We regret to hear of the death in New Zealand
last Satur- day of one of the very ablest of our Colonial Judges, Mr. Justice Richmond, who died there of pneumonia about three weeks after completing his seventy-fourth year. He was one of those whom Lord Rosebery's recent Bill permitting the Government to add distinguished Colonial Judges to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, might have been expected, had it passed, to raise to the Bench of our chief Imperial Court of Appeal. In the Colony, though he was never officially at the head of the New Zealand Bench, Mr. Justice Richmond was constantly spoken of as "the Judge," for he had been on the Bench for over thirty years, and his judgments were as universally respected as the man himself
was both revered and loved. He lived the first thirty-two years of his life in England, and had been practising at the English Bar for some ten years or upwards before health compelled him to seek a better climate for an asthmatic chest, In New Zealand his great abilities soon raised him to the New Zealand Parliament, and then to the post of Native Minister, which he filled for two or three years during the most critical part of the Maori War, which broke out in 1860. He gave up political life soon afterwards, and began to practise at the Dunedin Bar, but was raised to the Bench before he had been a year at his work. This was the last judicial appointment made from home. But his influence in the Colony was almost as much due to the singular force and distinction of his general intellect and character, as it was to the calibre of his professional abilities. He was one of those men who, so far as they have the opportunity, impress them- selves on the mind of an infant State, and give it a bias in the direction of honourable aims and a high, almost fastidious, social refinement. Wherever, in New Zealand, "the Judge" went circuit, there the high character of British integrity was illustrated, and the more spiritual elements of British culture were acclimatised and popularised.
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