A COLONIAL FORCE.

Southland Times, Volume 2, Issue 33, 18 May 1863, Page 5 (Supplement)

A COLONIAL FORCE.

In the last session of the General Assembly, an Act was passed which empowered the Governor to raise a local Colonial Force, and to officer it and command it. The expenditure was limited in the year to £30,000, and the number of men to 500.

In our opinion the future of New Zealand will be very largely affected by the mode in which this force is constructed and used. It is the first distinct assertion on the part of the colony, that it means to raise, command, and pay its own army. It is the embryo of a force which is one day to supersede the employment of Imperial troops. It is a complete, in fine, the only answer to Goldwin Smith's accusation that we do nothing for ourselves, at the same time that it is a recognition by men who abuse the doctrines of the Professor, of the practical wisdom of those doctrines. Why so long a time should have elapsed after the meeting of the General Assembly before the organisation of this force, we cannot comprehend. However, it is in the course of construction at last, and we are happy to say that the man of all others in the colony who is most fitted to command it, has been selected by the Governor. We mean Colonel Nixon, a gentleman who raised and commanded a regiment of volunteer cavalry in the neighborhood of Auckland in the late war. We believe that in this case the right man is put in the right place, and that the Colonial Corps will become a thoroughly efficient body of men under Colonel Nixon's command and management.

The general question of how colonies should be defended in a military point of view is one which will for a long time create much discussion. Whether it is better that there should be but one Imperial army, commanded from the centre of the Empire, and moved fiom point to point of the Empire as occasion demand, or whether, on the other hand, there should be local corps raised and commanded in the several colonies where their services are required, this is a question which will always create great difference of opinion. We are not talking of who shall pay for the cost of these troops, or on whom the burden of defending colonies should fall. That is another part of the question. England might either pay her share for troops raised here, or might send out a certain proportion^ of the force wanted, at her own expense, from home. It is certainly an important part of the question how the cost shall be borne, but that is not the point we are interested in just at present. We are now on the question of local as opposed to Imperial command and management. For example, formerly the Indian army was wholly under local authority. It was virtually commanded by the Governor-General of India, it was wholly independent of the Horse GuarJs, and it was paid entirely out of the Indian revenues. Again, at the Cape and in Ceylon, and in the West Indian Islands, there are local corps raised in the country and more or less under local authority. In some cases, although raised in and paid by the colony, the authority is vested in the Horse Guards, and all the officers are appointed from home.

The Indian Army has by a recent alteration been entirely placed under the Horse Guards, and is now under the same authority as the Queen's regular Army.

There have been, then, it will be seen, all possible systems in force in the military affairs of the colonies. Sometimes Imperial troops have been used, sometimes local ; sometimes they are paid out of Imperial funds, sometimes out of colonial ; sometimes they are under home authority, sometimes under local, without any rule or principle whatever. Nothing, indeed, can be conceived more inconsisaent or irregular than the various plans in force for defending the colonies.

Why a community which possesses a separate Government, independent in all but the name, which raises its own revenue, taxes its own population, appoints all its own civil officers, is, in fact, a complete State within itself, excepting only in so far as its power is curtailed in one or two points — why such a country should be exempted from that paramount duty which has attached to all communities since the world began — the duty of maintaining the security of life and property from internal disorder or from foreign aggression, — it lies on those who oppose this doctrine to show. They are bound to show us in what way we stand in an exceptional

position to the rest of mankind, and whilst enjoying all the benefits of free government, are entitled to be protected at the expense of others, who derive no profit from our independence.

We are quite aware that, in this respect, we are in advance of the age, but. we have seen public opinion greatly change in the last four years since Mr. Godley's papers first appeared ; and we are satisfied that in a very few vears there will not be found a single dissentient to doctrines which are still so strongly opposed by superficial politicians.

Nine writers out of ten, especially in the colonies, who have attacked Goldwin Smith's letters, have assumed that it is the object and intention of that writer, and of the school to which he belongs, to throw off the colonies as an integral p3rt of the Empire, and to change them into single and isolated small states at the mercy of any larger states which may choose to annex them. When it is claimed on the part of the overtaxed ratepayer of England, that he ought to be relieved from the task of defending colonists who are tenfold j better off than himself — when it is ! claimed on the part of the colonist, j that he shall be able to punish or remove incompetence, and to reward merit amongst soldiers on active service in the colony, and that the ordinary government of his country shall dis- • pense military honours and rewards as it does civil ones — it is assumed that j the entire political separation of the colony from the mother country is necessitated by the admission of such claims. That a colony should defend itself, and yet be part of the Empire, is looked on as a contradiction in terms. But these writers do not tell ns how it happened, that the early colonies of North America did defend themselves, were never defended by English troops, did levy their own forces, and pay them, and dispense honors, and exercise every one of these functions which we are now told must belong exclusively to an Imperial authority. The North American colonies not only fought with and conquered the Indians, and made treaties of peace with them, and declared war upon them ; bnt they also fought single-handed with the colonies of France an:l Holland, and added "whole provinces to the British Empire, without any aid from England whatever. And yet what communities so loyal as the colonies of Great Britain in the seventeeth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries ?

Those, then, who strive for the selfdefence of the colonies do so, not in the hope that the Empire vrill be dismembered, but that it will be drawn loser together in the bonds of commonc sympathies, common burdens, and common duties — a feeling of common immunity from urgent burdens, and of common resposibility for that which is an equal duty to all.

Those who oppose the doctrines of Godley, Adderley, and Goldwin Smith, should recollect what the history of Colonial Government has been in the last thirty years. Every attempt to ohtain independence of government in the colonies has been met with tlrft same cry — " You are dismembering the Empire.'' Every step which has been actually made in the emancipation of the government of the colonies has belied the predictions of its Opponents, by destroying the discontent and the causes for discontent which were threatening the Empire with disruption.

The removal of the civil government from Downing-street to the capital town of each colony was a necessary and inevitable forerunner of the removal of the military government from the Horse Guards to the same capitals. The one necessitated the other ; and the raising of a New Zealand force by the Colonial Government is only a first step towards that wh'ch will shortly be a universal system in every part of the British Empire. — Press.