Confidential

My formal Despatch No 40 of this date will acquaint Your
Lordship with what I have ascertained to be the state of feeling
and affairs with respect to the Judicial system of the Colony
and the manner in which the Supreme Courts Ordinance 1869 was
passed through the Council. There is no doubt that it was
carried only by the exercise of the arbitrary power of the
Government, Official members voting contrary to their own
opinions, and in ignorance of the Despatch No 40, and passed,
even so, mainly in the confident expectation which the Council
had been led to entertain that Her Majesty's Government would
intervene to remove the difficulty in which the Community is
placed, by providing elsewhere for one or other of the two Chief
Justices whose conflicting claims have prevented any settlement
regarded by the Community as satisfactory.

2. If Your Lordship should be willing, and should have it in
your power to do so, there can be no doubt that to remove either
Mr Needham or Mr Begbie to some other appointment would be the
readiest mode of disposing of a very disagreeable difficulty
which the Community are determined not to consider settled by
the Act of 1869. There is much irritation upon the subject,
kept alive by the ridicule of our American neighbours. I have
been informed upon credible authority that on the occasion of the
recent visit to this Colony made by Mr Seward, the late
Secretary of State of the United States, on his way from Alaska,
the double judicial system and the existence of two Chief
Justices in the same Colony, with a handful of population, was
made by him the subject of pointed jest not intended to operate
to the praise of British Government or Institutions. Hemmed in
on all sides as we are by American territory and intimate as are
our intercourse and relations with the neighbouring settlements
feelings of loyalty to the parent State are not fostered by what
the Colonists are induced to regard as the exercise of arbitrary
power on the part of the Imperial Government regardless of their wishes.

3. In default of the removal of one of the present Judges the
desideratum seems to be that they should be constituted Judges
of the same Court by merger of the existing separate
jurisdictions. This appears to have been Mr Seymour's first
intention, which he was deterred from carrying into effect by
the jealousy and dissension which most improperly prevailed
between the two Judges on questions originally arising out of
the Union of the Colonies, and the erroneous view of the effect
of the British Columbia Act 1866 which was especially maintained
by Mr Justice Begbie.

4. I regret to be obliged to say that the personal variance
still continues; and the Community know that it entirely
neutralizes the intended effect of the ninth section of the Act
of 1869; for these Gentlemen who are not on good terms are not
likely voluntarily to seek the assistance of each other in the
administration of Justice. But I cannot bring myself to the
belief that the private quarrels of any Officials should be
allowed to frustrate arrangements for the public convenience.

5. The only resource appears to be to make it matter of public
duty that they should act together. I should hope that in this
case English Gentlemen will scarcely allow private pique or
personal difference to prevent the honest discharge of their
duties. And notwithstanding the objections which may be urged
to such an arrangement as is proposed I do not think they are
of equal weight with the advantages which may be derived from it.
Short of a removal of one of the present Judges it seems the
nearest approach to obtaining what the Community desires to
have—a single jurisdiction for the whole Colony—without which
it cannot be denied that much inconvenience and expense is suffered.

6. It has appeared to me to be my duty to lay the matter before
Your Lordship in the aspect which presents itself to me as an
impartial observer who had no concern with the misconceptions
and complications arising out of the Union of the Colonies. But
I should scarcely have thought myself at liberty to reopen a
subject apparently settled by the Ordinance of last Session were
it not that I have found that that Ordinance was passed in
ignorance of the Duke of Buckingham's Despatch No 40 of 1868,
while his Grace in the concluding paragraph distinctly stated
that it was by no means his desire "to preclude the Government
and the Legislature from adopting any other mode of dealing with
the existing anomalies which without injustice to existing
Officers seems to them to promise more satisfactory practical
results."