I perceive that the writer of a letter to the ‘Times’ advocates the claims of the ex-Governors, on the plausible plea that it is exactly the very men who best represent the dignity of the station--best reflect the splendour of the Sovereign--who come back poor and penniless from the high office: while the penurious Governor, who has given dissatisfaction everywhere, made the colony half rebellious by his narrow economies, and degraded his station by contemptible savings, comes back wealthy and affluent--self-pensioned, in fact, and independent. To meet this end, the writer suggests that the Crown, as advised thereon, should have a discretionary power of rewarding the well-doer and refusing the claim of the unmeriting, which would distinctly separate the case of the worthy servant of the Sovereign from that of him who only employed his office to enrich himself. There is a certain shallow--it is a very shallow--plausibility about this that attracts at first sight; and there would unquestionably be some force in it, if dinner-giving and hospitalities generally were the first requisites of a colonial ruler; but I cannot admit this. I cannot believe that the man who administers India or Canada, or even Jamaica or Barbadoes, is only an expatriated Lord Mayor. I will not willingly consent to accept it as qualification for a high trust that a man has a good cook and an admirable cellar, and an ostentatious tendency to display the merits of both. Mind, I am no ascetic who say this: I like good dinners; I like occasionally--only occasionally though--very good dinners. I feel with a clever countryman who said he liked being asked out to dine, “it was flattering, and it was nourishing;” but with all this I should never think of “elevating my host” to the dignity of high statesmanship on the mere plea of his hospitality. We have had some able men in our dependencies who were not in the least given to social enjoyments, who neither understood them for themselves nor thought of them for others--Sir Charles Napier, for instance. And who, let me ask, would have lost the services of such a man to the State, because he had not the tastes of a Sir William Curtis, nor could add a “Cubitt” to his stature? All discretionary powers are, besides, abuses. They are the snares and pitfalls of official jobbery; and there would be no end of bickering and complaining on the merits of this and the shortcomings of that man. Not to say that such a system as this writer recommends would place a Government in the false position of rewarding extravagance and offering a premium for profusion, and holding up for an example to our colonial fellow-subjects the very habits and tastes which are the bane and destruction of young communities.