14 JULY 1838, Page 8

Several provincial journals, received this week as well as the

last, contain accounts of the debate on the New Zealand Bill. The sub ject excites a keen interest in many parts of the country ; and the means by which the measure was defeated appear to be much better understood than we could have supposed. An able letter in the Staffordshire Examiner exposes the selfish motives of the jobbing oppo- nents of the biil, and does not spare the Missionaries. In allusion to the means by which some of these worthies have acquired immense property in New Zealand, the letter-writer, who appears to speak from personal knowledge, says— "I assert that the New Zealand Mission has, by devoting itself to its own temporal benefit to the neglect of the spiritual welfare of its protegtls and by self-interested ministering to vicious propensities, plunged this heathen people infinitely deeper in anti.morality and vice than they were originally found ! Laud to a large extent is proved to have been purcuased by members of the Church Missionary Society on their own account; one of them sold the pro- duce of his estates to the Mission of which he was Chairman ; another bought a tract of land thirty miles in length; many others possessed thousands of acres each. With what was all this purchased from the natives? Rum and gunpowder! commodities which, by the proper rules of its trade with Sydney, are religiously forbidden to be exported to New Zealand. The sacred office of the Blissionaries, exempting them from suspicion, has been taken advantage of to smuggle and distribute these body and soul destroying instruments. Is not all this sufficient argument for the establishment of ihstitutions having control over Missionaries themselves—for teaching the natives, by the example of a civi. lized and well-ordered community resident among them, to attach value to the more harmless and useful articles of civilized society—to bold rum in due abhorrence, and estimate gunpowder for its proper purposes alone? If this be not enough, I can deduce still more flagrant instances."

[ An atrocious case, implicating a Missionary of great celebrity, is detailed.]