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recently passed by the Imperial Parliament
to "grant a Representative Constitution to
New Zealand."

That your petitioners have much pleasure
in expressing their gratitude for the liberal
concessions made by that Act, and especially
for conferring on the Colonists the control of
the Waste Lands; but your petitioners deeply
lament that these concessions have been ac-
companied by a charge of £268,370 15s. in
favour of the New Zealand Company, which
is regarded throughout this Province in the
light only of an oppressive burthen, unjustly
imposed.

That your petitioners deem it to be one of
their most urgent and important duties to
use every effort in their power to obtain re-
lief from this burthen; and with a view to
give expression to their own opinions, as well
as in deference to the universal wishes of their
constituents, your petitioners take the earliest
opportunity of bringing before Parliament a
subject upon which intense anxiety and
feeling exist throughout this Province.

That your petitioners most respectfully,
but unequivocally, state it to be their de-
liberate conviction that the abstraction of
one-fourth of the proceeds of the Land
Sales of this Province for the shareholders
of the New Zealand Company can only be
regarded as a most obnoxious grievance.

That, referring to a Petition presented to
Parliament on the last Session, from some of
the members of the late Provincial Council of
New Ulster, for a fuller statement of reasons,
your petitioners beg to call the attention of
your Honourable House to the following, as
some of the grounds upon which that con-
viction is founded:—

1.—Because all the Northern Settlements
now comprised in the Province of Auck-
land, were founded by Her Majesty’s Go-
vernment, and not by the New Zealand
Company, and between these settlements
and those of the Company there exists no
community of interest, and far less inter-
course than between New Zealand and
Australia.

2.—Because all the Land which the New
Zealand Company possessed to surrender,
and as payment for which the charge com-
plained of is imposed, were situate in other
Provinces at a great distance from Auck-
land, and no part of the proceeds of the
sales of such lands will ever directly or in-
directly be of any advantage or benefit
whatever to this Province.

3.—Because no reduction of price, however
great, in any land given up by the Com-
pany could, in the slightest degree,
affect the value of Public Lands in the
Province of Auckland.

4.—Because there does not exist in the Pro-
vince of Auckland any Waste Land,
properly so-called, all the Public lands, now
made subject, by the "Constitution Act,"
to the New Zealand Company’s claim,
being from time to time purchased from
the Aborigines by funds raised entirely
within the Province, without any contri-
bution whatever, directly or indirectly, by
the New Zealand Company.

5.—Because, therefore, the only reason given
by Earl Grey "that the price due for the
lands acquired from the Company by the
Crown must be a charge on the whole of
the Crown Lands of New Zealand," as the
purchase was "essential for securing a
proper value to the whole of the Crown
Lands throughout the entire extent of New
Zealand," is not only untenable, but ab-
solutely without any foundation whatever.

6.—Because the New Zealand Company
never had any beneficial connexion with
any part of the Province of Auckland;
they neither expended any money in it
on any public object, nor introduced a
single emigrant, nor ever rendered it the
slightest service; but on the contrary they
treated the Northern Settlements as rivals
their own; they unceasingly depreciated
their advantages, and traduced the cha-
racter of their Colonists, and even treated
Auckland as so foreign from the settle-
ments created by the Company as to insist
on being reimbursed, from the Land Fund
of Auckland, for the passages of a few
Emigrants, who were brought here, from
Wellington, by the first Governor of New
Zealand, to erect a public building.

That your petitioners entreat your Ho-
nourable House not to look on the "New
Zealand Constitution Act" as finally dis-
posing of the New Zealand Company’s
claims, and your petitioners beg most res-
pectfully to assure your Honourable House
that, so far from this being likely to be the
case, the sense of wrong and indignity in-
flicted on this Province is so universally and
acutely felt, that any attempt to enforce
those claims will but lay the foundation for
an agitation which must be prejudicial, and,
at the same time, cannot fail, however much
it is to be deplored, to sow the seeds of dis-
content and disaffection towards the British
Government.

That your petitioners do not plead in
favour of relief from a debt founded on any
moral obligation whatever, but for relief from
a burthen which has certainly no more reason
or justice to support it, than there would
be in favour of the appropriation of the Land
Revenue of the Province of Auckland, in
New Zealand, to reimburse the shareholders
of a bankrupt Land Jobbing Company of
British North America; and, from the con-
duct of the New Zealand Company towards
the districts comprised in the Province of
Auckland, a burthen than such an appro-
priation more vexatious to be borne.

That, under such circumstances, your Ho-
nourable House will not feel surprised that
there should exist throughout this Community
a settled determination to resist, by every
legitimate means, the payment of a single
shilling from the Revenue of this Province
to the New Zealand Company, and your