THE VESTRY-PARLIAMENTS. 173 between, twenty miles, in regard to travelling facilities, are quite as much as a hundred miles in England. The "rural settler," the estate-creating agriculturist or flock-master, living and working with his family on his land or station, even if he be only some dozen or twenty, and not fifty or a hundred, miles from the parliamentary Pedlington, cannot jump into a passing train after dinner, reach St. Stephen's for a night's debate, and be home among his flocks and herds by next day's noon. Neither can he leave his wife and children to manage his affairs and take lodgings in the town during the Provincial session. Thus, he rather eschews the honor of becoming a Provincial Councillor, and the local government of a country half as large as England is left to a handful of town dwellers, composed of noisy attorneys, and political M.D.'s, of master butchers and bakers, of oratorical tailors and traders-men who at eventide can lay aside pen and pill-box, blue sleeve, scale, and goose, and stepping across the road to Parliament House can there debate the affairs of State fresh from the domestic muffin, serene from the soothing pipe. Indeed it is asserted that the Provincial Councils are every session becoming more narrow, local, and inferior in respect to the legislative qualifications of their members; and it is not perhaps too much to say, that if all England north of the Trent were to be ruled locally by the Mayor and Corporation of York, the inhabitants of such district would be represented by their rulers just as much, or just as little, as the Colonists of the New Zealand Provinces are represented by their Provincial Councils. And this partial or non-existent representation, leading as it does to a very natural desire on the part of our Town Councillors to expend the public revenues of the Province among themselves, and on public works in and near the town, was the main cause why Hawkes' Bay and Marlborough separated from Wellington and Nelson, and will be the main cause why the Bay of Islands, Wanganui, Timaru, and Invercargill will soon, probably, insist on being separated from Auckland, Wellington, Canterbury, and Otago. Mr. Fox once wrote an excellent little book on New Zealand, and then called it "The Six Colonies of New Zealand." Does he know the meaning of the word? Does Bath consist of eight 174 THE VESTRY-PARLIAMENTS. cities, or of eight parishes? England and Wales of forty countries, or of forty counties? New Zealand is one colony, at present consisting of some dozen little Settlements, and to call her anything else is a misnomer. Build her up as one united colony, governed by a strong general representative Government, and her natural gifts will create her the home of thousands, and she may well become Britain of the South and Island Queen of the Pacific. Yield to the insensate cry of her Ultra-Provincialists; allow their dozen little vestry-parliaments to destroy her General Assembly, and to dominate the State; split her thus into a dozen rival little communities, with a dozen clashing codes of laws, and we open a true Pandora's box, sow broadcast the seeds of jealousies and animosities, and create such elements of strife that, as Italian history may show us, stranger sights might come to pass in the next century than the sight of Great Britain, in the year 1900, landing an army in New Zealand to suppress the fury of an internecine war. But, defective as the New Zealand Constitution has already been rendered by the creation of the original half-dozen of these pretentious parish-parliaments, it bids fair to be rendered considerably worse by the creation of half-a-dozen more. Under a late act of the General Assembly* any district in New Zealand possessing a port of entry and 500,000 acres of land may be raised into a separate Province, to be governed by a Provincial Council. Two new Provinces, Hawkes Bay and Marlborough, as before observed, have already been thus created, and some half-dozen other districts will probably soon seek to be raised *It is only fair to the Ministry who carried this measure to explain that it is thought they did so in the belief that the measure might gradually tend to the extinction rather than to the perpetuation of Provincial Councils. It seems to have been somewhat slily held by certain of our "Centralist" politicians, that if each of the present provinces could be cut up into two or three parts, and the new parts turned into separate provinces, the original provinces would necessarily be much humbled in tone; and that with their powers and dignities so crippled and shorn by subdivision, and with the spectacle before them of a dozen or more little parliaments all at work on the unfortunate colony at one time, the most violent of our Provincialists might be so smitten with sorrow or shame at the sight as to consent to the Provincial Parliaments being reduced to their legitimate grade of municipalities, attending to local wants and leaving the government of the colony in the hands of the General Assembly. THE FIFTEEN GOVERNMENTS. 175 to the like status. Thus, in a few years' time, there may be exhibited in the South Pacific a young Colony numbering only some eighty or a hundred thousand inhabitants, yet possessing the following little machinery of government :-One Governor, fourteen Superintendent Lieutenant-governors, one Legislative Council (or House of Peers), one House of Representatives (or General House of Commons), and fourteen Provincial Councils (or Local Houses of Commons), together with one general Executive Ministry, and fourteen local Executive Ministries. In addition to this, the larger towns, Auckland and Wellington, and others, will probably shake off the rule of their local governments, and insist on being raised into independent municipalities, so that in addition to Governor and Lieut.-Governor, and Life Peer, and M.P., and Local M.P., and General Executive Minister, and Local Executive Minister, we may reasonably hope, ere long, to display a fine crop of Aldermen and Bailies and Provosts and Mayors. It must be remembered, too, that these provincial legislative bodies are by no means idle bodies, existing or likely to exist only in name. If they did nothing, and were paid nothing, they would be harmless. But they do a great deal and consume a great deal. They keep the community in a continual state of political restlessness; and either to make speeches or to read speeches, take every second "town-dweller" from his legitimate business of the desk or the counter. The laws and ordinances they pass, and the conflicting character or unintelligibility of many of them, exceed belief. In three sessions alone, six of the Provincial Councils actually passed upwards of two hundred distinct ordinances; and as Charondas the Locrian was not present among them, they probably discussed as many more. * The establishment above alluded to may suffice for the Home establishment of New Zealand-but she requires representation abroad. Each of the six original Provinces having set up a different, or opposition, scheme for the sale and dis *Washington Irving, in one of his veracious histories, relates that Charondas the Locrian, "anxious to preserve the code of laws from the cumbersome additions of mere seekers of popularity," ordained that any legislator proposing a new law should do it with a halter round his neck; wherewith in case his measure was rejected they straightway hung him up; and there the matter ended." 176 THE VESTRY-PARLIAMENTS. posal of its wild lands, and each being the rival of the other in the work of attracting capital and labour from the Mother Country, has found it necessary to set up one in London, a little political and emigratory office an office where the emigrant-inquirer will generally glean rather too much about the merits of some one Province, and rather too little about the merits of any other. In self-defence, it is probable that each of the new Provinces will have to do the same; each must have a representative in England; so that in addition to our fourteen Legislative Governments in the Colony, we may find ourselves, ere long, in possession of fourteen Emigrationary Agencies in the Mother Country! How the handful of Colonists will find even the people, to say nothing about the money, to carry on a government of these Brobdignagian proportions, is a problem no man would venture to solve. Indeed, I cannot but think that it is a problem we shall never be actually called on to solve. It appears to me that the very intensity of our political disease may well affect its cure; and that the farce of our possible Fourteen Legislative Bodies may well induce Provincialists to pause, to retrace their steps, and to assist our Centralists to turn New Zealand into one strong united Colony, ruled by one strong united Government. If not-if, like the frog in the fable, we persist in seeking to inflate ourselves to death-I trust the Mother Country will mercifully step in before the catastrophe happens, and taking back that big constitution garment which she thought was for our good, will replace it with another-another, more fitting for our inches, more seemly for our tender youth. PUBLIC REVENUE AND EXPENDITURE. The public revenue of the Colony for the year 1860 may perhaps be estimated at about £600,000. It is derived from two great sources: nearly half from the sums received for Customs Duties and from the small items of postage, licenses, fines, and fees, forming what is called "Ordinary Revenue;" and the remainder from sums received by the sale and lease of the public waste lands of the Colony, forming what is called "Territorial Revenue." No less than three-eighths of the former, and the whole of the latter, amounting to 400,000l., is taken and spent by the eight Provincial Councils, as local revenue. These bodies have been suffered to raise some 300,000l. in the shape of local loans;* and this lion's share of the Colony's revenue which these local bodies consume goes partly to pay the annual interest of the loans they have raised, and partly to pay the army of small officials they employ-the residue being devoted to local public works. The remaining five-eighths of the "Ordinary Revenue," amounting to some 200,000l., goes to the General Government as general revenue, and is expended mainly on Native Purposes,† on the maintenance of the Customs and Post Office departments, including a steam mail service, on the legislative and judicial departments of the General Government, and in providing the annual interest of the Colony's public debt.‡ Owing partly to the existence of no fewer than nine public exchequers, general and local, in New Zealand, and nine Chancellors of the Exchequer; owing partly to the variety of borrowers, to the scramble for money, to the intricate appropriation of funds, and the general confusion of accounts, it would I think defy the most accomplished accountant to state precisely what may be New Zealand's exact financial position in this present year of our Lord 1860. But as far as a painful study of com * The power recklessly accorded to, or taken by, these "Vestry Parliaments" of borrowing large sums of money on local securities, is productive of bad results. It encourages a large establishment and a lavish expenditure. Offices are multiplied, salaries increased, public works jobbed; whilst if the day should come when any of these little settlements should be unable or unwilling to meet its liabilities, the financial credit of the whole colony would be damaged just as "Pennsylvania's Repudiation" damaged the character of the public securities of every State in the Union. In the Budget of the Colonial Treasurer (the Chancellor of the Exchequer), the Hon. C. W. Richmond, for 1859, some 15,000l. is required for native schools and other native purposes, and about 20,000l. for postal purposes. 4 The Act of Parliament which conferred the Constitution on New Zealand most unjustly charged the trading losses of the New Zealand Company, losses amounting to more than a quarter of a million sterling, and which were chiefly incurred in planting the two settlements of Wellington and Nelson, as a debt on the young colony; and to pay off this debt, and some others, and likewise to provide a sufficient fund for the purchase of further portions of the North Island from the native owners, the General Government, under the guarantee of the Imperial Government, has lately borrowed 500,000l. at 47. per cent. N |