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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 10
II.—Want of Unity of Policy
II.—Want of Unity of Policy.
The policy of the Weld ministry, now that it has been joined by Mr. Fitzgerald, one of the members for Canterbury Province, and who is the proprietor and editor of the Canterbury Press, cannot be mistaken.
"We know well," he says, "that, so long as the army remains in the colony, and the Secretary of State can send to the Governor, ordering him to do this, that, and the other, so long the Governor must be held responsible to the Crown for all that is done under his Government. He ought, in our view, to be little more than an officer of State; and the real meaning of giving Responsible Government to a colony is to make the Governor's position one of State and ceremony rather than of political power."*
"If the latter were the case," he says, on another occasion, "what business has the Governor to write letters to the Home Government, charging the Queen's ministers with driving the natives to desperation? Nay, we may go further and say, what business has he to write at all except as he shall be advised by his ministers to write? Did that ministerial responsibility which has been so much talked of really exist, such would be the position of the Governor in the colony. But it does not."†
And "Thank God it does not" would be the exclamation of ninety nine out of every hundred colonists, both in the North and South, if
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the question were put to them; for they recognize in these pretensions nothing less than the triumph of the attempt of the old New Zealand Company, to establish a separate authority, in fact, sovereign power in the Islands of New Zealand, in the hands of an irresponsible clique at Cook's Straits. Let us take—
* Canterbury Press, 7th October, 1864.
† Ibid. 5th October, 1864.