TOPICS OF TI-IE DAY.
THE DEATH-BED REPENTANCE OF TifFI COLONIAL OFFICE.
WE sincerely congratulate the Government on its tardy conversion to the belief which for so many years we have expressed, through little but evil report from all our Liberal contemporaries, that the nation is proud in its heart of hearts of its Colonial Empire, and will not, so soon as it clearly understands the issue, allow it to be broken up for the want of just and considerate treatment from home. For this,—and we are most anxious that it should be so understood in the Colonies,—is the only reasonable in- terpretation of what we may call the death-bed repentance of the Colonial Office in relation to New Zealand, and we are very confident that it is the true one. When it came to the point, and it was well understood that the niggardly offer of the Government, of which we gave the details last week, would not be recommended by the New Zealand Commis- sioners, and had little or no chance of being accepted in the Colony,—when, further, it was clearly understood that a wide- spread conviction had long been growing up in the colony that the connection with England was becoming not only a pure incumbrance and disadvantage, but even a special source of estrangement and bitterness between England and New Zea- land,—the Government had to consider carefully both the political wisdom, and the expediency in a merely ministerial point of view, of allowing this great quarrel to pass into a rupture. There can be no manner of doubt that the obvious interpretation of their decision is the true one. They knew that they could not afford as a Government, and no doubt there were some among them who had no wish to afford, to propose to Parliament to pass a Bill for permitting New Zealand to set up for herself. Numbers of the Liberals who voted against Mr. Torrens's ill-digested resolution the other day, were not at all disposed to sustain the Government in its unjust and ungenerous attitude to New Zealand. The people at large do not tuiderstand in the least the details of the con- troversy, but they would understand very well indeed, only too well, the statement that one of our most promising colonies is heartily sick of the connection, and demands as an act of justice the liberty to sever it. The Ministry, most wisely, we think, though most tardily, shrank from pushing matters so far. They probably had means of knowing the state of the popular feeling on the subject which newspapers, though called the 'organs' of public opinion, seldom possess, and on Saturday they gave way so far as to offer terms which the New Zealand Commissioners can at least take the responsi- bility of recommending the Government of New Zealand to accept,—the guarantee of a loan of £1,000,000, instead of half a million, to be expended "in employing the friendly Maories in road-making and other public works, and for the promotion of immigration." The English Liberal papers which have all along supported the Government in its attitude of hard resistance to the requests of New Zealand for help, are now showing themselves the most meritorious of political acro- bats by ingenious contortions to prove that what the Government has done is all of a piece with what it had previously sternly declined to do, and is, moreover, a convincing testimony to the loving heart which had all along been beating in unacknow- ledged suffering underneath the cold and inflexible language of Lord Granville's despatches. That is, of course, all non- sense, and, moreover, it is most important that New Zea- land should know it to be all nonsense. Ministers have changed their policy, have changed it very abruptly, and have changed it for the best of all reasons, — because they had begun to discover that their line was not the line of the people of England, and would, if pushed to its logical results, end in events which would bring down the bitter displeasure of the people of England. Unless the Colonies clearly understand this, we shall not reap half the benefit of the change, and therefore it is that we wish the only reasonable and intelligible rationale of this sudden change of front to be clearly understood there. This is, in fact, a death-bed repentance of the Ministry, by which we do not of course mean that it is a repentance made in the moment of its dissolution,—far be it from us to anticipate that distant event,—but a repentance that came only just in time to secure its salvation, to avert the most emphatic popular condemnation of its colonial policy towards New Zealand. Had the colonial agitation and request for peaceable separation come, we at least entertain no doubt that even Mr. Gladstone's popularity would not have sufficed to save his Ministry. That, we maintain, is the only rational interpretation to put upon this curious political phenomenon ; and we press it for this reason,— that if New Zealand can only be convinced that this is the true interpretation, it will do infinitely more than all the pecuniary help England cbuld give, even if it were ten times what we now offer, to re-unite the strained and partly broken ties between the colony and the mother-country. What the colony wants to know is that the old country is not really indifferent to the connection, that a feeling of genuine grief and dismay would be evoked at home by any rupture. The blunders and sins of the Colonial Office, however grave they may have been, will weigh but little if it be once known that they were the blunders and sins only of the Colonial Office, and not of the people of England. We, for our parts, feel no kind of doubt that it is so ; and we see the conclusive proof of it in this gracious change of heart of a department which, in its attitude towards New Zealand, has hitherto been so barren both in faith and good works. Lord Granville, indeed, is not only a brand plucked from the burning, but the very heart of the disastrous conflagration. Could anything have turned him aside from the broad and easy down- ward way which, with so laughing an imperturbability of resolution, he has now steadily pursued ever since his en- trance upon office, except a sudden flash of conviction that it was a way leading within a very few months to ministerial destruction?
No one who has read Mr. Monsell's somewhat embarrassed explanation to the House of Commons on Tuesday night, and noted the very remarkable change of tone in Lord Gran- ville's communications to the Commissioners from that which his despatches to New Zealand have lately embodied, can feel any sincere doubt of the curious revolution which has taken place, unless, indeed, like some of our contemporaries, he be at his wit's end to reconcile support of what the Govern- ment is doing now, with support of what it has been doing for the last year and a half. Compare, for instance, Lord Gran- ville's courteous praise of the colony for "its gallant and successful effort to meet the difficulties to which it is exposed," with the curt censure he expressed a short time agcb on its policy of confiscation, and his cynical recommendation to it to recognize the independence of a Maori power with which the colony was not able to cope ; no contrast can be more instructive. But without insisting on what is as clear as daylight, let us merely analyze the distinction without a difference which the Government and its embarrassed advocates in the Liberal Press are trying to draw between what the Cabinet is now doing and what it has up to the present time so steadily refused to do. That dis- tinction is said to consist in the difference between giving it military aid and giving it aid of a financial kind not applicable to military purposes, at a time when "for the first time New Zealand has, on its own resources alone, made a gallant and successful effort," &c. "These pleas are glass,—the very sun shines through them," as Richelieu says in Lord Lytton's play. As if financial aid in other depart- ments, for the purposes of road-making, public works, and immigration did not set at liberty the heavily-weighted re- sources of New Zealand, to precisely the extent of the help given, for military purposes! As if, again, the successive Governments of New Zealand had not repeatedly expressed their willingness to take the financial aid instead of the military aid, and met with a cold refusal at the hands of the Government and caustic criticisms from the Government's supporters in the English Press! The distinction may save appearances for the Government ; but it is a distinction which affects the colony solely in this way, that it forces it to undertake the whole military organization for itself, and prevents any sort of division of military responsibility ; and so far it is most wholesome, and is a distinction to which we ourselves have always attached the utmost value. Times with- out number, when the least austere of the Liberal papers,—the Pall Mall Gazette,—has advocated military help for New Zealand on condition that the colony would consent to leave the military administration entirely to a dictator sent out by the Home Government, we have pointed out the mischievous tendency of such an arrangement to cause a return to•all the old difficulties, and insisted that we ought to give our help in a financial form, leaving to the Government of New Zealand the undivided responsibility of the military defence of the colony. We do not, therefore, mean for a moment to say that the distinction drawn by the Government between its present offer and its recent refusal of bringing suits against the Erie Directors to the Attorney the regiment to the New Zealand Government is a distinction General of the State, who is practically their own nominee, and without a difference, and a very significant difference of finally a law making the Supreme Court of the State, presided administrative policy. But we do say that, as regards the over by the "Erie Judge," the only State Court which can substantial point in debate, the duty of assisting the give an effective order against them. The District Court, a Colonial Government against the hostile Maories, or not Federal institution, has, it is true, a concurrent jurisdiction ; assisting them, it is to all intents and purposes a distinc- but the Ring, backed as they are by the City, by the majority tion without even a shade of difference, except so far in the Legislature, and, in part, by the Governor, believe that .as a difference of language is often politely agreed upon they can raise a cry of State Rights which will compel the by both parties to a controversy in order to veil the retreat Supreme Court of the Union either to delay decision for years, of the defeated combatant, and concede it a certain chance a power it has frequently availed itself of to avoid political of dignity. It can hardly be maintained that the very complications, or to risk a collision between the State and the mode of help for which we perseveringly contended at a Central Government on behalf of British stockholders, never a time when we were patronizingly reproved by a Liberal class likely to obtain any great popular sympathy, and just at contemporary as the "organ of the New Zealand colonists," this moment especially out of favour. —whereas we have really been only the exponent of the Whether this part of the project will succeed we cannot • Imperial feeling at home,—is a mode of help which the guess, though we do not share the hopes confidently expressed Government can offer quite consistently with the attitude by the best Americans, believing that the Government will it had hitherto assumed. If New Zealand is to accept the shrink from the course to which the Erie Ring is clearly pre- offer in the only spirit in which it can be usefully accepted, pared to drive them,—a forcible interference with "State the spirit of cordial desire for reconciliation and hearty unity Rights," on the ground that the New York Legislature, in pass- in time to come, it is of the first importance that it should ing laws clearly intended to invalidate contracts, has violated a clearly understand that the British Government has really prime article of the Constitution ; but that is not our imme- been converted at the critical moment ; and that it has been diate affair. Our point is not to consider the chance English converted by the most impressive of all arguments,—the investors may have of recovering their money, but to inquire argument that the people of England, and especially the into the cause of the condonation which crimes like these re- Liberals of England, are thoroughly hostile to a policy of ceive in New York State. It is becoming quite clear that the
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