the ordinary grants for the army, navy, and commissariat departments for 1851-2. The right hon. gentleman prefaced his motion by a brief explanation of the requirements for this purpose. The motion led to a lengthened discussion on the affairs of the colony and the war.

Mr. Adderley availed himself of the occasion to enter fully into South-African politics, being precluded by form from moving an address, of which he had given notice, praying that Her Majesty would bestow on the colony of the Cape of Good Hope the means of self-government.

Lord J. Russell replied to Mr. Adderley, justifying the course pursued by the Home Government, with reference to the subject of representative institutions and frontier policy.

In the debate which ensued, in which the principal speakers were Mr. Hume, Mr. Hawes, Mr. Vernon Smith, Mr. Bright, Mr. Labouchere, Lord Naas, and Mr. Wakley, Lord John Russell pledged himself to the declaration, that at the earliest practicable period a representative Government would be established at the Cape. The vote was then agreed to. Subsequently, on bringing up the report of the Committee of Supply, the same subject was resumed by Mr. Hume, who impugned the conduct of the Government for withholding from the colonists of the Cape a representative system which had been granted to them by letters patent.

Lord J. Russell, in reply, stated the mode in which a representative system had been granted to the Cape. The letters patent contained no distinct details, but only an outline of the system, to be

filled up in the colony, and the scheme was to be sent home in the shape of ordinances for the decision of Her Majesty's Government. He explained the course adopted by Sir Harry Smith, who, instead of filling up the vacant seats of the council by nominees, completed that assembly, by which the new ordinances were to be framed, by members elected in the colony; and he detailed the result of that measure-the differences which arose in the Council, and the secession of Sir A. Stockenström and his colleagues. Those persons, he thought, had taken a most unfortunate course, since, but for it, the ordinances would have been transmitted to this country and received the consideration of the Home Government, and a representative constitution would now have been in force in the colony.

In the House of Lords, not long afterwards, the whole policy of the Home Government, in reference to the Cape colony, underwent a searching and protracted discussion, on a motion brought forward by the Earl of Derby. This was one of the most important debates of the session-the reputation and, as it seemed probable, the existence of the Government being involved in the issue.

The resolution proposed by the noble leader of the opposition party, and which he sustained in a speech of great eloquence and power, was in the following terms:-"That the papers laid before their Lordships, during the present and last session of Parliament, relative to the granting representative institutions to the Cape colony, be referred to a Select Committee." In the outset of his speech, Lord Derby rapidly sketched the late history of the Cape constitution. That colony

was one of the Crown colonies, originally acquired by conquest, and subject to the authority of the Crown. At first the Government was carried on by the authority of the Governor alone; he was afterwards assisted by an Executive Council; in 1834 that became the Legislative Council, nominated by the Governor, and comprising a majority of official members. In 1842 a petition was presented from the Cape, praying for a representative constitution. To that petition Lord Derby, then Lord Stanley and Chief Secretary for the Colonies, replied, pointing out certain difficulties in the way of adopting representative institutions, pronouncing no final decision, but waiting further information and explanation. In 1846 Lord Grey, then at the head of the Colonial Office, called for an answer to Lord Stanley's letter of 1842, which had been up to that time neglected. Sir Harry Smith, then Governor of the Cape, laid Lord Grey's dispatch before his official advisers. They expressed various opinions as to the expediency of introducing representative institutions, but unanimously agreed that there should be a Governor, a Legislative Council, and a House of Assembly, sitting at Cape Town, for the whole of the colony. Lord Grey referred the matter to the Board of Trade, who suggested that the Legislative Council should be elective as well as the House of Assembly, and that the Chief Justice should preside in the Lower House.

The report was sent to the Government at Cape Town; and the Governor was instructed that the details should not be included in the letters-patent, but should VOL. XCIII.

be supplied by the members of the Council on the spot.

In the interval, however, occurred those differences under which the Anti-Convict Association arose into being. Lord Derby felt that a great and grievous error had been committed on that point by Her Majesty's Government; for when pledges were held out, under the authority of the Crown, that convicts should not be admitted into certain colonies except when their labour was asked for as a boon, as it sometimes was, and when, in the teeth of all the public bodies of the colony of the Cape of Good Hope, convicts were sent out to it and their reception was pressed-he would not say on a reluctant colony, for reluctant was not the proper word-but on a colony unanimous in refusing their introduction, there was no other mild expression applicable to such transactions except that of great and grievous error. No error, he repeated, could be more great and grievous than to hold out, in the name of the Crown, any expressions or pledges respecting boons to be granted or privileges conceded, and then to recede from those pledges in spirit as well as in letter. The error on this occasion met with a grievous punishment, of which the example would be followed not only in the colony of the Cape but also in all our other colonies. The spirit of resistance had been evoked in a just cause, and had been carried to such an extent, that, after a vain struggle on the part of the Crown, its authority had been rejected and lowered in the colony; and not petitions, but threats and menaces, and even hostilities, had been directed against the Governor on the [K]

spot, which compelled him first, and afterwards the Government at home, to succumb. To such an extent had the resistance been carried, that by dint of violence the Legislative Council was dissolved. Lord Derby rapidly recited the subsequent history of the colony: the retirement of the four unofficial members of the Council at the Cape, with whose view, however, that they could only act as a constituent body, he disagreed; the new instructions from Lord Grey, that the Governor should go on if he had as many as six members of Council, -a course which Lord Derby believed to be illegal; and the discovery of new difficulties in the way of completing the new constitution. Governor Smith said that the vacancies could not be filled up without exciting a ferment in the colony he offered, if Lord Grey wished it, to proceed with the residuary Council, or to complete the Council by new appointments; but he thought that the introduction of representative institutions would be more practicable if it were provided for by "some instrument to be issued in England." Lord Derby cited again Lord Grey's proposal to carry on the government with only six members, and to appoint the Chief Justice speaker of the second chamber; the latter as a mark of his pertinacity, the former as a proposal decidedly illegal. Briefly referring to the opinion signed by Sir Fitzroy Kelly, Mr. Walpole, and Mr. Kenyon, Lord Derby left it to be expounded by a legal authority in that House, whose opinion was entitled to still higher respect Lord Lyndhurst. For himself he concurred in the Governor's opinion, that the final and

satisfactory adjudication of this question could only be given by the authority and intervention of Parliament. He regretted to say, that after what had occurredafter the colony had been called upon to say what amount of respect should be paid to the Crown, whose powers were practically exercised by the Secretary of State-after the colony had seen the authority of the Crown so set at nought, unless the consent of Parliament were given to the constitution sent over on the authority of the Secretary of State, with whom a large portion of the colony were engaged in an angry and hostile war,-he believed there was little chance of such a constitution being acceptable to the colony. To an Act of the Imperial Legislature all sections of the community would defer; and that alone would solve the problem that had threatened the whole framework of the colony with dissolution, more especially if a power were reserved for the Legislature, so to be constituted by a majority, to alter and amend the institutions which in the first instance should be granted with the authority of Parliament. For himself, he might have hesitated to grant so large a measure of representative government as that now proposed; but as such a proposal had been made on such high authority, and as it had obtained the sanction of the colony and the implied sanction of the Crown, any danger or risk was to be encountered rather than not fulfil those expectations. The labours devolving upon such a Committee need not be of long duration; and even if it should add a week or a fortnight to the session, he believed that a small portion of the time of

Parliament would be well bestowed by conferring it upon this distant colony-torn by intestine convulsions and distracted by external war-weakened as it was by the disinclination of the colonists to stand by the Crown, towards which they were rendered disaffected by these disputes. The object he had in view was, that with the least possible loss of time a Bill should be passed during the present session, which should settle at once, and for a lengthened period, this most difficult and complicated subject.

Earl Grey rose to answer Lord Derby's speech. He defended his own conduct in referring the framing of the colonial institutions to the Board of Trade. In the case of the Australian Bill, he said, that course had given great satisfaction to the colonies, and had resulted in the passing of the Bill through Parliament by large majorities without any essential alterations. With regard to the opinion of counsel on the question of legality, Lord Grey contended that it did not apply. No legal opinion is of much weight until you see the case on which the opinion was founded, and in the present in stance, being founded on a case in which the facts were wholly misstated, the opinion was valueless. The noble Lord pointed out at some length the mis-statements which, according to his view of the facts, the opinion involved. He agreed with Lord Derby that the Crown ought to adhere to its promises, and to fulfil them with as little delay as possible; and he declared that it was the intention of Government that the institutions should be brought into operation forthwith. He was sanguine enough to believe that, with the

means now at the disposal of the Governor, the Caffre war would soon be at an end, and then the only obstacle to the completion of the constitution would be removed. Lord Grey further justified the course now taken by that adopted with respect to Jamaica in 1661. He deprecated the delay incidental to proceeding by a Select Committee, and ascribed much of the bad feeling at the Cape to Lord Stanley's measure respecting the emancipation of slaves in 1833, which provoked an insurrection in 1842-3. The sending of convicts to the Cape in 1849 might, he acknowledged, have been a mistake, but Government had been placed in extreme difficulty by the impossibility of sending convicts any longer to Van Diemen's Land. Earl Grey concluded his speech by descanting in bitter terms on the violent and unjustifiable conduct of the anti-convict party at the Cape, to whom the success of Lord Derby's motion would operate as a direct encouragement.

The Earl of Malmesbury supported the motion and severely reprobated the policy of the Secretary for the Colonies. Lord Cranworth expressed his opinion in favour of that noble Lord's construction of the law.

Lord Lyndhurst entered at some length, and with great perspicuity, into the legal bearings of the question. The Cape of Good Hope was a conquered colony: the Crown therefore had powers to make laws for it. After a certain time, and in consequence of the increase of the European population, it was considered prudent to give the colony a Legislature; and a legislative power was given to it, by the name of the Legislative Council. If they looked to the constitution