Mr. Disraeli thinks it undutiful and improper in the Legislative
Coun- cil of New South Wales to call the Queen the trustee of the public lands of Australia—" her own dominions." Truly they are so : so are the Woods and Forests of Great Britain ; nevertheless, her Majesty is but the trustee thereof—for the British public ; and the Land Revenue of the Crown is duly accounted for accordingly. Mr. Disraeli needs to be in- formed, that, adopting a like principle, Parliament in 1842, by the Aus- tralian Land Sales Act, declared that, subject to certain charges of manage- ment, "the gross proceeds of the sales of waste lands of the Crown, in each of the Australian Colonies, should be appropriated and applied to the public service of the said Colonies respectively." What stronger words could be used to express a public trust ? Mr. Disraeli's tenderness betrays the Downing Street principle—that the public lands of our Colonies are thu proper patrimony of Crown officials, to be jobbed and mismanaged at plea- sure. Happily for the Colonies—happily, indeed, we may add, for the Mother-country—Sir John Pakington had gracefully anticipated the claim from New South Wales, by a formal abandonment of a mischievous and dangerous prerogative.
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