THIRD READING. (Hansard, 26 June 1865)

§ COLONEL SYKES
said, that Clause 2 enacted that a Colonial Governor who had been in the enjoyment of a salary of £5,000 a year should receive a retiring pension of £1,000 a year if he had served for four 842 years. This provision was, however, qualified by Clause 4, and he wished to ask, first, the minimum age at which a Governor would receive the full pension; secondly, what length of time a Governor must absolutely have served; and, thirdly, whether a person would obtain his pension for cumulative services as Governor and a member of the Civil Service.

MR. WHITE
said, he would like to know what would be the cost to the public of the engagements in this Act, and the amount of the pensions which would accrue under it. According to the Colonial Office Lists it appeared we had thirty-two Governors who derived salaries varying from £800 to £10,000 per annum, and twelve lieutenant-governors and presidents administering government with salaries varying from £500 to £1,800. It appeared to him to be rather late in the day to bring in a Bill of this sort. We had gone on hitherto without the machinery which it proposed, and he was quite sure that if there had been any absolute or pressing necessity for it, a scheme would long ago have been brought forward, because these Governors belonged to a class which had always plenty of friends.

§ MR. ADDERLEY
said, he could not agree with the hon. Member for Brighton (Mr. White) that it was rather late in the day to introduce such a Bill. In his opinion it was rather early in the day to retrace our colonial policy by imposing on the taxpayers of this country the payment of a portion of the salaries which the colonies ought to pay to their Governors. He knew very well that the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Cardwell) would tell him that the Governors stood in a different category to all other civil servants, and that while performing a service to the colonies, they also performed a distinct service to the mother country, but the answer was not satisfactory. He did not wish to impede the Bill, but he should enter his protest against it. If we were asked to take this first retrograde step, he hoped Parliament would not be asked next year to take another, and to pay a portion of the salaries of other colonial officers. There was no reason why we should not do for the Colonial Secretaries, for instance, what we now intended to do for the Governors. The Colonial Secretaries frequently acted for the Governors, and had as good a claim. In fact, he did not see why, according to the principle of this Bill, we should not go 843 further and pension all the colonial officers. He hoped the right hon. Gentleman would assure the House that if before Parliament met again the new constitution of our colonies in North America were formed, in which case the Governor General would have the appointment of the other Governors, we should not have to pay the pensions of those Governors.

§ MR. CARDWELL
said, in answer to the hon. Member for Aberdeen (Colonel Sykes), that there was no confusion between the two clauses referred to by him. That the first clause simply defined what a first-class pension should be, and was not otherwise operative at all. The 4th clause was operative, and enabled the Secretary of State to give that first-class pension in the case of three classes—where a man has served eighteen years; where a man has served twenty-five years, at least ten of which must have been passed as Governor, and the rest in the Civil Service; and where a man has served fifteen years and been permanently disabled in the course of the discharge of his duty. The words were perfectly plain. The period at which a pension was to be granted was either upon attaining the minimum age of sixty years length of service being the chief qualification, or earlier in the single case of a man being permanently disabled by illness in the discharge of his duties. With regard to the question asked by his hon. Friend the Member for Brighton (Mr. White), as he could not tell who would cease to be employed and at what particular period, he could not say what the precise extent of the burden to be borne by the country would be. By the first operation of the Bill a change would be imposed of much less than the £10,000 a year referred to in the printed correspondence, and that was not a very serious burden to be laid upon the public. With respect to the remarks of his right hon. Friend (Mr. Adderley), he would content himself with saying that the service which a Governor rendered to the mother country would make so small a charge as was imposed by the Bill justifiable. The principle upon which he defended the Bill was this—nemo tenetur ad impossibilia, because, you you could not raise a common pension fund from fifty different colonies, and, therefore, if pensions were to be paid at all they must be paid out of the Imperial Treasury. He did not regard this Bill as a retrograde step. It showed that they were disposed to estimate at their value the public ser- 844 vices rendered by a most meritorious class of men.