The New Zealand Times (PUBLISHED DAILY.) SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1877.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5191, 10 November 1877, Page 2

The New Zealand Times (PUBLISHED DAILY.) SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1877.

The first stage of the new memorandummiad has been reached: the correspondence between his Excellency the Governor and his responsible adviser, Sir George Grey, has been presented to the House of Representatives, with the Governor’s promised message, and will be found in another place. The House was prepared by the communication previously received from his Excellency, announcing that he had referred their address on the breach of privilege question to his constitutional advisers, to find that it was not the Governor who had fallen into the trap so skilfully laid by the Premier. It is admitted upon all sides, we think, and admitted with expressions of the most perfect satisfaction, that the tables have been completely and most cleverly turned by the Governor upon his advisers, and that all the responsibility for the breach of privilege of which the House of Representatives complained, really rested with the Ministers who, for their own ends, had advised that a “strictly secret and confidential communication” between the Governor and the Premier should be laid before the Parliament, and who , ought, as his Excellency properly reminds them, in discharge: of their duty under the oath which they'took as Executive Councillors, to have saved him from the error into which he unintentionally fell, instead of leading him to commit it. The fiction that the Governor ought not to know that a vote of no confidence affecting his advisers was in debate, is, as we have before said, childish. , He does know it; his advisers could not sit with him at the Executive Council table without letting him know, if other sources of information/ through the Press: and the Parliamentary Order Papers, were closed to him ; and, knowing it, it is absurd to say that the knowledge should not influence him in the discharge of his responsible duties as a constituent part of the Government of fhe colony. - His Excellency lays down the right rule, the. rule upon which Responsible Government in a free colony can only rest safeljq when ho says that Ministers so long as ■“ they retain office are alone responsible to Parliament for the acts of the Governor.” Public acts must always be presumed to proceed from the advisers of the Crown.' When there is a conflict of authority or of opinion, the remedy is by resignation of Ministerial office. This, however, is the last thing Sir George Grey is disposed to do. Whether he differ with the Governor or with the majority of tho House of Representatives, whose confidence he has never had, he clings with desperate tenacity to the post which he has won, and won only by violation of party pledges which public men ordinarily regard as binding and sacred.