Edward Gibbon Wakefield : the colonization of South Australia and New Zealand

Chapter X

Chapter X

The Last Days of the New Zealand Company—John Robert Godley—Sir George Grey's Ad-ministration—Death of Colonel Wakefield—'The Art of Colonization'—Criticism of M. Leroy-beaulieu—Death of Charles Buller

Speaking before the New Zealand Legislative Assembly, Wakefield condensed his views as to the decline and fall of the New Zealand Company into an epigram, 'The Company was founded by men with great souls and little pockets, and fell into the hands of men with great pockets and little souls.' Such was certainly the fact, yet it does not necessarily imply any severe censure upon the managers under whose direction the Company expired. In all great movements that comprise both an ideal and a practical side, there must of necessity be both enthusiasts and men of the world, and the influence of the former will be more potent in the early stages of the movement, because the initial impetus has come from them. As they drop off, they will usually be replaced by men of a less exalted, not necessarily a less respectable type. Never, perhaps, was any association dealing with scrip and shares launched in a spirit of purer enthusiasm than the New Zealand Company. It had not, as will be recollected, been intended by its promoters to have been a joint stock company, but this character had been forced upon it by the perversity of Government.

The condescension to joint stock enterprise was ill-omened from the first, the names of the Company's first directors manifest a declension from the board of the original association. Nothing can be said against Mr Joseph Somes, but the accession of this great shipowner to Lord Durham's chair indicated that the mercantile element was prevailing over that of abstract enthusiasm for sound principles of colonization. Nor can the solid business men into whose hands the undertaking was lapsing be censured if they took a serious view of their duties to their shareholders, and lamented, though they did not seek to evade, the necessity for relinquishing their own salaries, and cutting down those of their staff by fifty per cent. A note of dissonance may perhaps be detected in Wakefield's letter to his sister in 1845, already quoted, where he speaks of 'the Company, and, what I care more for, the colony.' Superior ability, and the fact that he was the only director able to devote his whole time to the company, kept him at the head of affairs until his breakdown in August 1846, after which date no responsibility for any of its doings can be imputed to him. From that moment a complete change in the Company's policy is observable. 'My incapacity,' Wakefield told the New Zealand Committee in 1854, 'changed the whole character of the direction, which then fell into the hands of a few persons in whose minds sound principles of colonization and colonial government were as nothing compared with pounds, shillings and pence. They sold the honour of the Company and the interests of the colony for money, to come through a parliamentary obligation upon New Zealand to recompense the Company for its losses.' Here speaks the enthusiast, to whom profits are nothing in comparison with principles, but, while we admire, we must admit that the director who thinks of the interests of the shareholder has also a case. The worst of the new régime was that under it the Company became wholly inoperative, it served neither God nor Mammon. The arrangement so much decried by Wakefield was concluded in May 1847, and though Wakefield always asserted that it was forced upon Charles Buller, must have in some measure commended itself to his judgment, seeing that he prepared it himself. In fact, all the correspondence on both sides, the Colonial Office's as well as the company's, was written by the ambidextrous Buller. The scheme provided for an advance of £236,000 to the Company, subject to the condition that if the loan were not repaid by 1850 the Company should resign its charter and all its lands in New Zealand, and receive £268,000 as compensation for its expenses, to be paid out of the proceeds of land sales in the colony. Wakefield, in a letter to the colonists of Wellington, dated in April 1849, truly prophesied that the Company would not survive 1850, and added that its disappearance would be the best thing for New Zealand interests, removing a sham representation of them to make room, as might be hoped, for a real one. He had resigned his directorship in the preceding January, on the ostensible ground that the Company would be prejudiced by his attacks on Lord Grey in The Art of Colonization, but consented that his portrait should be painted for the board room. It was a fine picture by Collins, nearly identical in attitude with the daguerreotype prefixed to this volume, and including his favourite Talbot hounds and pet King Charles. It came into his possession at the dissolution of the company, and was ultimately presented by his son to the Provincial Hall at Christchurch.

While the New Zealand Company began to totter downwards like a teetotum whose initial impulse is exhausted, Wakefield was entirely withdrawn from cognisance of its affairs. Two eminent physicians gave him up, but after a while the vigorous constitution rallied, and although unable to look at a book or paper, he regained physical strength sufficiently to seek relief by easy journeys and short removes from place to place, always carrying in his pocket a card inscribed, 'Do not bleed me.' In the autumn of 1847 he repaired to Malvern, and submitted with good results to a course of hydropathic treatment under Dr Wilson, the rival of the still more celebrated Dr Gully. Thomas Attwood, the celebrated founder of the Birmingham Political Union, whose daughter Angela had married Wakefield's brother Daniel, and whose other daughter Rosabel had been, as we have seen, the friend and correspondent of Nina Wakefield, was also staying at Malvern, 'and there it was,' says his grandson and biographer, Mr Charles Marcus Wakefield, 'that I had the privilege of seeing these extraordinary men together. Though both ranked as Radicals, or at least as extreme Liberals, they differed greatly in other respects. Attwood was utterly incapable of understanding the magnificent and far-sighted views of Wakefield on colonial subjects.' Attwood, indeed, whose foundation of the Birmingham Political Union ensures him a distinguished place in the political history of the country, had impaired his influence as a public man by too exclusive a devotion to his currency theories, and lack of interest in subjects unconnected with paper, coin, or bullion.

A more congenial spirit shared Wakefield's society at Malvern, and here it was that the foundations of the Canterbury settlement was laid. John Robert Godley, an Irish gentleman of good estate (born 1816), had been early attracted by Wakefield's writings on colonization, and had proved his own capacity as an independent thinker in a remarkable book of American travel, published in 1844, but written in the form of letters in 1842, when Wakefield was in Canada, and the two very probably met; and still more by a bold scheme for meeting the emergency of the Irish famine by emigration on a large scale. He proposed to locate a million Irishmen in Canada, charging the expense upon Irish landed property, and providing for the interest by the extension of the income tax to Ireland. An excellent project, could Godley have guaranteed that the Irish would be contented and loyal when settled down next door to the United States, but otherwise perilous to the Empire and unfair to Canada. Doubts on this point may have had their weight in determining Ministers to reject it. Published, however, by Wakefield's interposition, in the Spectator it marked Godley out as an original thinker and practical statesman, and one fitted in every way to co-operate with Wakefield in the plan for a Church of England colony which had for some time been floating in the latter's mind, and which was fully considered by the two during their stay at Malvern. This remarkable undertaking will form the principal subject of the next chapter.

While the old fruit was falling from, and the new blossom forming upon, the New Zealand orange tree at home, the colony itself was entering upon an entirely new phase of its history, strongly demarcated from that which had preceded and that which was to ensue. It may be briefly described as the autocratic phase, during which the affairs of the settlement were mainly regulated by one man of remarkable strength of will and faculty for rule. In Sir George Grey New Zealand had for the first time a capable Governor, the very type of the man whom the Romans would have entrusted with the dictatorship at a period of national peril, but made rather to rule a Crown colony than a constitutional state. It may have been an instinctive perception of his forte and foible that induced him to retain the colony in a state of pupilage as long as he could, and to take the exceedingly bold step of suspending a constitution which had been enacted by Parliament in 1846, but which he deemed unsuitable. His recalcitrancy was justified by the event. Earl Grey, usually so imperious, meekly adopted the view of a Governor whose capacity had been so brilliantly evinced by the pacification of the Maoris, and whom he justly credited with a better understanding of New Zealand affairs than was possible to himself; and thus a colony which the British Parliament had endowed with representative institutions had to submit to seven years of personal rule. In theory this was indefensible, and the undue prolongation of Sir George Grey's powers in the long run undermined his popularity, but no one appears to have been enthusiastic for the new constitution, and there seems at present a pretty general agreement that at the time personal rule was the best thing for the colony. The argument which chiefly weighed with Earl Grey seems to have been the discontent which the new constitution was expected to excite among the natives, whom, by insisting on a knowledge of English, it practically excluded from the franchise. It may be doubted whether there was really much weight in this consideration, but it was admirably calculated to impress Ministers at home, who dreaded a Maori war above all things; and settlers in the Northern Island, where natives were numerous, saw more in it than did settlers in the Middle Island, where natives were few. According to Sir George Grey's own statement through a third party to Wakefield, with whom his relations were at this time amicable, he would have been quite willing to have proclaimed the constitution in the Middle Island, 'but he dared not himself make such a distinction between North and South, and the Office would not take his hints to them that they should do it.' 'All the Southern settlements,' Wakefield adds, 'are discontented, and Wellington in very hot water.' 1

This feeling gathered strength as time went on, and, together with an unfortunate

1 The Founders of Canterbury, pp. 70, 71.

land policy, accounts for the comparative unpopularity, towards the conclusion of his term of office, of a Governor who had rendered the colony such signal services. The Maoris, on the other hand, gave him the strongest demonstrations of their gratitude and esteem. His position towards them had been peculiar. He was the first Governor who had been pro-Maori without being pro-missionary. Although a religious man—the intimate friend of Bishop Selwyn and the author of the first draft of the constitution of the Church of New Zealand—Grey was by no means under missionary influence. His proceedings towards missionaries who had speculated in land went far to justify the original contention of the New Zealand Company. One great mistake he made in conjunction with Bishop Selwyn—his interference with the devoted missionary, Henry Williams. The circumstance that the biographers of the Governor and Bishop alike avoid all mention of this affair, while the biographer of the missionary and the historian of the New Zealand Church relate it at great length, is abundantly significant. This, however, was but an incident. Sir George Grey did everything for the natives that could be done in his time. The diffusion of education among their children, actively promoted by the present New Zealand Government, is the only measure which can save them from extinction by reforming their insanitary habits; but this was impossible

until more of their territory, useless to themselves, should have passed into the hands of white men, and they should thus have become permeated with European influences. Sir George Grey did much by the acquisition of enormous tracts of waste land in the thinly-peopled Middle Island, under the same system of reserves for native benefit as that expounded by Wakefield to the Committee of 1840.

Sir George Grey's chief mistakes were in connection with that thorniest of colonial subjects—the land question. By endeavouring to frustrate the decision of Parliament that the New Zealand Company should receive compensation for their land out of the proceeds of land sales, he lost the confidence of the Colonial Office, his relations with which were never again quite satisfactory. A more serious error was the reduction on his own authority, and within a short time of his retirement, of the price of Crown lands from one pound to ten shillings and five shillings an acre. It is doubtful whether he had any power to make such an enactment, but all felt that the matter ought to have been left to the Colonial Parliament then about to be convoked under the new constitution. Wakefield, upon his arrival in New Zealand, tested the legality of the Governor's proceedings, and gained his case in the colonial court, but the decision was overruled at home. The cheapening of land, besides destroying the fund for emigration, excited violent discontent among those who had already purchased land at higher prices; but the most serious objection was that it played directly into the hands of speculators, and frustrated the object which Sir George Grey himself most desired to promote. The result fully vindicated Wakefield's theory of the sufficient price, if only as a barrier against 'land-sharks.' It is thus stated by Mr Gisborne, a writer in general most favourable to Sir George Grey:—

'The intention, no doubt, was to place the acquisition of freeholds within the reach of every man; but the result was directly the reverse. Rent-holders and speculators were only too successful in monopolising at nominal cost enormous territories, and those of them who were not rich enough, or who could not borrow enough to do this at once, 'picked out the eyes of the land,' to use an expressive phase, in order to render the remainder of the land of little or no value to any but themselves. The effect has been to lock up large estates in the hands of comparatively few landholders.'

It has been alleged in extenuation that Sir George Grey intended to have checked the accumulation of landed property in few hands by the imposition of a land tax, but there must be some mistake about this. To have invited purchase, and then saddled the purchaser with a tax of which he had had no warning, would have been an act of bad faith of which so just and honourable a governor as Sir George Grey would have been incapable.

Up to the time of his resistance to the satisfaction of their claims, Sir George Grey had not deserved ill of the New Zealand Company. He had been on specially friendly terms with their principal agent. Writing to his sister on March 29, 1847, Colonel Wakefield says:—

'We made a trip to New Plymouth and Nelson, and passed three weeks very agreeably in one of the most powerful and well fitted up of H.M.'s steam vessels. No two people can be on better terms personally than Captain Grey and I am.' He adds, indeed, 'Our politics are nevertheless as agitated as ever, and the Governor and I do not always agree— besides, now the Company has to economise, I get the ill-will and opposition of a considerable number of the settlers, who prefer a Government that spends a deal of money. But I came prepared for all this, and have many sincere friends.'

Grey's goodwill to the Company at this time was further evinced by the active assistance which he gave in adjusting its controversies with the settlers who had made purchases on the faith of its guarantee. The ultimate arrangement was embodied in a memorandum drawn up on September 15, 1848, on which very day William Wakefield was struck by apoplexy. He expired on September 19. 'During the last three years,' wrote Sir George Grey, 'I have been in con- stant communication with Colonel Wakefield upon a great variety of subjects connected with the interests of New Zealand, and have found not only that he possessed abilities of a very high order, but that his whole attention and thoughts were directed to the single subject of the advancement of the interests of this country.' No man had been more fiercely assailed, but he had lived down opposition, and New Zealand has never seen such another funeral procession as that which accompanied his body to the grave.

When William Wakefield closed his eyes in New Zealand, his brother was writing The Art of Colonization at the Château Mabille, Boulogne. He was at the time not quite off with the old love nor yet quite on with the new. The New Zealand Company had, in his view, been virtually destroyed by the agreement of 1847, yet he clung to the hope that it might in some measure be redeemed by an alliance with the new association which had grown out of his conferences with Godley at Malvern. This project, on the other hand, was not yet fairly launched, nor could be for some time, because, as Wakefield wrote in May, 'In consequence of Lord Grey's utter neglect of his own New Zealand polity, there is at present no land on which to plant the settlement.' The intended work on colonization, much talked of and never seen, had obtained in his own circle the appellation of 'Mrs Harris,' which explains several playful allusions in his letters. He arrived at the Château Mabille in June, and, in July, summoned Mr Albert Allom (afterwards Colonial Secretary at Tobago, son of the faithful friend who had nursed him in his illness, and brother of his former secretary in Canada) to assist him in the preparation of the book as amanuensis. Mr Allom, however, did not arrive until September, when the composition of the work was begun in earnest.

The book was published by John William Parker, publisher of Stuart Mill, Maurice, Kingsley, and so many more of the best thinkers of the time, on February 5, 1849. The full title was A View of the Art of Colonization, with Present Reference to the British Empire; in Letters between a Statesman and a Colonist. Edited by (one of the writers) Edward Gibbon Wakefield. It was dedicated in terms of warm affection to Mr John Hutt, one of Wakefield's earliest friends and supporters.

From various passages in his letters, it would appear that Wakefield anticipated tangible political results from The Art of Colonization. These certainly were not forthcoming, and for a reason which ought not to have escaped his sagacity. The book was ill fitted to attract novices, and those who had already attended to the subject could only say, 'We knew this before.' Like most important discoveries, the Wakefield gospel is a very simple one, admitting indeed of continual repetition, but not of republication. Once prove that the backward state of the colonies arose from the divorce of land and labour occasioned by the practice of giving away land for a nominal price, and that the land ought to be made the machine of its own cul- tivation, by selling it at a good price and employing the proceeds of the sale by settling it with labourers, and there remained no principle to enunciate which could impress the thinker, or influence the enthusiasm of the nation at large. Everything vital to the comprehension of Wakefield's theory had long been before the world, his views had undergone no such modification as to necessitate restatement, and the further illustration and exposition he now gave, though highly acceptable, and though some topics, such as the disadvantage of land sales by auction in comparison with sales at a uniform price, were treated at more length than heretofore, was in no way sensational. This was an epithet more applicable to the early part of the book, with its lively attacks upon Earl Grey, whom Wakefield regarded as the marplot from within, as Stanley had been the enemy from without. But although such passages might help the book to find readers, they obviously could contribute nothing to its scientific value, and, animated as they are, it might have been wished that they had been omitted, but for the glimpses they afford of Wakefield's own practical activity as an actual planner and founder of colonies.

There is no sign of failing literary power in The Art of Colonization, unless it be a certain diffuseness, due in part to the machinery of the book. This is an interchange of letters between a statesman and a colonist, founded, Wakefield asserts in the preface, upon actual correspondence. There seems internal evidence that such was actually the case. The method of the composition of the book, however, as described by Mr Allom, shows that but little of the original documents can be left. The statesman is represented as seeking enlightenment through the medium of oral discussion, which Wakefield would no doubt have preferred. 'E. G. W.,' writes Mr Allom, 'was a master in the art of persuading. He seldom failed if he could get his victim into conversation.' But physically, he was no longer the man he had been.

'My health, instead of improving, has got worse lately, and will probably never mend. It is a disorder of the nerves which has long hindered, and now absolutely precludes, me from engaging in the oral discussion of subjects that deeply interest me, more especially if they are subjects involving argument and continuous thought. You must have observed how I suffered towards the end of our last conversation. At length I cannot disobey the doctor's injunction to stay at home and be quiet, without effects that remind me of a bird trying to fly with a broken wing, and knocking itself to pieces in the vain exertion. As respects earnest conversation, I am a helpless cripple. But there occurs to me an alternative. With the seeming caprice of most nervous disorders, mine, which forbids talking, makes far less difficulty about letting me write. The brain suffers greatly only when it is hurried—as with old hunters, "'tis the pace that kills"—but can work somehow when allowed to take its own time.'

Such a machinery, whether growing out of an actual state of things or deliberately adopted for literary purposes, has manifest advantages and defects. It is a distinct gain in vivacity of presentation; it breaks up the subject into manageable sections, and diversifies it with an agreeable infusion of personal feeling. At the same time it is both artificial and inartificial. The statesman, whether a real entity or not, is evidently merely put forward to allow Wakefield to advance what he wishes, and whether because a man with many interests is unable to correspond on even terms with a man with one, or whether Wakefield tires of writing dummy letters to himself, the disciple almost disappears from the latter part of the correspondence. On the other hand, the machinery suits Wakefield, who, to his great merit as a master of homely, forcible English, did not add the artistic instinct which would have enabled him to group and display his subject as a whole. Desultory he must be, and desultoriness is less observable in a series of letters than in a formal treatise.

The Art of Colonization, then, could not be epochmaking, for the epoch was made; nor could it present the results of the author's speculations and experience in a symmetrical and classical form. On the other hand there is a singular fascination about the earlier part of the book—'the personalities and the egotism,' as the writer calls it in a letter to Rintoul. As a mere question of literary taste, these would perhaps have been better away, but we must be thankful for the window thus opened into the breast of a remarkable man, and pleased with what it discloses. There is nothing spiteful about the personality, nothing mean about the egotism, they are rather like lyric utterances, the indignant cry of an artist who models colonies as others model statues or poems, and whose special grievance it is that his work is not only undervalued but disfigured. It is impossible not to confess that his idea is far more to him than any concurrent influence or emolument, and that his whole soul is in his noble and disinterested definition of the summum bonum: 'The utmost happiness which God vouchsafes to man on earth, the realisation of his own idea.'

The most original part of The Art of Colonization, putting aside all that had been original when Wakefield first propounded it, but had become common property by the discussion it had since undergone, is descriptive of the impediments to colonization by reason of the too frequently low standard of morals and manners in the colonies, and by the subjection of the colonists to irresponsible officialism. The latter evil has long since disappeared in self-governed colonies; when Wakefield wrote it was sufficiently real, and the extension of the principle of responsible government from Canada to the other colonies, mainly inhabited by white settlers, remained a leading object with him to the end of his political career. The treatment of the other topic shows how deep a hold the Canterbury project had taken upon him. 'I am bound to add,' he says, 'that my notions on this subject were not originally formed in my own mind, but, for the most part, suggested to me by Dr Hinds,' the author, it will be remembered, of the chapter in the original manual of New Zealand colonization which dwelt on the advantage which would accrue to the colony from getting a bishop. Wakefield thought so too, but he also thought that the obligations of church and colony would be mutual. 'The Free Church of Scotland,' he wrote to Godley, 'finds the Otago colony a most valuable topic in its intercourse with the public. It is a very interesting topic. So is the conversion of savages, as used by the Church Missionary Society. There is something in it which appeals pleasantly to the imagination and the best feelings. Whereas the sole topic of the Propagation Society is religious destitution in the colonies, which is a painful topic and one of which people soon weary.' One of the finest passages in The Art of Colonization is an eulogium on the special deserts of the Wesleyan body.

Nothing of Wakefield's own in The Art of Colonization equals in a literary point of view the quotation from Charles Buller's character of 'Mr Mothercountry' in the little book on Responsible Government for the Colonies previously mentioned. 'Mr Mother-country' is a leading figure throughout the latter part of the book, and the name is assuredly well chosen to imply that any opponent of the colonial reformers must be something of an old woman. Its personal application to Sir James Stephen was most unjust. It is impossible to read Sir James Stephen's letters, to go no further, without discerning in him an admirable man of high capacity. The satire, nevertheless, is deadly in so far as it strikes the abuses of the only system of government which no one defends, and at the same time the only system of which it is impossible to get rid. Monarchs may be dethroned, aristocracies exiled, democracies enslaved, but neither monarchy, aristocracy nor democracy can ever dispense with bureaucracy; the responsible government on the spot which Wakefield and Buller invoked to supplant the distant and irresponsible bureaucrat in Downing Street must have its own civil service, and there as here the clerk versed in affairs will rule the uninformed minister. The removal, however, through the concession of responsible government, of a deadweight of unpopularity from the Colonial Office, was not the least of the good effects of the system of local government advocated by Wakefield and Buller. If they had known all that has since come to light about the inner workings of the Office, they must have thought more favourably of individuals, while at the same time they must have felt more anxiety than ever to modify a system where the best intentions of rulers were liable to be frustrated by the cross-currents of politics.

Where the 'Mr Mother-country' of The Art of Colonization represents the opponents of the vital principles of Wakefield's system, he is entirely in place, but where he merely personifies the general spirit of official obstructiveness he is an excrescence upon a book whose sole aim should have been to instruct in the art and mystery of planting colonies. Misled into polemics, the author left this unwritten. As, nevertheless, the book is his last, it presents an opportunity of stating the general judgment of economists upon the Wakefield system more than sixty years after its promulgation. This may be best accomplished by citing the judgment of the modern economist who has discussed it with most thoroughness, and who is at the same time a recognised authority—M. Leroy-Beaulieu, in his treatise, De la Colonisation chez les Peuples Modernes, 1886. M. Leroy-Beaulieu's judgment appears at first sight a mixture of praise and censure, but upon attentive examination he proves more eulogistic than he supposes himself to be. He calls the theory a mixture of wheat and tares, but when the tares are pointed out it appears that they are none of Wakefield's sowing. The chief defect of the Wakefield system, in M. Leroy-Beaulieu's eyes, seems to be the pretension which he attributes to it of a rigorously scientific and almost mathematical character. No such pretension is to be found in the writings of Wakefield, who was himself so far from attributing a strictly consistent and homogeneous character to his system as to have declared that, although he attached the greatest importance to the employment of the proceeds of land sales in bringing over emigrants, still, if only the giving away of land or its disposal at a nominal value could be checked by the establishment of a sufficient price, the main point would be gained, even though these proceeds were thrown into the sea. After this criticism, which really has no application to the system as Wakefield conceived it, M. Leroy-Beaulieu gives his entire adhesion to its two main principles—the sale of land at a substantial price and the immigration fund—merely observing that the entire proceeds of the land sales cannot be safely devoted to this object, which Wakefield himself admitted, and pointing out that Government assistance must almost always be necessary. His censure of the phrase 'self-supporting colony,' employed by some of the promoters of South Australian colonisation, merely repeats Wakefield's own statement to the South Australian Committee that he regarded this phrase as quackery. M. Leroy-Beaulieu does not advert to the chief practical difficulty—that of maintaining a steady influx of new labour after the first batch of labourers had become independent. 1 In the main his view of the system seems to differ but slightly from that of its founder; it is only to be regretted that the South Australian disasters are so presented that it might appear on a superficial view as though M. Leroy-Beaulieu regarded them as in some way consequences of the method adopted in the settlement of the colony, which it is nevertheless evident that he does not.

The practical results of the system spoke sufficiently for themselves. It had the fullest and fairest trial in Canterbury and Otago. 'Out of 11,915,303 acres,' says Mr Rusden, 'sold from the foundation of the colony till 31st of October 1876 for £8,101,859, the enormous proportion of £5,395,000 had been received by Canterbury and Otago for less than 4,500,000 acres. For about the same land as that sold by Auckland, Canterbury had received thirteen times as much money.'

It would appear, then, that land was thirteen times as dear in Canterbury as in Auckland, and that nevertheless Canterbury sold as much land as Auckland, and had thirteen times as much revenue from this source to devote to immigration and public improvements. In Victoria, by 1858, three millions of acres had been sold for £4,800,000, which, under

1 Labour soon became scarce in most of the New Zealand Company's settlements. 'The only cuss of this colony,' wrote a woman who had emigrated with her husband, 'is the exhorburnt wagers one has to pay.' 'She liked,' comments Wakefield, 'the "exhorburnt wagers" while her husband received them.'

the old system of New South Wales, from which Victoria had been detached, would have been given away in extensive tracts to individuals and have remained uncultivated. Even in New South Wales after the regulations in 1831, although the price put upon land was no more than five shillings an acre, the revenue from land sales rose from £10,000 in 1832 to £130,000 in 1836. 'In this manner,' Mr Elliott, the Emigration Commissioner, told the Lords' Committee on New Zealand in 1838, 'assisted emigration began immediately, and, the moment that commenced, a voluntary emigration arose also.' This tendency of emigration defrayed from the land fund to generate a simultaneous and independent stream of spontaneous emigration, was a noteworthy and valuable feature. While the former movement, controlled by intelligent directors with the object of providing the new country with the pick and flower of the old, contributed the elements best calculated to build up a prosperous state in the future, any tendency towards pedantry or over-regulation was checked by the second current, affording more play to the forces of nature. The high level of the colonies founded on the Wakefield principle is notorious, and was enhanced by its further development in enlisting religious bodies as colonising agents. Nothing in the system deserves more commendation than its scientific character, its progress on regular principles, and its administration by persons, whether

public commissioners or private bodies, earnestly but disinterestedly concerned for its success. In this respect it surpassed even Greek colonization; not, however, by contrivance, but from the nature of the case. The Greeks, going forth to occupy a small territory, the whole of which was to be appropriated at once, were of necessity in sufficient force for the undertaking, and hence needed no reinforcements, and were from the very beginning an independent and self-subsisting power. The English, settling in regions too extensive for anything but the merest beginnings of occupation, were long in need of the tutelage of the mother country, and she, had she rightly understood her place and mission, might have nursed them into a more intimate connection than Greece ever conceived.

The Wakefield system was of course violently attacked by those who wished to acquire extensive tracts of land at nominal prices, and the assumed interest of the poor was generally made the stalking horse of such persons. In fact, so long as the price set upon the land was sufficient to deter large purchasers, no contrivance could be better adapted to favour the multiplication of small landowners. No colony that gave it a fair trial has ever definitely rejected it, and if it is now tacitly laid aside in most of them, one chief reason is that it has mainly done its work, carrying them on to the period when the cheapness and facility of communication make regular systems for directing the tide of emigration superfluous, and when the growth of an indigenous population render emigration less vitally necessary. In Canterbury, where it had the fairest trial and produced the most striking results, many of those who bought land under its provisions suffered from the unprofitableness of farming produced by the great decline in the value of the chief colonial staples after 1872. Yet when all is said, in the opinion of the present Agent-General of New Zealand, who was brought up in Canterbury, much and solid settlement remains as its result, and little would ever have been said against it had the letting of a portion of the agricultural lands gone on, pari passu, with the sale of freeholds. The parting with land for cash, had it been applied to a portion instead of the whole of the public estate, might have found the funds for carrying on colonising work without becoming an instrument to effect the wild land speculation which, following on the Vogel borrowing policy between 1872 and 1879, half ruined a generation of Canterbury settlers. As to that speculation, mischievous as it was, it is obviously not to be charged against Wakefield that he did not foresee the relation to his land system of a Public Works Loan Policy conceived many years after his death. Little of the earth's surface is now available for colonization in the proper sense of the term; should Britain, however, ever again become possessed of an unoccupied tract enjoying a temperate climate and otherwise fit to be the cradle of a nation, she will hardly find a better way of peopling it with settlers representative of all that is best in herself than that devised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

The Art of Colonization might have been a more perfect book but for the misfortune which deprived it of the revision of Charles Buller, who died unexpectedly at the end of November 1848. He had visited Wakefield in the previous month to discuss a plan of colonization 'for the special use and benefit of the Milesian-Irish race, who never colonize, but only emigrate miserably,' which Wakefield had prepared in concert with Godley. It was then intended to have formed a section of The Art of Colonization, but 'it was ultimately agreed that the plan would stand a better chance of being soon adopted by Parliament if it were not published in my book.' It was consequently reserved to be used by Buller as might be deemed most expedient, but his death frustrated the project, 'and,' says Wakefield, 'the plan is still in my desk.' What became of it has not been ascertained.

No circumstance in Wakefield's life affords a more substantial guarantee of his worth than his long and, notwithstanding his disapproval of the New Zealand Company's agreement, and his complaint that 'Earl Grey had spoiled Buller for a colonial reformer,' untroubled friendship with so choice a spirit as Charles Buller. 'A sound, penetrating intellect, full of adroit resources, and loyal by nature itself to all that was methodic, manful, true,' as Carlyle wrote in the Examiner. Wakefield composed no set eulogium on his friend, but erected a memorial to him by reprinting as an appendix to his own book Buller's great speech on 'Systematic Colonization' in 1843, an eloquent and luminous exposition of the advantage to a great industrial country of peopling the world with her children.

The New Zealand Company survived its champion by about a year and a half. In 1850, although its existence was nominally protracted some time for the sake of winding up its affairs, it virtually came to an end through its inability to repay its borrowings from Government. Its charter was surrendered, and the compensation due to it, assessed upon the proceeds of colonial land sales, was paid with much discontent by the colony—an iniquity, if such it were, necessary to prevent a greater iniquity. With a higher level of public spirit the sum would have been paid by the nation. For, though sunk into decrepitude in the absence of its leading spirit, the Company had had a heroic past. It had laid the foundations of empire broad and deep. Four flourishing settlements owed their existence to it; to two others it had given efficacious assistance. In 1851 these settlements contained 17,000 white inhabitants—but for Government interference Wakefield thought there would

have been 200,000. It had baffled potentates abroad and shaken ministries at home. It deserved the most especial praise for its careful selection of emigrants, a prepared soil from which none but good fruit could spring—'men,' said Wakefield, 'already before they left home more accustomed to deal with matters of a common concern, of a public character, and of the highest importance to themselves collectively, than are any equal number of average Englishmen who stay at home, and who generally seem fitted to be the subjects and machines, rather than the springs and managers, of government.' Yet what was done was but little in comparison with what might have been done if they who wished to enlarge the empire had not been treated as though they wished to dismember it—if the rulers of the land, leagues behind its thinkers and its poets, had not assumed the old hopeless attitude of

'Blind Authority beating with his staff
The child that would have led him,