< Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu
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REMONSTRANCE OF THE LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL.

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mount claims of the colonists, as if the colony itself were but the fief of that minister. The salaries of the officers of the customs and all other departments of government mentioned in the schedules are placed beyond our control; and the only result of this new enactment, ushered as it was into Parliament by the Prime Minister himself with so much parade, and under the pretence of conferring upon us enlarged powers of self-government, and treating us, at last, as an integral portion of the British empire, is, that all the material powers exercised for centuries by the House of Commons are still withheld from us. That our loyalty and our desire for the maintenance of proper order are so far distrusted that we are not permitted to vote our own civil list, lest it might prove inadequate to the necessities of the public service. That our waste lands, and our territorial revenue, for which her Majesty is but a trustee, instead of being spontaneously surrendered as an equivalent for such civil list, is still reserved, to our great detriment, to swell the patronage and power of the ministers of the crown. "Thus circumstanced, we feel that on the eve of this council's dissolution, and as the closing act of our legislative existence, no other course is open to us but to enter on our journals our solemn declaration, protest, and remonstrance, as well against the Act of Parliament itself (13 and 14 Vict., cap. 59) as against the instruction of the minister by which the small power of retrenchment that act confers on the colonial legislature has been thus overridden; and to bequeath the redress of the grievances, which we have been unable to effect by constitutional means, to the Legislative Council by which we are about to be succeeded."

It would be easy to prove to those who were unacquainted with the political history of New South Wales that these grievances are for the most part imaginary; for in theory the colonists have almost all the rights claimed, and against granting them those they have not there are plausible theoretical objections.

For instance they have nearly the same control in theory over the customs department that we have; but as the officers are appointed in England by a board distant sixteen thousand miles, and paid out of a fund over which the colonists have no control, it may easily be imagined that they find it difficult to regulate the due execution of the duties of a department which has been almost too powerful for the merchants of London with all their parliamentary influence close at hand. It is true that here the salaries and cost of collection are deducted from the gross revenues, and so far the Australian rule follows the bad British precedent; but here the ministers who refuse to redress an administrative grievance may be turned out of office there—the advisers of the governor are irremovable.

So too there are theoretical reasons for making the salaries of the principal officers permanent, but the colonists remonstrating had in their view instances in which they had been compelled to pay Masters in Equity and prothonotaries, thrust upon them against their will.

There is no question that to confine patronage to colonists would

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