Mr. CAATLEY, agreeably to notice, moved the adoption by Council of the following Address to the Crown on the subject of an extension of the limits of the Canterbury territory.

Motion seconded by the Colonial Secretary of New Munster.

To Her Most Gracious Majesty Victoria, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen, Defender of the Faith and so forth.

We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and faithful Servants, Members of the Legislative Council of New Zealand in Council assembled, in venturing to address Your Majesty on a subject of importance to the interests of many of the Inhabitants of this Colony, beg leave to assure Your Majesty of our loyalty and devotion to Your Majesty’s throne and person.

From sources which are to be relied upon, we are informed that a certain Body of Your Majesty’s subjects incorporated under the Great Seal of the Realm by the style and title of the Canterbury Association of New Zealand, to whom Your Majesty has been graciously pleased to grant for ten years an exclusive right of sale and pasturage over two and a-half millions of acres of the Crown Demesne in this Colony, propose, and are about to apply to Your Majesty for an extension of the territory already granted to them.

We view with alarm the possibility of Your Majesty’s Government acceding to such a request.

Under the Regulations of the Canterbury Association, Land cannot be sold under three pounds an acre, of which two pounds are to be devoted to religious and educational purposes. But all Your Majesty’s subjects therefore who are not members of the Church of England are deprived of the right of using one of the finest and most extensive districts in the country as a field for their enterprise, and a means of realizing those benefits in the anticipation of which so many of them emigrated to this Colony.

But while the injury inflicted upon them is confined to a mere diminution of the advantages the Colony would otherwise offer to them, a more positive injury has been perhaps inadvertently done to another body of Your Majesty’s subjects who were settled, before the Canterbury Association obtained its Charter, upon the lands which it has placed at their sole disposal. Above 200 souls are resident at Akaroa, who profess the Roman Catholic Faith. Every Landowner among those, before he can obtain an increase of the pittance of Land at present occupied by him, (to the acquisition of however small a portion of additional land he may limit his wishes), must for every acre he purchases contribute a sum of £1 to the support of a religion he conscientiously disapproves of and dissents from. On the unfairness and hardship of this result of the monopoly of the Association, we trust it is not necessary for us to dilate. But the amount of injustice already done would be greatly increased by an extension of that monopoly to lands, the beneficial occupation of which is at present enjoyed or attainable by Your Majesty’s subjects belonging to the Presbyterian Settlement of Otago, or to that of Nelson, inhabited by a population composed of a variety of religious sects distinguished hitherto by their freedom from sectarian intolerance and exclusiveness, and for the harmony with which they have dwelt together in the same community. Still greater would be the unfairness to the actual land purchasers in those settlements, because while it is notorious that a considerable number of them have never obtained for the capital they invested in the purchase and cultivation of their lands anything like an adequate return, they have been, and will be enabled by the opportunity of occupying for sheep pasture the land contiguous to those settlements in some measure to redeem their losses, to recover their position, and to relieve themselves from the disastrous consequences which would otherwise attend their emigration to this Colony.

The extension of the Canterbury Block beyond its present limits would tend to deprive them in a great measure of the advantages just stated, and which, in the case of the Nelson purchasers particularly, the difficulties they underwent in the early days of the Colony’s existence, we think it cannot but be owned they are justified in deeming themselves entitled to be maintained in possession of by an equitable and generous Government.

On behalf then of the inhabitants of New Zealand generally, and of the Settlements just alluded to in particular, we pray Your Majesty while allowing the Canterbury Association to carry out their great experiment fairly and freely, within the ample limits assigned them, to be graciously pleased to withhold Your sanction from any attempt on their part to extend those limits, and thus impose disabilities upon, and infringe the rights of others of Your Majesty’s subjects equally engaged with them in the arduous work of colonization.

The Colonial Treasurer moved as an amendment, seconded by Col. M’Cleverty, that this Address be rejected.

Debate ensued.

Council divided.

Amendment negatived, being—

Ayes.

Hon. the Colonial Secretary of New Zealand,