Langford to Newcastle

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of a letter from Mr
Fortescue of the 31st ulto, in which he states that, any charges
that I had to prefer against the Administration of Justice in
Vancouvers Island ought to have been brought forward in the Colonial
Legislature or transmitted through the Governor; in reply to these
remarks I beg to state that from the peculiar composition of the
small Legislative Assembly of Vancouver's Island an appeal to that
body would have been futile and that from the connection of Mr Good
and Mr Cameron with the Governor I felt that an application to his
Excellency would have been also useless.

Mr Fortescue remarks in his letter that my Statements are imperfect,
I must observe that, from the singular nature of those statements and
the position of the persons that they affect, it could scarcely be
expected that a complete chain of evidence could be produced in
England, but as regards the unfitness of Mr Cameron and the
impropriety of confiding the Supreme Judicial authority to his hands
I did think that the copies of the letters from the Sheriff-Clerk at
Perth and the Registrar of the Supreme Court in Demerara would have
been considered as fairly conclusive. I herewith give the simple
facts regarding the Chief Justice Mr Cameron which facts can be
proved by persons now living in this country; Mr Cameron is a man of
obscure origin with no legal education whatsoever and a very
imperfect general one, he was an uncertificated Bankrupt in Scotland
and was sometime afterwards discharged as an Insolvent debtor in
Demerara shortly before arriving in Vancouver Island. But for the
impropriety of such a person as Mr Cameron holding such a high and
responsible office, it is extrmely unlikely that I should ever have
had to try such grievances before Your Grace.

I can most unhesitatingly assert that the purity of Justice has been
entirely overthrown in Vancouvers Island, rendering the proceedings
in the Law Courts in the Colony the theme of scorn and derision among
the colonists as also throughout the American Territories in the
Pacific.

I have felt disappointed at the delay that has taken place in
instituting even the preliminary enquiries now about to be made, the
treatment that I received at Vancouver having been for me fraught
with serious loss and inconvenience.

It is important for me to remark that no allusion to Mr Cary the
Attorney General of Vancouvers Island as made by Mr C. Fortescue,
the charge against Mr Cary is, that he committed a fraud in his
professional capacity—and from which I know that he could not
exculpate himself before a qualified and impartial Judge.