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A selection from the writings and speeches of John Robert Godley

[Speech about the Canterbury settlement, 23rd November 1858]

At a dinner to the late Superintendent of the Province of Canterbury, at the Albion Tavern on the 23rd November 1858, Mr. Godley was again called on to respond to a toast in which his name was connected with the Colony of Canterbury, and spoke in reply as follows:—

My Lords and Gentlemen—It is with very hearty feelings of satisfaction and pleasure that I find myself year after year attending these social meetings of the friends of Canterbury—such meetings as I believe no other colony can show—meetings eminently characteristic of the social, genial, and friendly feelings which have always marked the efforts of the friends of page 251Canterbury, and which have contributed in no small degree to its success. I should certainly feel extremely diffident of my own power of returning thanks for the colony of Canterbury—indeed, I should feel as though it was not my place to do so—if it were not, as your Lordship has said, that I have been more intimately, and longer, and more essentially connected with that colony, even than most of those who have been actually colonists. I have been, as I was recently told by a writer in a daily newspaper, "The notorious author of the "great Canterbury failure." At least, then, I have a right to speak a word in my defence, and to represent the case as it is. After the speech which Mr. FitzGerald has just made it would ill become me, however, to detain you more than a very few minutes; but I wish, on the part of the colonists whom you have done me the honour to allow me to represent, to make some very few additions to the statements which Mr. FitzGerald has laid before you as to the progress and prospects of the colony. He has told you that the exports of Canterbury were in the last half-year £109,000. I should like to add to his statistics the statement that the public revenue of the colony during the last six months amounted to £48,000; that is to say, that it has a revenue amounting to £96,000 a-year. And I want to point that particularly, because figures do not generally leave any strong impression upon the mind—I want to point it by saying that, in proportion to the population, that is more than double the amount of public revenue any community has ever had to dispose of since the world began. It represents £14 a-head upon the whole number of the people of Canterbury, and is equal, therefore, to what the revenue of this country would be if it amounted to £420,000,000. The revenue of the British Empire averages about £2 per head, and the revenue of the richest community in the world, up to this time—I mean Victoria—amounts to about £8 per head; that is, with a population of nearly half a million, it has a revenue of three millions and a-half to dispose of; while Canterbury, with a population of 7,000, has £96,000 revenue. page 252As Mr. FitzGerald has shown, the exports of the colony show equal prosperity, and I think I may say that the moral progress of the people, their advance in religion and education, quite correspond with their material progress.

No doubt there are great drawbacks in the colonial life of Canterbury which we are endeavouring to correct. These are principally the want of labour and the want of education. To meet the first of these drawbacks—the want of labour—Mr. FitzGerald is sending out ships freighted with emigrants, at the rate of a 1,200-ton ship a month; and to such an extent has the introduction of labour in this way gone on, that from March 1858 to March 1859 the population will have been increased by 2,000 people, or 20 per cent. I see, too, that great efforts are making to remove the other great drawback—the want of education—by the organisation and establishment of a higher school, a grammar-school and college, and by the exertions which the Bishop has made, in his own energetic manner, to organise a staff of clergy to visit the various stations at regular intervals. Therefore I think I may say that the moral progress which Canterbury presents corresponds with its material progress.

I will now say one word on the special topic of this evening. There is no person present, I believe, who has had so much to do with, or seen so much of, Mr. FitzGerald, in both his public and private capacity, as I have. Therefore I may speak with the force and authority of an eye-witness of his work in the colony. Upon this part of the subject others have spoken of what they have heard and read; I speak of what I have actually seen. Mr. FitzGerald was the first who landed in Canterbury after the Settlement was founded, and I never shall forget the emotion with which I threw myself into his arms when he landed. Both of us, I am sure, will look back on that moment as one of the most affecting and memorable of our lives. When he came out he had special duties to perform in connection with me, which he performed with that energy which he brings to bear upon everything in which he page 253engages. And he had a still higher duty, for he was the editor of a newspaper, and, as such, undertook the responsible task of providing the intellectual food, the material for thought, and the incentive to action, for the young community. In such a community it was all-important that the editor of the first newspaper should be a man of high aims and aspirations; and by the manner in which Mr. FitzGerald edited the newspaper, which we commenced the first week after the colonists landed, he rendered as essential a service as was ever rendered to a colony. I will venture to say that any man who was in the habit of reading the Lyttelton Times of that day will agree with me that no newspaper was ever conducted with loftier aspirations or with a more honest desire to elevate and raise the tone of the people amongst whom it circulated. There is nothing for which the colonists have to thank Mr. FitzGerald more than that great work, which was mainly instrumental in introducing that tone and feeling which have remained the characteristics of social life in Canterbury ever since. So far as I know, the colony of Canterbury affords the only instance of a small community where there are two newspapers which do not abuse each other. I read them both regularly, and can assure you that they actually praise each other, and I believe that to be a miracle without parallel. I read the Canterbury Standard and the Lyttelton Times, and I do not believe that I have ever found in either a word of abuse against the other, I attribute that, and the good feeling that prevails amongst the colonists generally, to the manner in which the Lyttelton Times was conducted by its first editor; and I have remarked that in all the public affairs of the colony Mr. FitzGerald has always dealt with them in such a way as showed that he was ever conscious of the moral dignity of his position. There is no position on earth where men of similar capacity and means—men of that class to which our colonists generally belong—can exercise such immense influence and acquire such immense power as that in which those who first go out to a new colony, and become the seed-plot and nursery of a new nation, find page 254themselves; and unless we keep continually before their eyes the power and the deep responsibility that ought always to be connected with that power, there is a danger of the whole course of the growing nation being turned to degeneracy. If the founders of the American Republics had been formed of the same materials as the settlers of California, the genius and liberties of America would have been lost in anarchy or absorbed in an inevitable despotism. It was because, on however small a scale, they were senators and soldiers, impressed with a due sense of the heavy responsibility that rested upon them, and not mere money-getters, that they succeeded in laying the foundations of the greatest republic in the world. They never lost sight of the responsibility of the task they had undertaken—they felt that they were going for a high position in the eyes of the world, and to set an example for all ages. Feeling this, the early settlers of New England accomplished their mission, and it has always been the great endeavour of my friend Mr. FitzGerald to keep constantly before the eyes of the first colonists of Canterbury the duty which they, in like manner, have undertaken, and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the good he has done in that way. I have taken up more of your time than I intended, and I will only further express on behalf of the colonists of Canterbury, whom you have done me the honour to allow me to represent in connection with this toast, the great pleasure and gratification which they will feel when they know the manner in which their most distinguished representative, Mr. FitzGerald, has been received by this company, and their hope that he will shortly be enabled to return, with renewed health and vigour, to resume the heroic career that has been temporarily interrupted.