The Sun.
London, England, 1845-06-21 00:00:00

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LONDON, SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 1845.

The House of Lords did not sit.
The Commons met at four o'clock.

Lord INGEsTRE moved the bringing up of the report on
the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway on the
broad gauge line, in favour of which the Committee had
decided.

Mr. COBDEN moved, as an amendment, " That a Select
Committee be appointed to inquire whether, in all future Acts
for the construction of railways, provision ought to be made
for securing one uniform gauge, and whether it would be prac-
ticable and expedient to bring existing lines of railway in Eng-
land, and lines now in course of construction, into uniformity
of gauge, and if so, to report upon the best mode of carrying
these objects into effect in the present session of Parliament."
Colonel WOOD supported the amendment.
Mr. SHAW, as Chairman of the Committee, entered into a
most eloquent and lucid statement of the reasons which had
determined the Committee to decide in favour of the broad
gauge line. The Right Hon. Gentleman, who was greeted
with enthusiastic cheering during the course of his speech,
concluded by calling upon the House to support the decision of
the Committee.

Mr. LABOUCHERE thought that the House ought to up.
hold the decision of the Committee.

Sir G. GREY thought that the Great Western should have
an independent line as well as the Birmingham Company.
Sir G. CLERK supported the decision of the Board of
Trade in opposition to that of the Committee.

Sir T. WILDE, as representing the interests of the people
of Worcester, supported the broad gauge line.
Sir GEORGE CLERK explained that the Board of Trade
had distinctly pointed out to the Great Western Company the
objections to the change of gauge, and that it was not until
a full hearing that the Board of Trade had decided.

Mr. WARD denied that he was operated on either by
personal canvass or by private interest. He had nothing to do
with either of the Companies, but he considered that a question
so large ought not to be decided incidentally by a Committee,
but by the Legislature at large.
Sir T. ACLAND thought that if the question of gauges
were to be taken up, it should be taken up gravely ; but it
was not fair to take it up now upon the question
of this particular railway. The question regard-
ing the railway had been referred to the Committee,
and the House would pay the Committee a very ill
compliment if they now raised the question of gauges
to throw the decision of the Committee over. Why
had they not raised this question of the gauges on the Basing-
stoke Bill, when the broad gauge abutted upon the narrow
gauge ?
Sir R. PEEL thought that as a general rule the Minis.
tors of the Crown ought to abstain from interfering in questions
of this sort. He would exercise no influence to support the report of
the Board of Trade, or to support the decision of the Committee.
He would give his opinion merely judicially. The Com-
mittee had been presided over by a Right Hon. Friend
of his who had been used to judicial investigation,
and looking to all the circumstances of the case, his cpinion was
that it would not be wise in the House to overrule the decision
of that Committee.

On the motion that the report on the Oxford and Rugby
Railway Bill be received, some discussion ensued ; hut,
eventually, the report was ordered to be brought up by a ma.
jority of 36; the numbers being, for the adoption of the report,
79, and against it, 43.
On the reading of the order of the day for going into Com-
mittee, several Hon. Members who bad motions on the paper
postponed them, on account of the lateness of the hour. Even-
tually it was determined that it was too late to go into Com-
mittee of Supply. and after disposing of the orders of the day,
the House adjourned at half-past Twelve o'cloult.

Thursday night brought to a cicse the adjourned and
protracted debate on Mr. C. BULLER'S Resolutions rela-
tive to New Zealand, its government and relations with
the mother country, and the conduct of successive admi-
nistrations of our Colonial Department towards it. The
division on the Resolutions was honourable to the abi-
lity with which they had been opened by the Learned
Member for Liskeard, and proved how strong an impres-

siou his speech had produced on the House. For,

although both Sir R. PEEL and Sir J. GRAHAM took up
the defence of Lord STANLEY'S policy, that
is, of his prejudices towards this noble colony,
with the zeal of partisans and the ingenuity

of casuists, the Ministerial majority of the session was
strangely diminished. A majority of 57 only, in a
House of 395 Members, acquitted the present Go-
vernment of faults of omission and commis-
sion less blameable than those of their prede-
cessors, in dealing with the affairs and colonists
of New Zealand. We have never concealed our
own impressions of the original error in principle,
and the subsequent miscarriage in details of the first
Government which dealt with New Zealand as a con-
nexion with the British Crown, and employed Captain
HoßsoN as its negotiator, in the reign of WILLIAM IV.
and of all the Governments which have since held office.
Lord Howica's acknowledgment of this error of princi-
ple and originally vicious scheme of establishment was
so frank and manly that we have not another word to
urge. Even Lord J. RUSSELL, in his speech of much
vigour and cleverness, could nut vindicate himself or

his colleagues in administration from the charge of a

misconception of the true character of the New Zealand
connexion, the great responsibilities they were incurring
at every step they were taking in a class of colonial regu-
lations, which required the most matured deliberation
in approaching, in proportion as they were of a character
utterly novel and anomalous. Now, it does seem to us that
even so lately as that recent period at which the tact and
perseverance of Mr. C. BULLER in conducting his mission
from the New Zealand Company to the great office in

Downing-street, pinned Lord STANLEY to the necessity
of finally proclaiming his intentions with r(gard to that
Company—its pretensions, its position, its demands, and

its future recognition or disavowal—every Ministry, in
the interval we speak of, has equally compromised its re-
putation for prudence, plain dealing, and sound judg-
ment. Here was a colony, to the territorial property
of which we had as undoubted a title as priority of
geographical discovery and frequent resort and inter-
course with the natives could give us. Our Ministers
were afraid or reluctant, or unprepared to propound.
They would not call it a possession of the British
Crown. They would not recognise it as the property of
any other Crown. They would not give protection to
British subjects, in the Bay of Islands, or at any other
point upon which they were congregated. They would
not ratify their contracts nor guarantee their property.
The colony waxed British and strong in spite of their
neglect. Something they must do. They sent
out Captain Ilousow with powers to treat, and
by that very act they moved as the British
Government towards New Zealand as a colony
of the British Crown. From that moment they should
have exercised the rights, and what is far more important,
they stood committed to the duties of sovereignty. The
old reciprocated ties of allegiance and protection were
already formed. On their part the Imperial Government
has, beyond all question, neglected the most important
of its duties to its British subjects in New Zealand.
But now came a new, powerful, and wealthy associa-

tion projected and established in London, composed of
many capitalists without rank, of some aristocrats
without capital, of some Members of Parliament (men of
ability and honour), and, we are compelled to believe, of
some adventurers without capital, without rank, of some
ability, and but an imperceptible modicum of honour.
Here was money subscribed in abundance, and agents of
very differing shades of moral character to force the
largest returns that could be derived from it. With
the exception of Culonel WAKEFIELD's very doubtful
but much over-rated principle of self paying colonisa-
tion, the New Zealand Company had few claims for
preference over any of the namerous land companies
that were at that time sceking public patronage. The
Direction of this Company appears to have thought that
" there was no harm in asking ;" and accordingly, in its
communication with the Government, asked for the most
enormous powers, as far as territorial possession and
rights were concerned, that ever had been heard of.
From Karakoora to Egmont, or to Nelson, the whole
,4 block" was parcelled out in the Company's prospec-
tuses with the self-possession of an estate-agent, commis-

sioned to let out a given plot of ground on building leases.
If the Colonial-office had been prudent, alarmed, and coy
t,efore, on the question of Crown title or no title, she
„threw herself into ,the very arms of this seductive Com-
pany ; gave all that was asked, and was willing to add
more into the bargain. Before its own title was de-
fined to its own satisfaction, or to the right of locating its
own immediate servants on the island soil,—the Govern-
ment permitted itself to be cajoled into a sort of official
coquetting with the New Zealand Directors, which ended
in its granting delegated powers and representative
authorities far greater than any it ventured to reserve to
itself. The Company (for, with all our respect for Mr.
AGLIONDY'S high character and legal talent, we must
turn to the plain but terrible charges brought by Captain
Rous,which it might have been convenient fur him to treat
as brought forward out of time, but which, we are satis-
fied, will never be met)—made promises which it had
not then, and has never since had the power to redeem ;
deprived of lands it did not possess ; induced emigra-
tion to a soil upon which it had no power to guarantee
a foot of settlement ; and of itself disppointed by the
Government, deceived its fellow-subjects on a scale of
unpardonable magnitude. After a careful perusal of the
debate, we are compelled to denounce the concern as a
dishonest one from the beginning. Mr. ELLICE declares
that, in an experience of 40 years of the Colonies and
Colonial administration, he has never known anything
to equal in fatuity, folly, and mischievous mismanage-
ment, the whole dealings of the present and former Go-
vernments with New Zealand. Were they, let us ask, the
absolute dupes of that Company? We do not believe it. We
rather suspect, from some passages in Mr. HOPE'S lame
pleading, that the Government must have anticipated
an accession of Parliamentary and political influence from
their outrageous adoption of a pushing Direction, full of
monied names and names of local authority and mark.
We must object to this debate of so many evenings, as
also a dishonest debate. The chief participators in it
may be divided into three classes ; one of them only in-
tent upon clearing Lord STANLEY and his subordinates ;
a second, bent on making our a good case for Captain
FITZROY, the ex-Governor ; and a third, interested
almost exclusively to achieve the difficult object of
whitewashing the New Zealand Company's Direction.
The wrongs of British emigrants, the murders of li
British settlers, the insults on the British flag ; the
hideous savagery of out most intimate native con-
nexions were, for the most part, slurred over.
Great public and political principles have been silently
passed ever although notoriously outraged. The condi-
tion of New Zealand, and the relations of the Govern-
ment with the New Zealand Company, were disgraceful
anomalies when the discussion began. It has left them
scandalous, admitted, unalloyed facts. Mr. HOPE and
Mr. CARDWELL, Sir H. PEEL and Sir J. GRAHAM, ap-
pear to have thought that the only result needful to be
accomplished was the justification of Lord STANLEY.
Lord STANLEY'S conduct and correspondence are a mere
personal question, not worth one straw by the side of
this UNSOLVED PROBLEM :- What is now to be done with
Nezo Zealand and the British settlers in it, and their
future government ? Sir H. PEEL must address himself
to this point, not to a miserable and insidious attempt to
turow the whole onus of culpable mismanagement and
neglect, for which his own Government is so seriously re-
sponsible through the connivance and imbecility of its
colonial department, on that Government which his has
displaced.

The charge delivered by the Bishop of EXETER, at his
triennial visitation on Monday last, to the clergy of his
diocese, is one of the most characteristic it has ever been
our fortune to peruse. Whether because in his own
cathedral the Right Reverend Prelate finds himself par-
ticularly "at home," or that after exchanging the
turmoils in which his public life is passed on the
banks of the Thames, for the more calm and pastoral
shores of the Exe, his militant spirit—invigorated by
the change—becomes impatient of the quiescent atmo-
sphere by which it is surrounded, and re-assumes all its
energies for new conflicts ; we must do this meek
Churchman the bare justice of acknowledging that his
"charge" smacks of the fierce, vituperative, impas-
sioned zeal of a very much younger polemical champion.
The "charge" is distinguished by one feature of family
resemblance to all the elaborate invectives of which

this forbearing and forgiving prelate has been, at
various times, the author, namely, its extravagant
_ _ _

extent. It is in this property as remarkable
as if it were the, inaugural message of a Right
Reverend President to a Congress ecclesiastical.
But it is not the greeting of an ancient man, well
stricken in years, and bending beneath the cares and
honours of his station, but rather the manifesto of a
leader still in the vigour of his purpose and the hey-day
of his vaulting ambition. If this be the language of a
dignified priest, it is that neither of the self-denying
LATIMER nor the lowly FENELON. It is rather the war-
cry of some Pontiff, like JuLtus 11., shouting from the
trenches against the enemy, whom he has invested but
cannot vanquish. Of course, the general theme of this
remarkable " charge" is a defence of those Puseyite in-
novations on the ceremonial of the Estabiished Church,
which have been nowhere more notorious, offensive, or
contumaciously obstinate than in the diocese which rejoices
in the Christian pastoral superintendence of HENRY of
Exeter. His Lordship adverts to these scandals—not

in terms of regret, but of exultation ; not with any
view to palliate, but with the avowed intention to vindi-
cate them. And we must, ourselves, take heed how we
designate the Puseyite rubric purism as " innovations,"
for the worthy Bishop is furious and somewhat insolent
in his denunciations of the ignorant presumption of those
laymen who first of all commit a stupendous error, as
he maintains, and then a sin of enormous presumption in
demurring to the decrees of Mother-Church.
Bishops, themselves, preach from texts, as do the
humblest deacons ; and` our Right Reverend Prelate
adopted for his, the general purport of the discourse
with which the Rev. Mr. BARTHOLOMEW opened the
business of the day. That discourse was a stern denial
of the rights of private judgment, and a strenuous main-
tenance of the Apostolic succession of the Hierarchy.
The witty authors of the famous quiz on Bishop
BURNET, entitled " Memoirs of P. P., Clerk of this
Parish," never devised, as a vehicle for their waggery, a
strain of more amusing simplicity than that in which
the egotistical bishop thus recurs to the (Puseyite)
squabble, about the obtrusive exhibitions of some of his
clergy last winter. They were, says he, " incidents
which had given to that diocese, and especially to that
city, an unhappy notoriety—extended net only through-
out England but to the remotest regions of Christendom."
He then falls to that special pleading which we have
already alluded to, as to the solecism of any layman's
calling a return to the ancient usages of the Church, ,
as established and settled by the Rubric, "innovation ;"
and he contends that the real innovation is not of above
twenty years' standing, or So, during which the minis-
ters of the Church have been gradually departing from
those ancient usages. It never occurs to the Right Rev.
Prelate, wrapped up in the infallibility of his own
hierarchical position (derived, not from the ca-
pricious ac,:ident of a royal conge d'elire, but,
as he will have it, from the indefeasible
authority of the Apostolic succession), that if

the members of a Church, in the proportion of 99 to

prefer and sanction particular forms of celebration to
which a succession of their own Ministers have accus-
tomed successive generations of their forefathers, and
themselves down to the present day, they cannot be
said to uphold an innovation in stedfastly insisting on
the maintenance of those forms. When the Bishop of
EXETER defends the Puseyite parsons by saying " they
revert to the practice of the Church in its best days," a e
may make him a present of the argument. It only
follows that, with Bishop PHILLPOTT'S, the Church must
have fallen on evil days. We should wonder if it had
not, with such a servant. But when he talks of the
forms, that the 99 out of every 100 members of the
Established Church persist in contending for, being but
the practice of thirty years, we must say that PHILL-
POTTS the Bishop is about as intrepid in his assertions
as PHILLPOTTS the pamphleteer. Can we say more ?
The Bishop of EXETER is, as it were, savagely
facetious on the inconsistency he attributes to
such as quarrel with the use of the white
surplice in the pulpit, whilst they tolerate it readily
in the reading desk. Upon this head he exhibits all
the pride of pedantry and grim sarcasm, such as that
with which TORQUEMADA might have rebuked Krivoi
FERDINAND OD the portentous folly of mercy to a Moor.
Then he comes to the offertory question, and on the
plea that it is declared by contemporary authority that
the collections shall be for the use of the poor " and other
pious purposes," he attempts to overthrow the judg•
ments, ancient and modern, of our law Courts as to its
illegality—as to its supersession, by reason of the sta-
tutable compulsory provision ❑ow made for the poor—as
to its being an absolute offence against the law except in
virtue of, and accompanied by the reading of, a "QUEEN'S
or KING'S letter," &c.—he rudely sneers at the different
views announced on this and other subjects by his brother
in GOD, the Bishop of WORCESTER. He is wroth at the
lack-learning of the ecclesiastical Chancellor RAISES,
who has decided these and other points against
his own Right Reverend infallibility. He rushes

* " Now were the eyes of all the parish upon these our
weekly councils. In a short space the minister came among
us. He spake concerning us and our councils to a multitude
of other ministers at the Visitation; and they spake thereof
unto the ministers of London ; so that even the Bishops heard
and marvelled thereat Lo I thus did our counsels enter
into the hearts of our generals and our lawgivers ; and from
henceforth', even as we devised, thus did they."—Miscellanies
(Pope, Swift, &c.), 1719.