Letter "The Gift of Conscience"

George Shepard’s letter, headed “A Gift of Conscience,” turns a dispute over the financing of the Hokitika Gaol-House into a public contest over propriety, legality, and private secrets. Dated 18 February 1866 and addressed to the editor of the West Coast Times, it presents Nilssen’s £400 contribution as a charitable donation while warning Alistair Lauderback that continued scrutiny may bring his former intimate relationship with Lydia Wells into the open. The letter’s polished public reasoning is shadowed by Shepard’s destruction of the private contract that exposes the arrangement as an investment.

The document and its concealed contradiction

Before writing, Shepard retrieves the only copy of his contract with Harald Nilssen from a file in his bookcase. Made three weeks earlier, the agreement requires Nilssen not to tell anyone else about his £400 investment. Shepard strikes a match against the cabinet and burns the sheet, holding it by one corner until the fire obscures the signatures and the paper becomes ash. He then kicks the ashes aside. The sequence places the letter’s argument beside the evidence Shepard has chosen to destroy: the public account will describe a donation, but the private agreement calls the money an investment.

Having removed that written record, Shepard sits at his desk, takes a fresh sheet from beneath his ledger, and composes the letter in a slow, measured hand. Its title, “A Gift of Conscience,” gives the defense a moral cast before the argument begins. The writing is not an impulsive reply: Shepard carefully prepares a formal statement after deliberately eliminating the document that could complicate it. The contrast between the burning contract and the orderly letter makes the act of composition part of the maneuver.

A defense framed as public service

Shepard presents himself as answering Lauderback’s damaging accusations, which he says reflect not only on him but also on the Westland Public Works Committee, the Municipal Council, the Office of the Commissioner, and other civic bodies. He frames his intervention as a correction of Lauderback’s errors of propriety, decency, and fact. This broad appeal makes the prison project a matter of collective civic reputation, rather than merely a private arrangement between Shepard and Nilssen.

The letter states that construction of the future Hokitika Gaol-House was aided by approximately £400 donated by Nilssen, a commission merchant of Nilssen & Co. Shepard describes the sum as a commission Nilssen received for honest employment and acknowledges that it came from the fortune discovered on Crosbie Wells’s estate. He then draws a legal distinction between a donation and an investment: the former, he argues, creates no debtor-creditor relationship and does not have to be repaid. From that characterization he concludes that the arrangement broke no laws or regulations. Because Shepard has just burned a contract describing the sum as an investment, the letter’s confident legal distinction carries an evident tension between its public wording and the evidence privately held.

Shepard also casts public works as a lasting sign of civilisational progress and declares himself satisfied that the gaol-house meets that standard. The prison construction thus serves two purposes in his letter: it is the project whose finances Lauderback has challenged, and the public good through which Shepard gives the disputed money a virtuous interpretation. The language of civic improvement turns a contested financial arrangement into a defense of the town’s institutions as well as of Shepard himself.

The counterthreat against Lauderback

The letter’s defense changes register when Shepard challenges Lauderback to disclose what he has concealed from the voting public: that he was formerly intimate with Mrs. Lydia Wells, widow to Crosbie. Shepard does not merely answer the allegations or invite further examination of the accounts. He makes Lauderback’s private relationship the price of continued public pressure. The counterattack links political reputation to intimate history, using disclosure as leverage in the same document that argues over what counts as a lawful donation.

That threat complicates the title’s presentation of the letter as a gift of conscience. Its language invokes charity, honest employment, public works, and civic responsibility, but it also offers Lauderback a reason to stop pressing the matter. The letter therefore performs both a defense and a warning: it supplies Shepard’s official explanation of the £400 and signals that the opposing politician has a vulnerable secret of his own. The evidence establishes the threat and the proposed disclosure, not whether Lauderback subsequently makes a full disclosure or how the public receives the letter.

Exact copies and controlled delivery

After finishing the letter, Shepard blots the page, takes a clean sheet, and transcribes the text in full. He makes the replica so exact that the two documents would require prolonged comparison before even the smallest difference became apparent. He folds and seals both letters, addresses them in his laborious hand, and calls for Mrs. George to summon the penny postman for a second time that day.

Shepard directs the postman to deliver the copy to Benjamin Löwenthal at the West Coast Times first. The other goes to Nilssen at the Auction Yards on Gibson Quay. When the postman asks whether there is a message, Shepard gives him one only for Nilssen: Nilssen is expected at work the following morning, with no complaints, no hard feelings, and no questions asked. That instruction makes the dispatch more than a public rebuttal. Shepard is simultaneously sending a newspaper statement designed for publication and a private message that signals the terms on which Nilssen is to return to work.

The letter’s significance lies in the gap between its carefully managed public account and the acts surrounding its preparation. Shepard destroys the contract, asserts that the money was a donation, threatens exposure of Lauderback, duplicates the letter precisely, and controls the order of its delivery. What appears on the page as a composed civic defense is therefore inseparable from concealment, pressure, and the practical management of the people whose cooperation the prison project requires.