A.—3

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If so, then the proposal would not merely be one to insure a better administration of justice, but is a little disguised impeachment of the High Commissioner's Court itself. 19. Your Excellency will recollect that "The Vagabond," who signs some of these productions, and appears to have inspired the remainder, is the person who was last year brought down to Fiji for a few weeks, and, without knowing anything of the colony or the affairs of its government, or the administration of justice in it, sought notoriety by assailing your Excellency and myself in a public lecture with abuse so foul and violent that even the local journals most hostile to the Government shrank from reproducing it in what purported to be a report of the proceedings. 20. The respectable part of the audience rose and left the hall, and he was thereafter shunned even by most of those who had taken him by the hand when he first came. He left the colony baffled and most bitter, and to that bitterness, born of his failure to stir up sedition here, he has given abundant vent through the Australian papers. 21. No doubt the writer saw many things in this colony which could not but shock a person of his views. 22. He saw that no means were taken to encourage or cajole the natives to strip themselves of the possessions solemnly guaranteed to them by the Queen, and that the maxim that, (as he puts it,) " the land is for the white man," was not one accepted by the Government of the colony. He saw Her Majesty's Fijian subjects a well-ordered society; he saw their rights and property respected; he saw them contented and peaceful and industrious, with a fair prospect of rising with that rising prosperity of the colony, —a prosperity which the contentment of the natives insures, and which their discontent would imperil or destroy. He saw an absence of all those costly precautions which elsewhere mutual distrust has rendered needful, and of that sullen ill-will which a sense of injustice has too often elsewhere engendered. 23. For offences such as these we are not likely to be forgiven by this man, or others of his sort. But I think we are entitled to ask why the delegates should have received, and, without inquiry as to their truth, reprinted, his outpourings of bombast and falsehood ? 24. It is a maxim with public men at Home that they do not take any serious step in grave concerns without having well-ascertained facts upon which to stand. Here we have a resolution of a meeting of colonial delegates supported apparently by nothing better than anonymous libels, or the random charges of an alien adventurer! 25. I must enter my protest against the character and good name of Judges, who have grown grey in Her Majesty's service, and who fill positions such as those which for many years I have had the honor to hold, being thus trifled with, either by colonial delegates or by any other body of men. The delegates are now more responsible for the libels than even the author himself. As his, they would rapidly, and before this time, have sunk into oblivion; accepted and recirculated by the delegates, they may live some little time longer, —not, however, to my hurt, but to the shame of those who have reproduced them. I have, &c, John Gobeie, Chief Judicial Commissioner for the "Western Pacific. His Excellency the High Commissioner, &c.

Authority: Geobge Didsbuby, Government Printer, Wellington.—lBBl

Price Is. 9d.]