OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE AND THE CASE OF NEW ZEALAND. BY JAMES BUSBY, HER MAJESTY'S RESIDENT AT NEW ZEALAND FROM 1832 TO 1840, WILLIAMS AND NORGATE, 14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON; AND 226. 6. 57. PREFACE. THERE are certain obligations and rights which are essential to, and inseparable from the relation of Sovereign and subject ; and these obligations and rights are neither abrogated nor impaired by the distance of a province or of an individual from the sovereign authority. They remain the same in a colony which is separated by the circumference of half the globe from the seat of the central Government as in the districts which lie contiguous to it. It is a popular prejudice that by what are called the institutions of self-government, as given by Act of Parliament to colonies of British settlement, the relations of those subjects of the Crown who have become British colonists to the mother country are so altered as to affect, in relation to them, the essential attributes of sovereignty. But it is not so. These attributes are, from their very nature, inalienable and incapable of being delegated to a subordinate authority. All government under British dominion is the government of the Crown. The powers delegated to colonial authorities are simply for matters of local regulation, and must necessarily, like all subordinate municipal functions, be subject to the law of their delegation; and the maintenance of this law cannot be renounced without a betrayal of the highest trusts which are reposed in the rulers of empire. By the grant of representative institutions, the connection of the Colonies with the mother country is not reduced to an impalpable thread, or to a mere relation of sentiment, as assumed by some late theoretical writers on colonies, who have supposed that abuse of authority is its normal condition. It is the strong ligament of paramount law and ultimate authority which binds together, under one head, the individual members of one body. If every colonial question is not also an Imperial question, it becomes so in every case in which a colonial Legislature exceeds its jurisdiction, or a colonial Governor makes an unlawful or unrighteous use of the powers delegated to him, whether by the oppression of the Queen's subjects, or by an encroachment on Imperial authority. Of late years, however, the Colonial Department has so far ignored the obligations which spring out of the necessary relations of Sovereign and subject as to favour the belief that the fundamental laws of the empire are not in force in the Colonies, and that it is no part of the duty of a British Minister to maintain them there. Notwithstanding that of all public questions those relating to the Colonies are the least attractive to Members of Parliament, it may be fairly assumed that the present condition of many of the Colonies of Great Britain is such as ought to ensure for them, in the approaching session, a degree of attention which is rarely bestowed upon colonial questions. The sacrifice of so many valuable lives, and the expenditure of so much British treasure, in New Zealand, in the hitherto ineffectual attempts to put down the insurrection of the Maories; the proposal to confederate the provinces of North America by a union which, if a judgment may be formed from the results of a similar federation in New Zealand, will not only fail in relieving the Colonial-office from its responsibilities, but bring about complications which will make the true objects of government impossible of attainment; and, more recently, the insurrection of the negroes in Jamaica; and the conspiracy of the PREFACE. functionaries of the Government of Victoria to violate the law of the Constitution of that province, may well create a desire to trace those evils to their source, and overcome the repugnance of British statesmen to investigate colonial questions. "The system called Responsible Government," which has so extended and complicated the machinery of colonial administration as to make it difficult to understand any colonial question, has also created an idea that it is neither competent nor desirable for the Imperial Parliament to interfere with the affairs of the colonists. But the highest and most essential duties of government are of such a nature that no subordinate authority is competent to discharge them; and these duties cannot be ignored without occasioning abuses of the gravest character, the consequences of which, though first felt in the Colonies, are sure to react with double force upon the mother country. . It was expected that the system called "Responsible Government" would relieve the Colonial Department from the greatest part of its labours, but, judging from the voluminous correspondence which appears from time to time in the Bluebooks issued from the Colonial-office, it may be safely affirmed that the labours of that office have increased with every concession to the colonial Legislatures; or, to speak with more precision, with every fresh encroachment which they have been allowed to make upon Imperial jurisdiction, until they have become probably tenfold what they would have been under a system that should faithfully maintain the relations which must necessarily subsist between the supreme authority of an empire and every subordinate department of its administration; with which relations the system called "Responsible Government" is absolutely incompatible. While Parliamentary debates and newspaper discussions have |