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have this assistance, and I believe that the Secretary of State for War will not object to its being afforded to me, for at the Cape of Good Hope, where my duties were less onerous than they are here, the Home Government provided me with a military secretary, whilst the Colony pays the salaries of two aides-de-camp for the Governor. I trust therefore that you will be good enough to allow me to have the benefit of Major Gray's services until the question has been referred to the Secretary of State for War. I have, Ac, Lieut-General Sir D. A. Cameron, K.C.B. G. Grey. No. 107. Lieut.-General Sir D. A. Cameron to Hi 3 Excellency the Governor. Sir,— Head Quarters, Auckland, 18th May, 1865. I have had the honor of receiving your Excellency's letter of the 15th instant, relative to a Memorandum of Ministers of the Bth April last. I have forwarded a copy of it to the Secretary of State for War, and it now remains for Her Majesty's Government to decide whether it was right or necessary that the Memorandum in question should have been written and published in the Colony, and how far your Excellency is responsible for any injury the public service may sustain in consequence. .1 readily admit, and I have already considered that the private correspondence between your Excellency and myself on public business, might at any time be made use of by either of us in communicating with Her Majesty's Government, but I deny that your Excellency has the right to communicate the contents of my private letters to your Eesponsible Advisers, or that the fact of their having been communicated to Her Majesty's ministers gives them a public character in this Colony. I beg to inform your Excellency that I forwarded your two letters and my replies privately to the Secretary of State for War without any accompanying letter, though I wrote by the same mail, as 1 do by every mail, a private letter to his Lordship acquainting him with the general state of afl'airs, but in that letter there was but very slight allusion to our private correspondence. I immediately informed you»of what I had done, thus giving you an opportunity of replying to any statements affecting yourself or your Eesponsible Advisers. From the style of your letter of the 17th March, I thought it very probable that after receiving my reply of the 30th of March, which must have reached you at Wellington before the departure of the April mail, you yourself would have considered it necessary to notice it in your correspondence with the Secretary of State for the Colonies. I therefore thought it right to put the Secretary of State for War in possession of the whole case, and now that the Memoranda which passed between your Excellency and the Colonial Ministers, between the 4th of March and Bth April, have come to light, it must be admitted that the step I took was absolutely necessary. Your Excellency has stated with the view of defending the conduct of your Eesponsible Advisers, that you especially warned them not to treat my communications as official ones, unless I myself marie them public, and that after you had informed them that I had done so by transmitting them to the Secretary of State for War, you think they were entitled to judge in what way they could best defend themselves from the charges preferred. I am surprised at this statement, as your Excellency must be aware that at the lime the Ministers wrote their Memorandum of the Bth April, they could not have known that I had transmitted those communications to the Secretary of State for War, for my letter acquainting you that I-had done so. is dated the 9th April, and was not received by you before your return to Auckland on the 12th or 13th and could not have been known to the Ministers, who were at that time in Wellington, until a later period. I must however repeat that the transmission of those communications privately to the Secretary of State for War, did not make them public. Lithe last paragraph of your letter, your Excellency observes that if you had withheld a knowledge of the opinions and sentiments contained in my private letter, from your Eesponsible Advisers, you would have been hereafter seriously and deservedly blamed. It appears to me, on the contrary, that it w Tas incumbent on you as Governor of the Colon}' carefully to avoid doing that which you must have known would create ill-feeling and dissension between the Civil and Military authorities without in any way benefiting the public service. I regret therefore that 1 am unable to perceive that your Excellency's proceedings were guided by a sense of public duty, so much as by other motives, the nature of which may be judged from the fact, that while I was engaged in operations in the field, your Excellency was writing Memoranda to the Ministers and eliciting from them Memoranda in reply which reflected on my conduct without ever giving me the slightest notice of what was going on, and leaving me to discover it a month afterwards accidentally-in a public newspaper. It was only three or four days before you wrote your Memorandum of the Ith of March, that you visited me at the Patea, and yet not a word was said by you on that or any other occasion that could lead me to suppose that you intended to draw the attention of Ministers to any opinions I had expressed in my private letters to you, or that you yourself were dissatisfied with any observations in them. It is now for Her Majesty's Government to judge between us. I have, Ac, D. A. Cameron, His Excellency Sir George Grey, K.C.B. Lieut.-General. No. 108. Lieut.-General Cameron to His Excellency the Governor. Sir,— Head Quarters, Auckland, 18th May, 1865. I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your Excellency's letter of the 13th instant, relative to the payment by the Commissariat Department of about 250 Militia and loyal Natives, who are to occupy the White Cliffs and the land to the north of the Waitara.

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GOV£RKOK AND LIEUT. GENERAL CAMERON.