound. That is no repudiation." Why could not Lord Lyttelton have made this simple snd straightforward statement to the Times and Herald, in place of his discourteous brevity ? The thing, by Mr. Adderley's statement, is clear enough. The New Zealand Company having received over the amount of the guaranteed land sales, has put down the bonds to the account of money lent, which the bondsmen contend is not what was intended on their part. If they be wrong, and ihe law compel them to fulfil bonds under such conditions, they are willing to do so, and not otherwise. The comments of the Times, Herald, and ourselves, were based on the New Zealand Company's version, as given in their report, and this should have been contradicted in another mode than by general denial. There are grounds, then, for the bondsmen going to law ; and now, knowing those grounds from Mr. Adderley's statement, we have not the slightest hesitation in admitting that we, in common with our contemporaries, erred from ignorance of those grounds, which were not permitted to come before the public, though an adverse version was before it. For this Lord Lyttelton can only blame himself. Public journalists can only take things as they find them. We can now understand the admission of Mr. Few, the solicitor to the New Zealand Company, in stating that he preferred going to law rather than to arbitration ; as an arbiter " might attach weight lf where a judge would not. Wt confess we thought the admission a strange one, as we had an idea that an equity judge would deliberately weigh all circumstances in opposition to law, which judges do not so nicely. We do not see whyany false delicacy should have prevented Lord Lyttelton from making known the exact state of the case, even though it were bis own. To prejudge a criminal case, would be both un-English and indecorous. But a civil one is a different affair, especially when the integrity of the litigants is called in question. We have no hesitation, if we have erred from ignorance, in retrieving our error on principle, and we have no doubt our contemporaries, after Mr. Adderley's statement, will follow our example.