Colonial Despatches

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 chargeagainst 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.