A Disagreeable Incident.

Proclamations might declare the war at an end, but the troops were still kept on a war footing. General Chute marched down the west coast storming and destroying the pahs. Indeed, some of its ugliest incidents were still to excite horror on one side and simulated indignation on the other. An English officer on duty with the troops in New Zealand—Colonel Weare—wrote letters to his brother in England, a clergyman, denouncing the war as being conducted in a "degrading and brutalising manner," asserting the greed of the colonists for land as its sole end, and attributing the barbarities that were committed to the wish of the colonial Government to have no prisoners. He gave a specific instance. He told how a Maori prisoner of war had been butchered without a trial by order of the General, and as a death-sentence could be carried out only after it had been approved by the Governor, the charge against the General was equivalent to a charge against the Governor. The accusations were communicated to Grey by Mr. Cardwell, now Secretary for War, in a despatch marked, "confidential." Grey ignored the superscription, flouted the Secretary, and laid the confidential despatch before his Ministers, who were as deeply compromised as the Governor himself. With the Ministry at his back, Grey passionately retorted the shameful accusations, which Weare afterwards withdrew, and demanded an inquiry. Cardwell was indignant at the breach of confidence and induced his colleagues likewise to regard the breaking of the seal as an offence against official, if not personal, honour. Never was Grey forgiven. His successor, Sir George Bowen, was twice guilty of a similar breach of page 158confidence, but he, a lighter nature, was let off with a reprimand. His offence was venial; Grey's sin was mortal and unto death—official death. Vainly did he solicit an inquiry into charges backed with so little weight of authority. It was refused by Lord Carnarvon in 1867 and by his successor, the Duke of Buckingham, in 1868. He was condemned without trial, and the condemnation was fatal—fatal to the official and fatal to the man.