considerate character had smoothed many of the difficulties and many of the collisions between the Governor and the Parliament. His successor, Mr. William Downes Griffith, was a pugnacious Irishman, who had had no previous knowledge of the country or of its institutions, and was profoundly unfitted to hold a political position in the country. Under such an influence the difficulties which beset the working of incomplete representative institutions were immediately accentuated, and threatened to bring relations between the Parliament and the Executive to a deadlock.

Mr. Molteno had drawn attention to the enormous increase in the number of convicts, owing to the provisions. of an Act by which judges were compelled to sentence sheep and cattle stealers to a minimum of three years' imprisonment. One-tenth of the whole revenue of the country was now spent in supporting the large army of criminals. Mr. Molteno moved a resolution giving power to the judges to modify these sentences. In a maiden speech Mr. Griffith violently attacked him, and suggested that the Government would not carry out any resolution of the Parliament which was not in accord with their views.

Mr. Molteno replied, expressing his surprise at the manner in which the Attorney-General had taken up the matter the hostile tone he had adopted, so different from the and Governor's opening speech, which had stated that he would be most happy to consider any suggestion which might come from the House. He did not see how the passing of such a resolution could be in any way offensive to the Government. As to the introduction of a Bill, as suggested by the Attorney-General, he thought it was the duty of the House to communicate its views to the Government, and

One of the complaints of the American colonies which led up to the war was the appointment of officials who had never even seen America. See Lecky's England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. iv. p. 112, n.

for the Government, who were the Executive of the Colony, if they were to be guided by the House, to pay respect to its recommendations; if not, the Governor had better dismiss the Parliament at once. If the moment a member made an attempt to make a suggestion in the best possible spirit to remedy a glaring evil, he were to be met in a hostile spirit by the Government, the sooner Parliament was prorogued the better. He feared the spirit in which he had been met was not likely to conduce to the comfortable progress of public business.

The action of the Attorney-General was promptly condemned by member after member, who rose and expressed their indignation at his attitude. That functionary, however, was undaunted, and his reply is worthy of quotation, as showing how the system of appointments through political patronage at home may work in the selection of officials for posts in a Crown colony :

Sir, the hon. member for Beaufort argues in this way: The prisons are crowded, therefore let the prisoners loose; the cheaper course would be never to bring them to trial. . . . It would be a most economical proceeding to abolish the criminal law altogether and try nobody, and leave all your thieves at liberty, as the hon. member for Beaufort wishes to do. . . . The hon. member may speak of his own constituents, the majority of whom, he admits, are in gaol.

This was the manner in which the Attorney-General, attacking representative and constituency alike, chose to insult a leader of the House who had devoted twelve years of unwearying care to the public interests. No community with any self-reliance or independence of feeling could endure this state of things. The 'Argus' justly said :—

It was untrue and offensive for the Attorney-General to tell the member for Beaufort that he wanted to destroy the Governor's prerogative of pardon and assume it himself. The AttorneyGeneral is evidently quite unused to address a deliberative assembly; he speaks as if he held a brief against the member

whom he is at the moment opposing. We are sorry to see this feeling--that the Parliament is the natural enemy of the Executive-creeping into the debate. The Executive are not alone to blame. The officials, however, are widening the breach to the utmost by saying of the member for Beaufort nasty and unjust things.

The narrow spirit in which the Government was being administered was further shown by its action in regard to the disposition of the Crown lands of the Colony. Mr. Molteno drew attention to the injury which was being done to the country by such a system of administration. He showed that the Crown lands were being retained for some supposed good time when they would be of enormous value, but he pointed out that while the Free State and Transvaal were offering farms to anybody who would go and take them, it was not likely that the price of land in the Colony could be high, and the effect of this policy was to denude the Colony of its population.

Every year hundreds of people who had been crying out for land in the Colony and could not get it, were going away. It was with the greatest possible difficulty that the Divisional Council of Victoria West had obtained the sanction of the Government to a survey and sale of 105 farms in that division, although there were applications for all of them! The Government said that nothing could be got for them; nevertheless, 20,000l. to 30,000l. was realised by the sale of these farms, which, in addition, paid the annual quit rents. Then he turned to the Act for leasing Crown lands, which had been administered by people who did not understand, because they would not understand, the country, but who, if they continued to go on as they were doing, would drive away the population. If they would

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It may be added that this led to the settlement of one of the most important districts in the Colony, which now sends down thousands of bales of wool to Port Elizabeth, a district which, when Mr. Molteno first went there, was hardly inhabited at all.

fix the population in the central districts they would double and treble the exports of wool in the course of a few years. But it was of no use to say these things, for when people who understood the matter ventured to do so they were charged with opposing the Government. It was no use cailing Parliament together, and getting people who understood the country to speak of things within their own knowledge, unless their representations produced some effect. If the present line of policy were continued the country would be ruined.

Almost the whole of the session was devoted to a fruitless effort to bring about a retrenchment of the colonial expenditure. There were two sets of opinions in the House. The responsible government party submitted that measures of such importance could only be useful if initiated by the Government, while another set of politicians, opposed to the advent of responsible government, sought to prove that Parliament even as at present constituted could initiate and carry through great changes and effectively control the Government. The Government, seeing the temper of the House, offered to bring in a measure of their own-an offer which was decisively rejected.

A retrenchment committee was appointed on the suggestion of the party who thought the present system of government might be worked, and the House, as apart from the Executive, resolved to see what it could effect by itself. The Government did not, of course, take kindly to the committee or its labours. The so-called Conservative party were eager and anxious to show how much Parliament could effect without a responsible government. They asserted that the Executive officers were the servants of Parliament, and should ever swiftly and willingly obey its commands.

The Government, however, resented the idea of being the mere tools of Parliament. And the Constitutional party, who believed that the Government, whether irresponsible or

responsible, should be the sole initiators of all public policy, nevertheless in their anxiety to have retrenchment from whatever source it might come, supported the retrenchment committee. The final result was that the Government was left to decide how far they would be able to embody the committee's suggestions in the estimates; but upon the estimates coming forward the alterations were found to be very different from the retrenchment committee's proposals.

The Government had made retrenchment distasteful and impossible by cutting off the necessary establishments first, and the House refused, on the motion of Mr. Molteno, to go into the Government scheme owing to the late period of the session, but passed the estimates of the first six months only of the succeeding year, with a few reductions which had been previously resolved upon. The House was prorogued early in January of the next year, 1867.

The proceedings had been most unsatisfactory. Mr. Molteno had, as usual, taken a prominent part. Though not of the party who had appointed the retrenchment committee, he honestly aided them. By suitable amendments he frequently saved them from defeat, and more than once delivered the House from the hopeless confusion of aimless debate by expressing its wishes in a few well-chosen words. He had, with his sound commercial instinct, vigorously opposed the Paper Currency Bill, which appeared to be the special protégé of the new Attorney-General, and succeeded in defeating it.

It was felt that responsible government was at hand, and the proceedings of the Attorney-General and other officials had convinced several of the hereditary opponents of responsible government that their traditional opposition could no longer be maintained without great cost. It was becoming clear to the country that very little could be hoped for from the present system of government.