Chapter VII

The Durham Report became a more important factor in the history of Britain's colonial empire than even the Wakefield system, yet the Canada expedition was no more than a brilliant episode in the life of Durham's counsellor. We must follow him back to New Zealand, the colony of his predilection, although for long he is not more immediately visible in the events occurring upon the islands than the dramatist whose pen has filled the theatre, but who never appears in person upon the stage.

The pioneers of the Tory left England amply provided with instructions from the Company, throughout the greater part of which Wakefield's manly style is easily recognisable. These it is not too much to characterise as models of wisdom as concerned the direction of the Company's affairs, and of fairness as re-page 193garded the rights of the various classes affected by the undertaking. They were so framed as not merely to prescribe rules of action, but to answer many of the most specious objections against colonization in New Zealand, and against the measures which it was absolutely necessary to adopt if colonization was to be effectively carried out. Those most anxiously weighed and carefully expressed related to that interference with aboriginal claims which cannot possibly be avoided if the white man is to fulfil his mission of civilising the earth, but which every just and humane person desires to reduce to a minimum.

The language of the New Zealand directors breathes this spirit of justice and humanity.

'The chief difficulty,' they say, 'with which you may have to contend is that of convincing the natives that the expedition under your orders has no object hostile to them. They are necessarily suspicious in consequence of the ill-treatment which they have often received from Europeans. We recommend that you should on every occasion treat them with the most entire frankness, thoroughly explaining to them that you wish to purchase the land for the purpose of establishing a settlement of Englishmen there; and you will abstain from completing any negotiation for a purchase of land until this, its probable result, shall be thoroughly understood by the native proprietors and by the tribe at large. Above all, you will be especially careful that all the owners of any tract of page 194land which you may purchase shall be approving parties to the bargain, and that each of them receives his due share of the purchase money. You will fully explain that the Company intends to dispose of the property to individual settlers expected from England, and that you purchase, if at all, on the same terms as have formed the conditions of private bargains for land in other parts of the islands.

'But in one respect you will not fail to establish a very important difference between the purchases of the Company and those which have hitherto been made by every class of buyers. Wilderness land, it is true, is worth nothing to its native owners, or worth nothing more than the trifle they can obtain for it. We are not therefore to make much account of the inadequacy of the purchase money according to English notions of the value of land. The land is really of no value, and can become valuable only by means of a great outlay of capital on emigration and settlement. But at the same time it may be doubted whether the native owners have ever been entirely aware of the consequences that would result from such cessions, as have already been made to a great extent, of the whole of the lands of a tribe. Justice demands, not merely that these consequences should be as far as possible explained to them, but that the superior intelligence of the buyers should also be exerted to guard them against the evils which, after all, they may not be capable of anticipating. The danger to which page 195they are exposed, and which they cannot well foresee, is that of finding themselves entirely without landed property, and therefore without consideration, in the midst of a society where, through immigration and settlement, land has become a valuable property. Absolutely they would suffer little or nothing from having parted with land which they do not use and cannot exchange; but relatively they would suffer a great deal, inasmuch as their social position would be very inferior to that of the race who had settled amongst them, and given value to their now worthless territory. If the advantage of the natives alone were consulted, it would be better perhaps that they should remain for ever the savages which they are. This consideration appears never to have occurred to any of those who have hitherto purchased lands from the natives of New Zealand. It was first suggested by the New Zealand Association of 1837; and it has great weight with the present Company. In accordance with a plan which the Association of 1837 was desirous that a legislative enactment should extend to every purchase of land from the natives, as well past as future, you will take care to mention in every booka-booka or contract for land, that a proportion of the territory ceded, equal to one-tenth of the whole, will be reserved by the Company, and held in trust by them for the future benefit of the chief families of the tribe.

'The intended reserves of land are regarded as far more important to the natives than anything which page 196you will have to pay in the shape of purchase money. At the same time we are desirous that the purchase money should be less inadequate, according to English notions of the value of land, than has been generally the case in purchases of territory from the New Zealanders. Some of the finest tracts of land, we are assured, have been obtained by missionary catechists and others who really possessed nothing, or next to nothing. In case land should be offered to you for such mere trifles as a few blankets or hatchets, which have heretofore been given for considerable tracts, you will not accept the offer without adding to the goods required such a quantity as may be of real service to all the owners of the land. It is not intended that you should set an example of heedless profusion in this respect; but the Company are desirous that in all their transactions with the natives the latter should derive some immediate and obvious benefit by the intercourse.'

These instructions are indeed admirable. They grapple at once with the difficulty of the apparent inadequacy of the price at which the uncultivated lands of a people destitute of the circulating medium must be acquired, and indicate the means by which the bargain may notwithstanding be made as advantageous to the sellers as to the buyers. When at a later period Sir George Grey, the Maori's friend par excellence, made extensive acquisitions of land in the Middle Island, he acted entirely in their spirit, and could do no otherwise. Much, however, depends upon page 197the character of the agent entrusted with the execution of instructions drafted at the other side of the world. Colonel Wakefield's antecedents might have been deemed unfavourable. We have become acquainted with him as a member of the giddy society at Paris among whom the Turner plot was hatched, and as punished for his complicity with a penalty not less severe than that meted out to his brother. He had himself eloped with his wife, the daughter of a baronet, and had been seriously embarrassed in his circumstances, both before and after the Turner episode and its consequences. On the other hand, those who knew him, or have retained the tradition of him, unanimously express amazement at his participation in such a transaction, and declare that this could only be attributed to the contagion of the Parisian circle, and to the irresistible magnetic influence which Edward Gibbon exercised upon most men, and especially upon a brother seven years younger, and particularly open to it from having been attached to him at the Turin embassy while a mere youth. In maturer life William appeared not more shrewd than trustworthy. He had fought for freedom in Spain and Portugal, where he had been especially distinguished for coolness, and was about to distinguish himself in New Zealand by munificent generosity. We shall see that he retained the confidence of the Company through nine most difficult years, and his name is still cherished by the descendants of those whose hardships page 198were shared by him. In such a conflict of evidence, it is fairest to resort to the testimony which the man has unconsciously bequeathed concerning himself, and this is wholly in his favour. In the portions of his correspondence which remain, Colonel Wakefield appears the tender father, the careful guardian, the steady friend, the loyal servant of his employers, just and firm in his dealings with all men.

Intellectually, William Wakefield is described by Mr Gisborne (New Zealand Rulers and Statesmen) as 'a pale copy of his brother.' This may be in so far true, that William made no pretence to originality of genius, but he was as much the hand of the New Zealand Company as Edward Gibbon was its brain. Among the hosts of ideas which Edward's creative mind was perpetually emitting, a certain proportion were almost inevitably unsound; he was not always careful to sift these out, and sometimes damaged himself and his cause by advancing arguments or proposals obviously untenable. William, on the other hand, was a man of close reserve, and of that peculiarly baffling secretiveness which is not synonymous with taciturnity. 'His manner,' says Mr Gisborne, 'was attractive, and, in outward appearance, sympathetic, but the inner man was out of sight and hearing.' 'Of medium height,' says Mr Crawford, 'compactly built, fair in complexion and Saxon in appearance and temperament, astute and reticent, he had seen much of the world, both British and foreign, and could make page 199himself a very pleasant companion. People said he was always so, except when spoken to on business.' His general conduct of affairs attests his eminent talents as an organiser; and his official despatches and journals, which ought to be reprinted in a volume, are excellent reading.¹

'We must now mention another rule which you will not fail to impress on all your subordinates; namely, the propriety of carefully avoiding anything like exaggeration in describing the more favourable features of the country. Let the bad be stated as page 201plainly and fully as the good; so that the Company, hearing the whole truth as well as nothing but the truth, may run no risk of misleading others.

'You will consider any act of aggression or affront from any of the Company's servants towards any native of New Zealand as a sufficient reason for immediate dismissal from the Company's service, and in the most public manner.'

The commercial intercourse of civilised nations and barbarians, especially as concerns dealing with land, raises difficult problems for the jurist and philanthropist. The maxim, 'property has its duties as well as its rights,' applies to savage quite as much page 207as to civilised man. It cannot be admitted that a tribe of cannibals has a right to retain large tracts of the earth's surface, on or near which they happen to have established themselves, in an unproductive and useless condition. It is the duty and the very raison d'être of the civilised man to develop the resources of the earth, and if he neglected this he would be punished by the ills that follow in the train of over-population at home. Yet, as a civilised tenant cannot well settle under a cannibal suzerain, he must in some manner acquire his land unless he can first civilise his landlord. The latter experiment was tried in New Zealand by the missionaries, and failed because it was impossible to shut out other European influences of a pernicious nature, insomuch that civilisation was far outrun by depopulation. Traders and land speculators had their own methods, which may be defined as taking advantage of the ignorance of the savage, and buying him out for a song. Equity and humanity must alike disapprove; yet part of the disapprobation with which such proceedings have been visited arises from an erroneous conception of the rights of property among barbarians. There was commonly no development, no reclamation, not even any occupation to establish a title morally valid. Large tracts spoken of as though they had been transmitted from father to son since the arrival of the first inhabitants, with title-deeds tattooed upon the persons of the natives, were utterly page 208waste and entirely worthless to the nominal possessors, conferring no advantage or privilege but the right of shooting rats. The natives, except as regarded the land actually brought under cultivation, were not proprietors but squatters, with rights comparable to that possessed by an English cottager of grazing his donkey upon a common. So opines Vattel, first among the expounders of the law of nations. It is sufficiently ridiculous to observe the deference paid to such shadowy pretensions, so long as the claimant is black brown or red, by writers who would oust the white proprietor in every country who has complied with every legal and moral condition of ownership, by open violence or the more cowardly device of an oppressive land tax. This deserves no other name than cant; but it is no less certain that every bonâ fide claim, however indefinite, ought to be fully acknowledged and satisfied to its full worth. But how is this compensation to be made? There is something shocking to refined feeling in acquiring the possessions of poor ignorant people for trinkets and cloth, or even for tools and weapons. It is true that these commodities have an immense value in their eyes, but the civilised purchaser knows well that this value is partly fictitious, and that the really useful part of the consideration he tenders will wear out in time and leave nothing to replace it. Money multiplies itself, but money in the then condition of the natives would have been useless to them and page 209incomprehensible. The New Zealand Company met the difficulty in the only way in which it can be met, by the reservation for the natives of a portion of their land, which, though comparatively small, could, through the development of the country by European colonization, come to be far more valuable to them than the whole. Wakefield put the matter into a nutshell before the Committee of 1840:—

'The terms were, a payment, in the first instance, of various goods, such as the natives require, but which the Company regard as a merely nominal price. They have paid for their lands a much higher price than has commonly been paid by other purchasers in the first instance; but the consideration which they offer to the natives, and which they regard as the true purchase money of the land, is the reserved eleventh, which eleventh, by means of the expenditure of the Company, acquires, in a very short time, a higher value than all the land possessed before. I feel myself quite satisfied that if the measure were to proceed in the best way, every acre of the land reserved would be worth at least thirty shillings; so that there would be an endowment of three millions sterling in the course of time as a native provision.'

Mr Buller (not Charles Buller) pertinently inquires:—

'What Security is there that the natives will have the benefit of it? page 210'There is no security at present, because the Government has hitherto refused to let law be established in New Zealand, so that it is impossible to create a trust. The Company are very desirous of placing this land in trust for the benefit of the natives. They have considered the subject a good deal, but they have found great difficulty in defining, till they have better information, what the trusts ought to be. Their objects in reserving these lands has been to preserve the native race. They believe that it will be impossible to preserve the native race, that the native race in New Zealand will undergo the same fate which has attended other people in their situation, unless their chief families can be preserved in a state of civilisation in the same relative superiority of position as they before enjoyed in savage life; and with this view the Company is desirous of investing them with property. But if it placed the property at once at their disposal, they would sell it for a trifle. It became, therefore, necessary to create a permanent trust. That the Company will do as soon as they possibly can; and in the meantime they have appointed a commissioner, whom they have sent out for the purpose of preserving, letting and taking care of those lands.'

These roseate anticipations, of course, were based on the supposition that the Company's purchases would not be interfered with, and when they were cut down from twenty millions of acres to two page 211hundred and eighty-three thousand, the possibility of forming any considerable fund for the benefit of the natives came to an end.

There seems no reason to charge the New Zealand Company with indifference to the well-being of the native race. The one fault was the want of due inquiry into the validity of the titles supposed to be conveyed by the native vendors; and this was forced upon Colonel Wakefield by the necessity for extreme dispatch, lest the Company should in the meantime be deprived of all purchasing power. Far otherwise would it have been if, instead of stealing away from a hostile and jealous Government, the Tory had sailed under Government auspices, and with an Imperial Commissioner on board.

In this lame fashion did New Zealand eventually hobble into the ranks of the British colonies and the Maories become British subjects. Apart from these results, the treaty of Waitangi was no matter for congratulation. It could not have been obtained at all without an enormous and uncalled for concession, the recognition, in spite of Vattel, of the absolute right of seventy thousand savages to sixty-six millions of acres of valuable land, by far the greater part of which they had never occupied, and were incapable of turning to account in any way. This carried the recognition of the tribal tenure along with it, and native sovereignty and native jurisprudence together opened a Pandora's box of ills for the unfortunate settlers, thus powerfully described by the present Agent - General for New Zealand, the Hon. W. P. Reeves:—

'Had Captain Hobson been able to conceive what was entailed in the piecemeal purchase of a country held under tribal ownership, it is difficult to think that he would have signed the treaty without hesitation. He could not, of course, imagine that he was giving legal force to a system under which the buying of a block of land would involve years of bargaining, even when a majority of its owners wished to sell; that the ascertainment of a title would mean tedious and costly examination by courts of experts of a labyrinth of strange and conflicting barbaric customs; that land might be paid for again and again, and yet be declared unsold; that an almost empty wilderness might be bought first from its handful of occupants, then from the conquerors who had laid it waste, and yet after all be reclaimed by returned slaves or fugitives who had quitted it years before.'

It is now easy to discern what the Government ought to have done. Instead of thwarting the original New Zealand Association, they should have reposed a generous though not a blind trust in it. They should have at once incorporated New Zealand in the Empire, and ruled it through the Association, enjoying the status and subjected to the restraints of a chartered company, and under the surveillance of an agent of the Government. They should have provided a law-making power which might at a stroke have got rid of the nuisance of tribal titles to land, page 215while the executive should have seen that the real interest of the natives did not suffer. The administration, apart from the Association's share in it, should from the first have been in stronger hands than those of a captain in the navy, taking orders from the Governor of another colony. A first-rate man should have been chosen, strong in ability and devotion, able to overawe, if need were, both natives and colonists, and not unprovided with naval and military force. The England of Victoria, no less than anciently the England of Elizabeth, had many rising young men competent for such a mission, enthusiastic at the prospect of building a new State, and to whom three or four years of such experience would have been invaluable. The envoy would have returned an accomplished Colonial Minister, and qualified for activity in any sphere. What if the choice had fallen upon William Ewart Gladstone?