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Chapter XI

Via prima salutis,
Quod minime reris, Graia pandetur ab urbe.

Surely it was by the spirit of prophecy that the pioneer vessel of New Zealand colonization was named the Tory. During the turmoil of the Company's battle with Lord Stanley, Wakefield must have been far from foreseeing that his ideas would be taken up and carried out by that nobleman's political supporters, and that New Zealand would wait for a constitution until the Colonial Secretary had become Prime Minister. It had seemed an axiom to him, as to all, that reform must proceed from reformers. The attitude of stolid resistance to all change assumed by the Tory party when he en-page 298tered public life would alone have constrained him to range himself with the Radicals, and he would have been found sitting and voting with Grote and Molesworth but for the disaster which destroyed his prospect of a parliamentary career. He had since 'mended his shell with pearl' to some purpose, but so had the Tories. A 'Young England' school had been growing up, influenced in no small measure by modern ideas, but whose special mission it was to take up the old mediæval principles and graft them upon the new era. Carlyle's Past and Present expresses the essence and quintessence of this mode of thought, which pervades the contemporary novels of Disraeli, and was especially represented by those young Tories whom a breach with their party on the question of free trade had constrained to set up for themselves as Peelites. To these Wakefield's theories presented a different aspect to that which had chiefly impressed the economists of the Mill and Molesworth type. Although the sufficient price and the immigration fund had been the corner stones of the system, still the Letter from Sydney had laid hardly less stress upon the necessity of systematic colonization by well-selected emigrants, observing a due proportion of the sexes; and all the arrangements for the sale of land implied the persistence of social distinctions. The young Tories naturally agreed with Wakefield in preferring an aristocracy to a page 299plutocracy, and were powerfully attracted by the vision of a well-ordered colony in which squire and clergyman should exert a preponderating influence. Wakefield himself, as we have seen, had warned them that England could not be reproduced in the Antipodes, and that those institutions alone could bear transplantation whose fitness could bear the test of experiment. The Peelites, on their part, nothing doubted the ability of princes and prelates, churches and colleges, coronets and chasubles, all things which the spirit of the age threatened with extinction at home, to acclimatise themselves beyond the seas. Strangely enough, it was precisely the Puseyite section of the Tory party, with the highest notions and most retrograde tendencies in ecclesiastical matters, that entertained the most liberal views in secular affairs. It was they who had broken with the bulk of their party on the Corn Law question, and now presented the phenomenon of a phalanx of Liberal High Churchmen, the essential point of whose contention was that the Church was a vital institution in harmony with the deepest needs of the age; nor could Wakefield be more ready to take up the Church for the sake of colonization than they were to take up colonization for the sake of the Church.

The emigration of religious bodies had been a leading feature of seventeenth century colonization. Wakefield awards the credit of reviving it to Dr page 300Hinds; but the germ of it may be detected in a note to his own England and America, vol. II., p. 255, and his letter to his sister respecting the Bishopric of New Zealand, already cited, proves how warmly he entered into it. 'Bishop Selwyn's see,' he says, writing to Godley on 21st December 1847, 'was created by us in spite of many obstacles put in our way by the Church and the Government. Indeed, we forced the measure on the Melbourne Government; and in that measure originated all the new Colonial Bishoprics. If our views had been taken up by the Church, great results would have been obtained, both for the Church and colonization.' His own sympathies were by no means ecclesiastical; his creed appears to have been a masculine Theism; but to get his plans adopted in influential quarters, and to secure desirable emigrants for his beloved colony, he would have transplanted the Grand Lama of Tibet with all his praying wheels, and did actually nibble at the Chief Rabbi. He entertained, moreover, a statesmanlike conviction of the importance of fostering the religious element in a colony, both on its own account and for all that it implies. He says in The Art of Colonization, 'A colony that is not attractive to women is an unattractive colony; in order to make it attractive to both sexes, you do enough if you take care to make it attractive to women. Women are more religious than men—or, at all events, there are more religious women than religious men. You might persuade religious men to page 301emigrate, and yet in time have a colony of which the morals and manners would be detestable; but if you persuade religious women to emigrate, the whole colony will be comparatively virtuous and polite.' Further on, following Godley in his Letters from America, he points out that the early American colonists did not so much resort thither to escape religious persecution as to 'find a place where their own religion would be the religion of the place,' and that this system answered. 'All that colonization was more or less a religious colonization; the parts of it that prospered the most were the most religious parts; the prosperity was chiefly occasioned by the respectability of the emigration; and the respectability of the emigration to each colony had a close relation to the force of the religious attraction. I am in hopes,' he adds, 'of being able, when the proper time shall come for that part of my task, to persuade you that it would now be easy for England to plant sectarian colonies; that is, colonies with the strong attraction for superior emigrants of a peculiar religious creed in each colony.' This was written in 1848, but the idea had been worked out in theory, and seemed on the point of execution in 1843, as shown by a letter to his sister, undated, but which the announcement of the resumption of land sales in virtue of an agreement between the New Zealand Company and Lord Stanley proves to have been written in the May of that year.

'The project of a new colony in New Zealand is page 302so nearly ripe that I want to talk with you and Charles about it. It will be a Church of England colony; that is, the foundation fund of the colony will contain ample endowments for religious and educational purposes in connection with our Church exclusively. A body of colonists will be formed here in conjunction with eminent clergymen and laymen of the Church of England not intending to emigrate, and this body will mature the plan and offer it to the New Zealand Company, by whom it will be accepted. The project, which is mine own, is warmly approved, and will have the zealous support of the Church and eminent laymen. Dr Hinds, who is here, will work at it….

'The settlement of our differences with Lord Stanley is signed and sealed, and we begin again today to sell land.'

It must be supposed that the renewal of disputes between the Company and the Colonial Office prevented the further prosecution of the scheme for a Church of England colony at that time. Another ecclesiastical colony, however, came almost simultaneously to birth. In July 1842, Mr George Rennie, an enterprising Scot, who had for a while represented Ipswich in Parliament, had addressed to the New Zealand directors a scheme for colonization in the Middle Island. Wakefield was then in Canada, and the directors referred Mr Rennie to the Government. The arrangement concluded with Lord Stanley in page 303May 1843, referred to in Wakefield's letter to his sister, quoted above, gave them, however, more freedom of action; and on 23d May, Mr Rennie and a new associate, Captain Cargill, returned to the charge with a plan embodying the important modifications that the new colony should be a Scotch Presbyterian one, comprising provision for religious and educational purposes, and that the whole of the emigration fund derived from land should be devoted to bringing over Scotch labourers only. Five days previously the scheme had received a great impetus from a great event—the disruption of the Church of Scotland on 18th May 1843. Free Kirk sentiment was immediately appealed to, to such effect, indeed, that the Kirk swallowed up the entire undertaking, except the original projector, rejected as an indigestible morsel. The New Zealand Company sided with Mr Rennie's opponents, the ultra Free Kirk men; lands were acquired from the natives under the auspices of Colonel Wakefield in June 1844, and, after many vexatious delays, the John Wickliffe and the Philip Laing entered Otago Harbour and founded Dunedin, capital of Otago, the most southerly of the New Zealand provinces. They brought 343 emigrants. The progress of the settlement was considered slow; nevertheless, by 1858, there were 7000 inhabitants, and 19,000 acres were enclosed. In 1861 came the gold discovery and the rush which emptied the little settlement to fill it again. By the end of the year page 30420,000 Australians had supervened, swamping the original Scotch element, but affording the substantial consolation of a rise in the revenue from £97,000 to £470,000. So great was the increase of population that, by 1871, the number of pupils in the public schools was equal to the entire population in 1858.

Colonies founded in pursuance of a deliberate plan have a double history—that of the emigrants on the spot, and that of the contrivers at home. The early history of Otago is mainly that of the hardy settlers, but the sister colony of Canterbury has a still more interesting tale to tell of the struggles undergone on its behalf at the other side of the world by men whom it merely interested as representing a principle. Here, as perhaps nowhere else, we may see a colony in the making, exhibited in the correspondence of one of the two principal projectors. Mr Jerningham Wakefield's grievous neglect of his father's papers is partly redeemed by his having not only preserved, but printed Wakefield's letters to Godley and other leading persons concerned with the foundation of the settlement, of which the writer had most fortunately preserved copies. The Founders of Canterbury, containing this correspondence from November 1847 to October 1850, is probably the worthiest monument to Wakefield ever raised, for what his other writings left matter of inference is here matter of demonstration. It might well have been conjectured that so bold a theorist, and so sagacious a judge of human nature, page 305would not want boldness or sagacity in action; but here he is found, not merely prescribing recipes for colony-making, but himself making the colony. What elsewhere may have seemed a dry abstraction is here clothed with flesh and blood. We see the sanguine, enthusiastic projector, fertile, inventive, creative, his head an arsenal of expedients, and every failure pregnant with a remedy; imperious or suasive, as suits his turn; terrible in wrath, and exuberant in affection; commanding, exhorting, entreating, permitting, as, like an eminent personage of old, he

'With head, hand, wings or feet, pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.'

And to what end? Merely to demonstrate the soundness of his ideas by founding a colony, the incarnation of his thought, and, in its way, a finished work of art.

The principal actors in this exciting drama, after Wakefield himself, are Godley and Lord Lyttelton, whose figures, though Wakefield nowhere in this correspondence attempts a regular portrait, are clearly defined, and might be almost as vivid as Wakefield's, if Mr Jerningham Wakefield had performed the obvious duty of preserving their letters. Godley's character has been ably portrayed by Mr J. E. FitzGerald, in the memoir prefixed to his Writings and Speeches (Christchurch, 1863). Mr FitzGerald's estimate concludes:—

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'He had not the comprehensive intellect of a great philosopher, nor the fire and fancy of a great poet, but he had the mind of a practical statesman, clear foresight and wise judgment, with a resolute will, unimpeachable integrity, and a chivalrous sense of honour.'

In other words, he did not possess Wakefield's originality of genius, but was as much a born leader of men as Wakefield was a born leader of thought.

Of Lord Lyttelton, who had had considerable experience of colonial affairs as Under Secretary to Mr Gladstone, Wakefield gave a glowing character in his letter to Godley on the New Zealand constitution. The principal members of the Canterbury Association had been denounced by the Examiner as 'Jesuits.'

'I must say another word about two of these "Jesuits." The first is Lord Lyttelton, whose indifference to power and fame keep in obscurity his singular ability and public spirit. Ever since you left England he has made himself a slave to the business of promoting New Zealand colonization and the reform of colonial government, always ready to give his whole time, his whole attention and his money without stint to the work in hand; and this without appearing to suppose that he deserves the least credit for these sacrifices. I cannot recollect another instance of equal modesty and gentle simplicity of character combined with great talents: and, with the exception of Lord Metcalfe, who did page 307not surpass him in this respect, I have never known a politician so unlike a Jesuit in love of truth and downrightness of conduct.'

Lord Lyttelton and Godley were distinguished from the crowd of politicians in that they were, like Wakefield, idealists, but their ideals were not quite the same as his. It is doubtful whether either would have taken up colonization except in the interest of the Church of England; having once done so, however, they became enthusiasts in the cause, still keeping the Church mainly in view. Wakefield in a measure reversed the process; he could not be as good a churchman as his friends were colonizers, yet he becomes almost episcopal as he talks of the various candidates for the bishopric. One motive he had which his colleagues could not share, to confound the renegades, as he deemed them, of the old New Zealand Company:—

Virtutem videant, intabescantque relicta.

It is evident from the letter already cited, that the idea of a Church colony was in Wakefield's mind in May 1843, and the further provision defined by Mr FitzGerald as the requirement 'that ample funds should be provided, out of the proceeds of the land sales, for the religious and educational wants of the community about to be established' seems an obvious corollary, though it need not be doubted that it was taken up with especial warmth by Godley. The scheme appears to have assumed definite shape at a page 308conference between the two at Malvern on 29th November 1847. The part which especially devolved upon Wakefield was to induce the New Zealand Company, of which he was still nominally a director, and in which two-thirds of the waste Crown lands of New Zealand were vested, to dispose of a sufficient amount of the lands to the Church colonizers to set them going: while Godley's part, in Mr FitzGerald's words, 'was the labour of bringing to the scheme a sufficient amount of influence to secure the foundation of the new colony.' As a leading contributor to the Morning Chronicle, for which most of the more distinguished Peelites wrote, as a brilliant Oxonian of High Church tendencies, and a member of several leading clubs, he was intimate with most of the members of the neo-Conservative party, he found no difficulty in interesting men of influence in his project, and the indispensable qualification for a New Zealand directorship was furnished by a nominal transfer of stock from Wakefield. Wakefield, on his part, wrote on 30th November to Mr John Abel Smith, one of the most important directors left on the New Zealand Board, proposing 'the old plan of a settlement of 300,000 acres to be purchased from the company for ten shillings per acre.' It was at the time intended that the location should be the valley of the Ruamahanga, near Wellington, and it is not quite clear when the page 309Canterbury Plains in the Middle Island were decided upon as the site of the settlement. The company took up the idea; a 'Canterbury Association' was formed by Godley's exertions, which in due time obtained a charter. Land was to be sold on the Wakefield system at a 'sufficient price,' but here the weak point—not fatal but unquestionably troublesome—of religious colonies came in. To induce the Church to enter into the scheme, it was necessary to set aside a portion of the funds for public worship and religious education, and as this could only be got out of the proceeds of the land sales, the price of the land was necessarily raised to meet the demand, and was thus rendered excessive. It was fixed at three pounds per acre, and the proportion of this devoted to church and school buildings being no less than one-third, it followed that one pound out of three was an unreproductive investment. At the same time, the high price dismayed emigrants, as the promoters found to their cost when they appealed to the public for support. The more ecclesiastically minded among them probably rejoiced in the expectation that this regulation would keep out dissenters, who would hardly pay a pound an acre for the privilege of sending their children to High Church schools; but even bigotry and virtue lost their attractiveness in the presence of excessive price. The experiment, well worth trying, will hardly be tried again; but page 310the colony could not have been launched without it, and, after all, proved no failure, and had the especial advantage of enriching New Zealand with emigrants of an especially high standard of character and culture—'Canterbury pilgrims,' among whom knights, squires, franklins, parsons, lawyers and physicians constituted a numerous and substantial element. 'The young men of Godley's school,' wrote Wakefield, 'resemble, both in head and heart, the nobler spirits of Elizabeth's time.'

By the middle of 1848 the affairs of the embryo settlement had progressed sufficiently to justify the despatch of Captain Thomas as agent to occupy and clear the ground: but for some time afterwards they appear to have languished, and it was not until the winter of 1849 that the state of Godley's health brought about the step to which the ultimate success of the colony is mainly to be attributed, his mission as general manager and superintendent. It had been proposed that he should spend the winter in Italy. Wakefield warmly, almost passionately, urged that the equally mild climate of New Zealand should have the preference, and Godley sailed at the beginning of December. His first act on arriving was to stop all expenditure, Captain Thomas having considerably overdrawn his means; and then, finding that the expected colonists did not arrive, he betook himself to Wellington, where he successfully opposed a scheme brought forward page 311by Sir George Grey for the government of New Zealand. It was not until November 1850 that, after raising £5000 for the advantage of the settlement upon his own security, he returned to Canterbury upon hearing of the actual despatch of a body of emigrants in September. For nearly two years from that period, in the language of a settler, 'his word was law.' 'Not with coffers full and facilities abundant,' says Mr FitzGerald, 'but in poverty of funds, amidst great difficulties, amidst much discontent, amidst the disappointment of many sanguine expectations, and the ill-concealed hostility of a Government [Sir George Grey's] which appeared vexed at the additional trouble imposed on it by the founding of a new colony within its jurisdiction, Mr Godley guided the infant fortunes of Canterbury, in the full and entire conviction of the result which must one day come.' It only needs to be corrected in this generally just description that the motive of Sir George Grey's unquestionable hostility to the Canterbury settlement was not dislike of trouble, but his conscientious though narrow antipathy to 'class colonies.'

One of Godley's first steps was to abolish, some-what to Wakefield's alarm, the regulation of the Canterbury Association, forbidding the granting of pasturage leases except to purchasers of land. Of all New Zealand districts, Canterbury is the best adapted for sheep breeding, and the result of the page 312change was to bring a welcome flow of capital into the colony. 'No day passes,' wrote Wakefield, in June 1850, 'without my thinking of your being there with urgent work to do and no money. But, indeed, the whole deficiency of money must be treated as an unavoidable misfortune, unless you and I are to blame for having thought of founding, with twentyfive thousand pounds, a colony whose proper foundation on the plan adopted requires a capital of two or three hundred thousand. However, courage! It is a good plan; there is a good colony of people; an excellent prospect on this side, of the largest and best emigration we ever hoped for; and we Englishmen are not apt to faint.'

Before this letter was written the vessel of the colony had been upon the rocks, and was only floated off with great difficulty, mainly by the interposition of Lord Lyttelton, who, Mr FitzGerald says, and the statement is fully borne out by Wakefield's correspondence, 'brought his strong intellect and resolute will to rescue it from destruction.' 'He threw himself into the affair,' says Wakefield, in an unpublished letter to Godley, 'as if his own fortune or life had been at stake. You and I planned, but I should have been disappointed and you discredited, if he had not taken up the work and carried it through by dint of personal effort and risk.' He became chairman of the Managing Committee in the spring of 1850, superseding Mr John Hutt, an page 313excellent man incapacitated by advancing years and failing health, of whom Wakefield writes most characteristically:—'It is very distressing, as was the necessity for knocking him out of the chair: but if you saw your own child boring a hole in the bottom of a ship full of passengers, and you could not stop him any other way, you would shoot him, would you not? I would.' The land sales, owing to the extra pound an acre insisted upon for Church purposes, disappointed expectation, and a guarantee to the New Zealand Company was necessary. Lord Lyttelton, Sir John Simeon, Lord Richard Cavendish and Wakefield himself each became responsible for £3750; and hence it became possible to announce in April that the first body of colonists would positively sail for their destination in the autumn. 'Thanks,' exclaims Wakefield, 'to the heart and head combined of Lord Lyttelton and Simeon in particular!' This was by no means the last of their ventures and benefactions. The first provincial assembly relieved the founders of the settlement of £18,000 obligation. Of Wakefield's own part he modestly says: 'I have always regarded my signature to the guarantee as imposing on me no real pecuniary liability. Poor I should have to pay only when Hagley, Swainston and Mr Cavendish's estate could not.'

Not all the munificence of Lord Lyttelton and his friends, however, could render the Canterbury page 314Association a success, but it saved the colony. The extra pound for religious and educational purposes fatally checked land sales; not more than one-tenth of the two hundred thousand acres expected to be sold during the first year or two were actually disposed of; the Association's inability to perform its engagements led to the forfeiture of the charter granted in 1850; and as soon as the colonists got their own way through the dissolution of the Association, while firmly maintaining the principle of the sufficient price, they fixed this at forty shillings. This result seemed to demonstrate that the sectarian system of colonization is only justifiable as a pis aller, which in the case of Canterbury it actually was. The New Zealand Company had long abandoned systematic colonization, and but for the ideas of Wakefield and Godley, and the ecclesiastical enthusiasm of Lord Lyttelton and his circle, the fair plains of Canterbury would have been long unoccupied, or have been monopolised by squatters from Australia attracted by the prospect of cheap land. The 'sufficient price,' though in this instance overdone, and the religious fervour, though narrow and exclusive, preserved them for the occupation of one of the finest bodies of emigrants ever collected, who, the first difficulties of settlement overcome, dotted them with Lyttelton, Christchurch, Timaru and Akaroa, and many another thriving town.

A lively picture of the early days of the struggling page 315settlement is presented in a letter to Catherine Torlesse from her youngest brother, Felix Wakefield, the author of a valuable treatise—to which, however, Edward Gibbon gave literary form—on the survey of waste lands. After many years spent in land-surveying in Tasmania, he returned to England with his family in 1847, and was promptly impressed by his senior into the service. He took an active part in the preliminary arrangements for the foundation of the settlement, and arrived there himself in December 1851. His letter gives a vivid picture of the natural features of the colony 'like the South Downs on a gigantic scale, entirely free from timber but with ragged edges, and here and there some fantastic peaks, jagged as the volcano left them when it forced these islands above the sea.' This scarcity of timber—which the writer himself, an enthusiastic acclimatiser who first brought red deer and pheasants to New Zealand, afterwards did much to remove—was a great hindrance to the prosperity of the settlement, but not to be compared to the mountain which blocked communication between Lyttelton, the port, and Christchurch, the capital, an evil afterwards remedied by driving a tunnel. 'I bitterly regret not having come out instead of Captain Thomas, for I could have saved a mass of disappointment and misery by preventing a settler landing here until the road was passable.' The colony, Felix Wakefield thought, was, notwithstanding, on the page 316road to prosperity, but prosperity was a long way off. Pending the attainment of this goal, he anticipated considerable difficulty in supporting himself and his young family, and looked forward to a long course of potato-growing as a means to this end. The colonists were an excellent body of men, 'a colony of gentlemen; and this, my deliberate opinion, was confirmed by Bishop Selwyn a few days since, when he told me that he knew of nothing like it in that respect. The labourers are, as a body, respectable, some black sheep among them, but very few; for this we may thank the workers of the scheme in England, and the chaplain and schoolmaster on board.' 'The first body of colonists,' says Wakefield, in a letter to Godley, 'was made up by infinite painstaking. Nine out of ten of them were nursed into becoming colonists.' Owing to the slowness of the land sales, the arrangements for churches and schools were in abeyance, and the voluntary system loomed darkly in the future. Mr Wakefield himself had just rescued two most promising young men from Norfolk from 'slipping back into barbarism.' He fully agreed with Godley that there was too much government from home, and that the despatches from headquarters were unduly didactic. 'Except the sale of land, and sending ships out, everything ought to be done here by Godley and the Council of the colonists.'

This feeling on Godley's part, and, as Wakefield page 317thought, the interference of Godley's future biographer, the then emigration agent, Mr FitzGerald, a brilliant, impulsive Irishman, meteorically conspicuous in the political history of New Zealand, who had adorned the Secretary's office at the British Museum, and whose epistles to Panizzi on the subject of registration are still preserved with reverence in the archives of the printed book department, led eventually to a lamentable estrangement between Wakefield and Godley, which would not have occurred if they had not been on opposite sides of the world. 'What a pity,' Wakefield himself observes to Godley, 'that we cannot meet, and fight it out till one should give in! I pray you to believe that I am not obstinate or conceited, but really desirous to think with you.' Not all his letters were equal models of sweet reasonableness, but personal explanation would have obliterated unfavourable impressions. 'I declare,' Wakefield wrote to Lord Lyttelton from New Zealand after Godley's departure, 'that a thorough reconciliation would be more agreeable to me than anything else I can think of.' Felix Wakefield did not after all devote himself to potatoes; he went back to England, became director of the Army Works Corps in the Crimean War, and returning after some years to Canterbury, found that his property there had beome as valuable as he had expected it to prove 'if the colony did not collapse page 318for want of a road.' The time of trial, nevertheless, had been severe, and it is not surprising that when Wakefield himself arrived at Canterbury he wrote to his sister, 'Extreme unpopularity met me on landing,' though he adds, 'It nearly all evaporated in a month.' When Lord Lyttelton, in 1868, came to view the work to which he had so largely contributed, he found it very good, especially as regarded the high religious and educational development which had been the colony's raison d'être.

The letters quoted, hitherto unpublished, belong to the year 1851. The printed volume is one of the raciest of books, full of humour, designed and undesigned. Nothing gave the writer more trouble than that indispensable appurtenance to a Church colony, a bishop, and anxiously did he strain his untutored vision to discover the precise tint of churchmanship which would gratify the High Churchman without absolutely infuriating the Low. 'Surely the Church comprises many earnest Churchmen who are not members of the Puseyite or Tractarian party. I would name, for example, Gladstone and the Bishop of Oxford.' (The children of this world are not always wiser than the children of light.) Two most eligible prelates were thought to have been caught, but both managed to give the association the slip; a third, to whom it had actually bound itself, proved so ineligible that great relief was experienced when he himself arrived at a similar conclusion as page 319respected his intended diocese. Bishop Selwyn got no suffragan at Canterbury until December 1856. If, however, Wakefield did not shine as a theologian, his letters do him much credit as a practical moralist. The blessing promised to the peacemakers should have rested upon the writer of this letter to an eminent servant of the New Zealand Company who had quarrelled with another of equal distinction:—

'Your quarrel is to me a subject of deep regret, both on your own account and that of the colony. Is it irreparable? Men of sense never quarrel irreparably. If I could imagine you exempt from the strange violence of colonial party feeling, I should earnestly counsel and beg of you to put an end to the quarrel. In every quarrel the man who puts an end to it is he who makes the first advance to reconciliation. To do that is only considered disgraceful by petty minds: men of sense and courage deem it magnanimous. You have made a mistake. Why not retrace the step? If you have the manly sense I give you credit for, you will be able to conquer a natural disinclination to admitting the mistake. Greater men than either of us have done this very often: very little men cannot do it. I misjudge greatly if he is not a gentleman and a man of spirit: and if he is, he will cordially accept the offer of your hand. If you have, as may be natural, a difficulty about opening the way to peace, send him this letter, and wait for what he shall do. It page 320would be a vast satisfaction to me were I thus to be the means of bringing together two men whose co-operation and friendship I consider of great importance to the welfare of New Zealand. If you make up the quarrel you will both be gainers, as well as the colony; and you will be better friends, closer allies in the pursuit of the cause as to which you have never differed—that cause which I have at heart, and to which I make every sacrifice that it requires—than if you had never quarrelled at all.'

The following is equally admirable in a different way:—

'A new colony is a bad place for a young single man. To be single is contrary to the nature of a new colony, where the laws of society are labour, peace, domestic life, increase and multiply. The hospitality is so great that a young man who can make himself agreeable may live in idleness: and the most common lot of a single young man is to do this, till he becomes unfit for marriage by becoming wedded to his pipe and his bottle, not to mention the billiard table. Whereas, if he is nicely married, he has a sweet home to go to after his day's work, and his mind is kept tranquil enough to bear without injury the intense excitement of sharing in the creation of a new society. Marriage is the most economical: the same capital goes further with a wife than without one. It is her moral influence that both saves the money, and stimulates her page 321husband's energy and prudence. Whatever may be the rank and capital of the young colonist—whether a nobleman's son worth £10,000, or a labourer—let him be married for the sake of economy as well as peace and comfort.'

Wakefield's stay at Malvern had been preceded by a residence of a few months at South Stoke, near Arundel, where he begged a cottage from Mr John Abel Smith, chiefly on account of his little friend, Amy Allom, whom it pained him to find wasted by illness upon his return from his own tour. After her recovery, he settled at Warwick Lodge, Redhill, where he gathered around him the family of his brother Felix, recent arrivals from Tasmania. Constance, the eldest daughter, now Mrs D'Arblay Burney, became his secretary, an office also sometimes discharged by his nephew George, the son of his brother Howard, and afterwards an Indian civil servant. He took his brother's family with him to Boulogne, and when he afterwards moved to a pretty little outbuilding belonging to the White Hart Hotel at Reigate, quartered them at Woodhatch, a house in the neighbourhood. Mrs Burney vividly remembers her first impression of her uncle, only confirmed by subsequent acquaintance, as of one superior to all men she had ever seen or imagined. She compares him to a lion, with massive head, magnificent brow, sanguine complexion, somewhat too full habit of body, long floating hair, the token page 322of the enthusiast, and brilliant blue eyes, indescribably tender when in gentle mood, but frequently blazing with passion or excitement. The great charm and impressiveness of his personality, not-withstanding, were incapable of definition: they lay in that mysterious magnetic power which excited feelings of intense devotion among those who came fully under its spell, detained unwilling listeners within hearing, and often subjugated them at last, but, by the law of compensation, frequently aroused violent antipathy among the unsubdued. The same contrast pervaded his own nature; in general the kindest of men—continually performing generous actions, and affectionate and tenderhearted to a fault—he had moods of perverseness, and could be bitterly resentful and vindictive when his plans were thwarted, as by Earl Grey. He was especially attached to young people, and was always striving to educate those who came under his influence. He provided his niece with teachers in French and dancing; and she remembers, with even more gratitude, his constant admonitions on punctuality, method, good handwriting, and the other valuable habits whose importance is so often undiscerned by the young. He was continually contriving parties and picnics for the amusement of his young people; but nothing was more marked in him than his exuberant spirits and fondness for practical joking, especially by alterations of apparel. He so effectually page 323disguised the daughter of a friend as to impose on her own parents. On the whole, the impression conveyed is that of an opulent nature, whose abounding energies must have vent, and whose love of mischief and talent for stratagem might easily involve the possessor in disagreeable adventures. These perilous endowments were, nevertheless, held in check by unrivalled sagacity and shrewdness. He seemed to read unuttered thoughts, to discern character by intuition, and to foresee the future both of individuals and societies. One theme on which he was fond of dilating was the future of the Empire under the British Crown. He looked forward to the Queen's sons ruling the chief groups of the British colonies as permanent viceroys—one in Canada, another in Australia, a third at the Cape—a vision which might have proved a prevision had the Imperial sentiment, which he did so much to create, been somewhat less tardy in asserting itself. He would sometimes calm the perturbed nerves by the anodyne of a new novel, and he read The Vicar of Wakefield through regularly once a year. Mrs Burney copied documents and letters for him, and wrote abundantly to his dictation. It frequently happened to her to be fetched in haste, and to find her uncle closeted with some leading public man, such as Sir William Molesworth or Mr Aglionby. She would then take down an oration or disquisition from his lips, which frequently reappeared in the proceedings of the House page 324of Commons. She also remembers Mr Rintoul, the large-browed, gentle-mannered editor of the Spectator, who must never be spoken to upon a Friday. The picture of life at Reigate would be incomplete without record of the enormous Talbot hounds, the awful delight of the neighbourhood, already mentioned by Mr Allom, and of a good cat, demonstrative in her affection to her master.

Another person intimately acquainted with Wakefield at this time was Sir Frederick Young, K.C.M.G., chairman and mainstay of the Royal Colonial Institute, who has most kindly placed his recollections of his old tutor in colonial politics at the writer's service:—

'My father, the late George Frederick Young, M.P.,' says Sir Frederick, 'was an active director of the New Zealand Company, and from 1839 onwards I found myself frequently in communication with Mr Wakefield. He exercised a powerful influence over all who came within his sphere, and especially over young men. His manner was striking, and most persuasive. There was a peculiar fascination about the way in which he put everything before one, which seldom failed to inspire confidence in the views which he propounded. There was a breadth, and power, and grasp of a subject in his thoughts, and a boldness in the enunciation of these that could not fail to draw attention, and generally carry conviction. In my own case he quite captivated me.

page 325

'In the year 1848 the Canterbury Association was formed, and I was induced shortly afterwards, at Mr Wakefield's suggestion, to undertake the management of their shipping department. During 1851, and part of 1852, all the ships chartered by the Association, conveying to New Zealand nearly 2000 colonists, were despatched under my personal management. During this period I was in constant communication with the Association at its offices, 9 Adelphi Terrace, Strand, which brought me into contact with Mr Wakefield, who was daily in attendance there.

'At this time he was living in a cottage, in a garden, which belonged to, and was approached from, the White Hart Inn at Reigate. It was a comfortable and commodious little residence, with a large dining-room. Here he every now and then invited me to stay with him for a day or two. On these occasions our evenings were spent in discussing various problems connected with colonization, and with the details of the progress and prospects of the new settlement of Canterbury, and the best means to be adopted for promoting its success in England. Wakefield's brother Felix was often with him at Reigate, as well as Sewell of Oxford, an active member of the Canterbury Association. I remember one night, just after Sewell had retired, and Wakefield and I were leaving the room to do the same, Wakefield, candle in hand, turned to me and said:

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"What a good fellow he is! It is a pity he is such a Puseyite!"

'In those days Wakefield possessed a breed of those rare dogs, the Talbot hounds. He had two magnificent specimens, who were his constant companions, both in and out of doors. He was very fond of them, and splendid animals they were. He also had a strong cob, on which he used to ride every morning before breakfast. When I was at Reigate, I always accompanied him on foot, as he only rode at a walking pace, listening to his sage remarks, and taking in much that he propounded on the subject of colonization. He was then between fifty and sixty, about five feet six inches in height, stout and burly in figure, with a round, smooth, fair face, looking very like a prosperous English farmer. If it had not been for his unfortunate escapade in early life he would have attained a very high place in public estimation. Still, among politicians, and especially those in any way feeling an interest in colonial questions, he was undoubtedly a great power. One day he said to me, "Young, I had thirty-six members of Parliament in this room yesterday." They had travelled down to Reigate to consult him on some important colonial subject then on the tapis.

'His personal habits, when I knew him, were of the simplest kind. He was most temperate, and never indulged in any of the pleasures of the table. He page 327rose very early and went to bed early. He lived on the simplest food, and scarcely touched wine.^*

He had an especial dislike to the vulgar snobbery of the nouveaux riches, of whom there were many specimens around him. As he was a person with a name they desired to have him at their tables, but they never could succeed in getting him. One of them said, "If you will come I will have fish down from London and dine at six." "Thank you," was the reply, "I always dine at one, on a leg of mutton and a rice pudding."

'With all his defects, Wakefield was unquestionably a great man, and possessed remarkable intellectual qualities. He was always very kind to me, and I learned much from him. He never did me any harm, and I feel honoured and proud to have known him.'

In 1850 and 1851, Wakefield united with Mr C. B. Adderley and other colonial reformers, chiefly of the more recent school, in founding a Colonial Reform Society, which materially influenced the grant of constitutions to the Australian Colonies made shortly afterwards. In 1852, his attention was chiefly given to a matter of the deepest moment to him, the New Zealand Constitution passed by the Derby Ministry, which terminated the system of personal government dominant in the islands since Sir George Grey had set aside the con-page 328stitution of 1846. This state of affairs, it was admitted, could not last indefinitely; and when the Derby Ministry succeeded to power in February 1852, they found a constitution in the pigeon-holes of the Colonial Office, drafted mainly under the influence of Sir George Grey. The turn which affairs then took is circumstantially described in a letter from Wakefield to Godley, of 7th June 1852, printed in the Lyttelton Times of 30th October, giving a complete history of the transaction, with one remarkable omission. Wakefield nowhere says that he was himself the chief author of the new constitution, yet such is the explicit assertion of Mr C. B. Adderley, afterwards Under Secretary for the Colonies, and now Lord Norton, who says in his 'Review' of Earl Grey's work on Colonial Policy (1869), 'The measure was based on a draft I drew up under the guidance of Gibbon Wakefield.' Wakefield may have considered his part as confidential, or he may have been unwilling to assume responsibility for a measure which he himself regarded as a compromise, and which he knew would prove unacceptable in many respects. It is the one aim of his able letter to reconcile the colonists to an admittedly faulty constitution, which yet contained the germ of improvement, by representing it as the sole alternative to no constitution at all.

The wisdom of the advice was soon justified. At the end of 1852, the Conservatives having, in strict page 329fulfilment of a remarkable prophecy made by Wakefield to Rintoul in 1849, held office just long enough to weld the Peelites and the Liberals into one party, made way for their opponents, who came into power laden with pledges and projects which would have left them no time to think of New Zealand. In 1854 the Crimean War supervened, and domestic legislation ceased to interest. After all, the chief defect of the measure was unavoidable at the time. Theoretically fault might be found with the institution of six miniature parliaments under the title of Provincial Councils; but practically the settlements were so far apart and had so little in common that a collective management of their affairs was impracticable, and all that could be done was to confide the larger concerns of the country to a General Assembly, consisting of two houses, one nominated for life, the other elected by a very wide suffrage, without distinction of race. Provincial legislation required the assent of the Governor only, though, always subject to repeal by the General Assembly; acts of the General Assembly might be disallowed by the Crown. The constitution was apparently less democratic than that proposed by Sir George Grey, in so far as all the members of the Upper House of the Legislative Council were to be nominated for life by the Crown, while by Sir George's scheme the majority would have been elected for a term by the Provincial Councils. But, as Mr Reeves points page 330out, in this case 'New Zealand would have a powerful Senate, eclipsing altogether the Lower Chamber.' It improved upon the Grey project by empowering the colonists to regulate their land sales and civil list, and to vary their constitution—a liberty which ultimately effected the abolition of the provincial system. The great defect of the absence of any provision for the selection of the Governor's responsible advisers seems to have occurred to none, either of those who prepared the measure or of those by whom it was canvassed and criticised.

The Bill received the royal assent on 30th June 1852. It had undergone, to the great indignation of Godley, an alteration by the office of Provincial Superintendent being made elective; theoretically an improvement, but which kept all New Zealand in hot water as long as Provincial Councils existed. Hostility to Provincial Councils in any form, embodied in the persons of Sir William Molesworth and Mr Robert Lowe, almost destroyed the Bill; le mieux est souvent l'ennemi du bien. Its passage was materially assisted by two remarkable intellectual performances—Mr Gladstone's speech and Wakefield's petition in its favour. Before the session began, Mr Gladstone had been shown the draft of a projected Bill drawn at Hams, Mr Adderley's seat, by a committee consisting of Lord Lyttelton, Mr Adderley, Messrs Fox and Weld, afterwards New Zealand Premiers, and Wakefield. He ap-page 331proved, and undertook to force the subject on by moving resolutions framed by himself, should the Colonial Office hang back. That this proved unnecessary was largely due, Wakefield tells Lord Lyttelton, to the private influence of Mr Gladstone with Sir John Pakington, and the advice he gave to the deputation to him 'to be very importunate.' 'And so we were.' On 21st May, Mr Gladstone delivered a remarkable speech, a pattern of close argument and classic oratory, in which, while severely criticising some provisions of the Bill, he pleaded for its passage as a whole. It is only in the light of some of the speaker's subsequent proceedings that we discern the taint of separatism, the unexpressed conviction that a divorce between the mother country and the colonies would be best for both, which is certainly there, though in too subtle a form to have impaired the admiration of the orator's contemporaries. 'The humble petition of Edward Gibbon Wakefield,' dated 2d June, and published in the New Zealand Journal of 18th June, is an equally characteristic performance. It would appear surprising to find it turning almost entirely on the question of the Provincial Governments, if we did not know that Molesworth's and Lowe's opposition to these Governments was the rock which jeopardised the Bill. Wakefield certainly makes out the best possible case for them. 'Evil happens,' he says, 'when the area of the colony is so large, and its means of com-page 332munication so deficient, that the seat of government is what London has been as the seat of government for many remote dependencies. In such cases the benefits of Government—the means of getting done things without number which are greatly needed and which government alone can do—are confined to the seat of government and its immediate neighbourhood. The rest of the country is neglected, and stagnates almost without government.' This was true when Wakefield wrote, and he nowhere professes to regard Provincial Councils as a necessarily permanent arrangement. On the contrary, he lays especial stress on the clause in the Act allowing of its amendment from time to time, and concludes, 'Your Petitioner humbly prays that your Honourable House may be pleased to pass the Bill in question for the sake of its merits, and without regard to its obvious defects, because there is not time for amendment by present legislation here, whilst the whole measure is open to future amendment by legislation in the colony, subject to the approval of the Crown and Parliament.'

Wakefield had always contemplated emigration when his work in England should be completed, and the establishment of a constitutional system in New Zealand now seemed to open to him the prospect of a parliamentary career. He therefore arranged for quitting England in the company of Sewell, with whom, next to Lord Lyttelton, he had page 333been most closely associated during the latter days of the Canterbury Association; of Captain Henslow, a Windsor knight, and one of his staunchest friends; and of sundry canine favourites. We have seen him put up with a cat at Lancaster Castle, whose frowning portal probably bore the legend, 'No dogs admitted.' But innate preference now reacted in the direction of bulldogs of the purest breed; he further proposed to augment the population of Canterbury by a bull and a heifer. His last news to his sister, written within an hour of sailing from Plymouth, scene of the departute of the Mayflower and the Tory on 12th October, is, 'The bull is nearly well. This morning at six, Henslow, Sewell, Bogey, Spring, Violet and I went off to the breakwater and walked there for an hour.' Four days previously he had written a letter to Lord Lyttelton embodying some of his deepest feelings and convictions:—

'Plymouth,

8th October 1852.

'My dear Lord,—The fatigues of preparation for an eternal severance from England really made it impossible for me to write to you with a collected mind. And, indeed, I had but little to say beyond offering to you my sincere and grateful thanks for all your consideration and kindness from the moment when Canterbury colonization brought me into relation with you. And this I now do with the strongest feeling of respect and attachment.

'Somehow or other, nevertheless, I cannot bring page 334myself to believe that I am bidding you farewell for ever. A pleasant dream is often in my mind that circumstances may yet arise that would induce you to represent the monarchy in New Zealand; and if my life, with anything like health, shall be spared, I will work hard in helping to make these circumstances take a form of reality. They would consist mainly of plentiful evidence that the colony wishes for monarchical institutions. If it should prove so, and if such institutions could be established by the only man I know who is quite fit for the task, monarchy will be preserved in the southern world; if not, we must be content with democratic republics. I am sure of this, and that there is no time to lose.'

This may seem overstrained to some, but will not to those who remember the state of opinion between 1850 and 1860; who consider that veneration for the Sovereign could not in the nature of things be so strong an influence after a reign of fifteen years as after one of fifty; and who reflect that the improved intercommunication, which has done so much to knit the Empire together, was then in its infancy.

Two months after Wakefield's departure for New Zealand, Godley left its shores homeward bound, to die a few months before his coadjutor. Permanent residence in New Zealand would probably have prolonged his life; but his work at Canterbury was done, and important employment awaited page 335him in England. Another impressive circumstance signalised Wakefield's departure. Among those who attended his embarkation from London (29th September) was Frances Wakefield, who had unjustly suffered through him for the Turner affair, and had ever since been estranged from him, until moved to reconciliation by good Mrs Allom, after scenes surpassed for dramatic intensity by nothing off the stage, and little upon it. He knelt down and asked and received her forgiveness.

The earth may open and the sea o'erwhelm;
Many the ways, the little home is one;
Thither the courser leads, thither the helm;
And at one gate we meet when all is done