“A Gift of Conscience”

“A Gift of Conscience” is the title George Shepard gives to a public letter defending the funds used to help build the Hokitika gaol-house. The phrase turns a disputed payment into an argument about charity and civic virtue: Shepard insists that Harald Nilssen gave the money freely, while using the letter to place political pressure on Alistair Lauderback. Its polished appeal to public good is shadowed by the private leverage with which it ends.

The letter and its financial background

Shepard dates the letter 18 February 1866 and addresses it to the editor of the West Coast Times. He writes in response to aspersions cast by Lauderback, presenting the controversy as an attack not only on himself but also on the public bodies with which he is associated, including the Westland Public Works Committee, the Municipal Council, the Office of the Commissioner, and the Hokitika Board.

The money at issue came from the fortune discovered at Crosbie Wells’s estate. That fortune had been concealed in Wells’s cottage, while another portion of the gold had passed through Anna Wetherell’s dresses: Ah Quee removed gold from four gowns, retorted the dust into squares, and stamped them with the Aurora name. Nilssen, commissioned to clear Wells’s cottage after his death, discovered the hidden wealth and received a ten-percent commission. Shepard’s letter identifies approximately £400 of Nilssen’s commission as the sum given to the Council for public use.

A donation, not an investment

Shepard’s central defense rests on the legal and rhetorical distinction between a donation and an investment. He describes Nilssen’s payment as compensation for honest employment and says that Nilssen instructed that it be used for public good. Because a donation creates no debtor-creditor relationship, Shepard argues, the Council is under no obligation to repay it. The terminology lets him answer the suspicion of improper finance without denying that the money originated in Wells’s estate.

The title therefore carries a carefully managed implication. Conscience appears first as Nilssen’s generosity, then as the moral authority Shepard claims for the gaol-house project. The letter’s logic asks readers to see the money not as a questionable investment in public works but as a gift that has been converted into civic benefit. Its case depends on the asserted character of the transfer as much as on its account of where the money came from.

Public works and private leverage

Shepard elevates the prison from a contested construction project into evidence of civilizational progress, arguing that public works provide a lasting testament to civilization. The gaol-house, in this account, is not merely an expense to be audited; it is a public good whose purpose lends moral weight to Nilssen’s contribution. Shepard presents the argument as a correction of Lauderback’s errors of propriety, decency, and fact.

The letter’s conclusion sharply changes register. After inviting Lauderback to disclose what Shepard calls a formerly intimate relationship with Lydia Wells, Shepard anticipates the politician’s full public disclosure. The challenge is not a neutral request for transparency: it turns Lauderback’s criticism back on him by placing a concealed private relationship beside the contested public financing. Shepard’s defense of the donation thus ends as a threat of exposure.

The title’s irony and function

The title’s language of conscience gives the letter a virtuous public face, but its sequence complicates that presentation. Before writing, Shepard burns the only copy of his agreement with Nilssen, made three weeks earlier, under which Nilssen had promised not to tell anyone about his £400 investment. Shepard then writes a defense claiming that the payment was a donation rather than an investment. The distinction may serve a legal argument, but the destroyed agreement makes the letter’s clean account visibly entangled with secrecy.

The expression crystallizes that tension between public justification and private maneuver. Shepard invokes charity, honest employment, and civic progress, yet the letter also functions as a weapon in his conflict with Lauderback. Its title names the virtue the argument claims for the transaction while leaving readers to weigh that claim against the concealed agreement and the threat used to silence its critic.