which I had been unable to concur with you, that the session might have been allowed to close without pausing on its remaining business for the purpose of raking up a bygone and settled affair—debating thereon at great length, and carrying a resolution which it behoves me to reply to. It is no doubt lamentable to have incurred the renewed and unmeasured censure of the bare majority of your Council, but it is a comfort and encouragement to find that the views I expressed in my message on this subject No. 5, Dec. 5, and the terms on which I assented to the Ordinance, as published in Gazette No. 17, have been practically confirmed and responded to by the Province, without a dissentient voice.

The Rules which were prepared under the Ordinance thus assented to were approved by your Council. One of them gives liberty to all settlers in the Province (no exception whatever) who may wish to get out their friends, to apply for them, giving guarantee for repayment of the cost of passages;—and, corresponding with this rule, an obligation is laid upon the home agents that the parties thus guaranteed shall, if found qualified, have the preference over all other applicants for assisted passages. And what has been the result of this? Applications with guarantees have been lodged to an extent about equal to the whole sum appropriated for passages, and, without a solitary exception, the persons so applied for are north of the Tweed—a circumstance which fixes also the place of embarkation under another of the adopted Rules—viz., that “the ships be chartered from ports most convenient for the bulk of the passengers;” and thus have the Otago colonists themselves made the proposed London Agency a nullity; and even so, I believe, will it prove in England also. I assented to the Ordinance for the reasons then stated, and under the full conviction that the gentleman named therein as independent London Agent would make himself no party to the object, and, besides his being wholly engrossed with public duties, that he is too much of a man of business to have anything to do with an arrangement so conflicting as that of separate Agencies for the application of one fund, without any authoritative and responsible head. And I therefore trust, notwithstanding the Ordinance having been sent to him, and his name inserted in the power of attorney, that the agency will be found, as formerly, under one head, and that,

according to applications for passages received from any part of the British Islands, subordinate agents or correspondents will have been appointed, responsible to the head Agents even as the head itself is responsible to the Provincial Government.

It is in vain, Gentlemen, to reiterate in your unsavoury Resolution the charge of illiberality upon the Executive. The public will not be so deluded, nor will it fail perhaps to form its own conclusions as to the taste and judgment of the principal leader of your resolution, even as it has practically decided both upon Immigration and the land question. But for the sake of that public, and that there may be no mistake as to the grounds of the unhappy differences that have existed in the present Council, I must again repeat that Superintendent and Council were elected on the same principles—those, namely, of the Settlers’ Association. But the Council had hardly met when a moiety of them felt at liberty to depart from these principles, and to act in an opposite direction. I as Superintendent could not do so, even if I had wished it; and I have always felt that until, by means of new elections, it could be shewn whether the people had changed in the same ratio as their Representatives, I was bound under compact to the electors, and which compact they alone can dissolve. And so how then have I stood in this matter? From the commencement, four against four of the nine councillors were regularly opposed to each other, and the casting vote only, and generally on the side I was bound to—embarrassing enough certainly—but this embarrassment has been enhanced by one of the four whose views and principles had been staunchly in accordance with my own, having suddenly gone over to the other side, and taken to himself the power, on every question, of turning the scale in favour of his new party.

Gentlemen, I cannot even thus surrender to your narrow majority in so far as it involves a departure from my obligation to the electors. In order to force me from this, and with the aid of your majority’s new colleague, you have resorted to the extremest measures—even the stoppage of supplies, though you might have known ere this that I cannot depart from the obligation referred to.

But to be still more explicit—for the public has a right to be fully informed. One of the principles of the Settlers’ Association was what may be