Proclamation as legal.’ Your Excellency knows that my deliberative opinion on that subject was never required. I felt that if it had been offered unasked, and had been adverse to the policy of the Government, I should have only incurred the mortification of seeing it disregarded, and the discomfort of being considered officious. I only refer to a fact more than notorious, to what is in this colony a truism or understood matter of course, in saying that no responsibility ever weighed on the officers of your Government.”
Action was taken in the Law Courts really at the instigation of Mr. H. Sewell against the regulations (Dorset v. Bell), and an injunction obtained. Meanwhile, with indecent haste and inadequate notice, lands were offered for application, for which no proper plans were available. It must not be supposed that because the lands reserved for the Canterbury and Otago Associations were exempted from the operation of the regulations that therefore Canterbury was not affected. It was manifestly impossible for the Canterbury Association or the Provincial Council to sell land at £3 per acre when similar land just outside their boundary was offered at 10/- an acre or even less.
It has been necessary to explain the land regulations in some detail, because the election of the first Canterbury Superintendent largely turned on the land question, The Canterbury Association, whatever its shortcomings in other respects, could have claimed that it had sold no land to speculators, and very little to absentees, and that it had not parted with the freehold of any big estates. The question before the country in 1853 was not leasehold v. freehold, but cheap or dear land. The dear land policy of the Canterbury Association was based on Mr. E. G. Wakefield’s “sufficient price” theory, by which was meant that the price of land should be high enough to provide for the cost of surveys, roads, bridges and other purposes in the case of the Canterbury Association.
