Chapter IX

It is asserted by psychologists, and the assertion admits of confirmation from the experience of every reflecting man, that the absolute stock of knowledge, thought and emotion of which we are conscious bears but a small proportion to the stores latent in the mind in a sub-conscious condition, but ready to be called into activity at any moment by the application of the proper stimulus. It is equally true of the brain of the State, that the visible is but little in comparison with the invisible energy, that conspicuous events are commonly but the outcome of long, slow, and subterranean processes. Especially is this the case with reforms prepared by the agency of Parliamentary Committees, whose function is frequently that of mere publication. The visible proceedings page 235of such Committees, we may be sure, bear hardly a larger proportion to the invisible forces which have set their machinery in motion than does the limited domain of fully conscious mind to the dim infinitude of unconscious cerebration. All the labour of Edward Gibbon Wakefield of which it is possible to take cognisance would probably appear insignificant in comparison with his exertions in originating, organising, coaching, cramming, sometimes, perhaps, coaxing or mystifying the various Parliamentary Committees convened to further his projects, or whose interference with these he had to avert.

Wakefield's activity as a Parliamentary engineer followed the same development as his activity as a writer and a promoter of companies; it began with gaols and ended with colonies. The transition was effected through the then prevailing system of transportation, a subject equally important to the reformer of prisons at home and to the emigrant to distant settlements.

It may appear strange to find this Committee cited as an instance of Wakefield's beneficent activity as a colonial reformer, for although his hand may be traced in its recommendations on the sale of land and the encouragement of immigration, his name seems not to occur anywhere in its two folio volumes of report, testimony, and appendices. There can be no stronger illustration of the frequently subterranean character of the most profitable political activity, for Thornton Hunt wrote truly in his obituary notice of Wakefield in the Daily Telegraph:—

'He had gained the active aid of several men in Parliament, and in Sir William Molesworth the colonial reformer found a mover and a chairman for the Committee on Convict Transportation which followed up Ward's.¹ Before that tribunal, by one means or other, Wakefield managed to bring such a mass of appalling evidence that it became impossible to sustain the system, which was in a few years abolished.'

Sir William Molesworth had already assailed transportation in the first number of the London and Westminster Review. A stronger Committee than that presided over by him can seldom have met. It included both the leaders of the House, Lord John Russell and Sir Robert Peel; Lord Howick and Sir George Grey; and Messrs Ward, Hawes, and Charles Buller. Sir William Molesworth's part in colonial affairs now and long afterwards was so important that his character demands a special notice, but it is not one easy to depict. In the pages of Mrs Grote, for years his intimate friend, and, notwithstanding their ultimate estrangement, far above any suspicion of malice, he appears a wayward and indocile being. His political opponents, on the other hand, thought him heavy and slow, a mere absorber of blue-books. The fact appears to be that the vehemence of his temper was at variance with the deliberation of his intellectual processes; and that the vigour of his action, when it came, seemed the more startling from the torpidity which had preceded it. Devoid of imagination or intuition, he was compelled to rely solely upon his very considerable logical faculty, but the certainty of being right which he thus acquired rendered him more absolute and imperious than the quicker minds which have not stopped to verify every step of their course. Morally, notwithstanding the unevennesses of his temper, he was one of the noblest of men. His solid worth and serious aims, steady perseverance in investigation and page 240thorough moral and intellectual honesty are lovingly set forth in the autobiography of his friend, H. F. Chorley, in a passage the more worthy of notice as it has escaped Mr Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary of National Biography. Such characteristics well qualified him for the important task which, at Wakefield's instigation, he now (1837) undertook.

The searching nature of the Committee's investigations is evinced by the fact that, although no more than twenty-three witnesses were examined, their evidence occupies four hundred and fifty pages folio. The appendices of documents comprise between seven and eight hundred pages. The witnesses included official persons like the Chief Justice of New South Wales, who had himself gone out in a convict ship for want of another; Sir George Arthur, formerly Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land; Mr Macarthur, son of the man who had created the wealth of New South Wales by the introduction of merino sheep; Major Wright, ex-police magistrate; and Peter Murdock, ex-superintendent of convicts. There was also representative colonists like Dr Lang, ministers of religion like Dr Ullathorne, afterwards Roman Catholic Bishop of Birmingham, and superintendents of emigration like Mr John Marshall. The appendices are crammed with essays, despatches, reports, petitions, complaints of the scarcity of labour, controversies respecting the charge of Mr Justice Burton, who had frankly told the community that page 241'the main business of them all was the commission of crime or the punishment of it,' and statistics of all kinds down to the number of lashes inflicted by 'the standard scourging-cat.' Evidence and appendices alike teem with details of ill-doing, from the atrocity of the man Pearce, who not only killed the man Cox but ate him, down to the misdemeanour of Mrs Murdock's convict servant, who 'was found lying on the bed with what she called the yard of clay in her mouth, and drinking a pot of porter, and blowing a cloud; that was her expression to Mrs Murdock.' On the whole, a more uninviting picture was probably never traced of any society: 'as the greater portion of the agricultural labourers,' Sir William Molesworth quaintly remarked in his report, 'belong to the criminal population, they constitute a peasantry unlike any other in the world.' The statistics adduced established, as he showed, that the number of convictions for highway robbery in New South Wales, in proportion to the population, exceeded the total number of convictions for all offences in England: that rapes, murders and attempted murders were proportionately as frequent there as petty larcenies here; that if the annual average of convictions in England had been 137,000 instead of 17,000, then, and not till then, the state of crime and punishment in the two countries would have been the same. How could such a condition of things be tolerated? The answer repeated the contention of Wakefield's Letter from page 242Sydney; he had pointed out that, owing to the great dispersion of working people and the facility of procuring land, no labour but convict labour was to be had; and it now appeared that such labour was so indispensable that the colonists were nearly unanimous in resisting any interference with a system which embittered their lives and contaminated their offspring. The Committee, however, were entirely unanimous in condemning it. Under the guidance of Sir William Molesworth, whose report is a model of exhaustive discussion, they resolved that Australia should no longer be polluted for the convenience of the mother country. They recommended the discontinuance of transportation except to distant depôts, and sought to cure the scarcity of labour by an immigration fund obtained by raising the price of land in accordance with Wakefield's principles, the only reward he could expect or receive for his unrecognised labour.

In estimating the credit due to Wakefield, Molesworth and their associates in the abolition of transportation, it must be remembered that they were not the mouthpieces of a popular demand, but were forcing reform upon unwilling colonists, as well as upon an unwilling Government. A meeting held at Hobart Town to protest against convict deportation 'was respectable, but not numerous;' and the material interests of the mother country appeared at first sight still more contrary to any change. Many of us can remember the consternation occasioned when 'ticket-page 243of-leave' and 'garotter' became household words among us from the retention of the convict element at home. Obliged, however, to choose between safety within the four seas and the weal of her colonial empire, Britain has made the right choice, for which she may largely thank Wakefield, Molesworth, and an illustrious man who had taken up the subject from another point of view, Archbishop Whately.

The Transportation Committee had been preceded in the previous session (1836) by one of no less importance upon colonial lands, equally Wakefield's creation, and in whose proceedings he took a prominent instead of an inconspicuous part. The object was to obtain the sanction of the cardinal principles of the Wakefield system, that land should be sold by contract at a sufficient price, instead of being given away or leased at a nominal quit rent, and that the proceeds should be employed in promoting immigration. The former principle had indeed been established by Lord Goderich's New South Wales regulations of 1831, but the price of five shillings an acre thus imposed was, in Wakefield's opinion, as already stated, far too low. It was now proposed, in the words of the report of the Committee, drafted by its able chairman, Mr H. G. Ward, 'that the whole of the arrangements connected with the sale of land should be placed under the charge of a central Land Board, resident in London.' This was carried in Committee, but obstructed by the Government, whose representative, Sir page 244George Grey, Colonial Under Secretary (not to be confounded with the Governor of South Australia and New Zealand), voted steadily against all the specifically Wakefieldian clauses of the Report. Land Commissioners, however, were ultimately appointed by Lord John Russell, but only as an appendage to the Colonial Office. The evidence collected was of the highest value, conveying the opinions of such authorities as Wakefield, Torrens, Hanson and Poulett Scrope. The inquiry was also of great personal advantage to Wakefield, bringing him into connection with many members of the House of Commons; familiarising the public with his name, hitherto so much in the background; and exhibiting him as a powerful reasoner on his feet, no less than in his study. He was severely cross-examined by Roebuck, who was hardly capable of forming a serious opinion upon an economical question, but whose French Canadian clients dreaded the application of the Wakefield system to Lower Canada. Wakefield, however, felt that the tide was with him, and thus concluded the remarkable passage in his evidence, already referred to, upon New Zealand and other fields yet open to the colonizing energy of Britain:—

'These, I know, may be considered as something like dreams; but if they be so, I shall have the consolation of knowing that the plan of fixing a price upon all lands, and employing the purchase money as an immigration fund, which was described page 245to the Committee the other day by the Honourable Member for Devonport as the only plan which any reasonable person would now think or adopting, was, not six years, not five years ago, I think I may say not three years ago, treated with derision and scorn by those who had the means of carrying it into full effect.'

Before passing on to the two great New Zealand Committees of 1840 and 1844 it will be convenient to deal briefly with the South Australian Committee of 1840, already mentioned. This did not immediately concern Wakefield, as the inquiry principally respected the proceedings of the South Australian Commissioners, with whom he had no official connection, and the alarming financial condition of the colony, for which he was in no way responsible. He nevertheless gave important evidence, advocating a stricter application of his system to the organisation of the colony, and the appendix of documents contains one of the most remarkable papers he ever wrote, his letter of the 2d June 1835 to the South Australian Commissioners, from which large quotations have already been made. The result of the inquiry was entirely favourable to his views, the Committee reporting:—

'Your Committee conceive that the first principle of the system of colonization originally recommended by Mr Wakefield (to realise which was the object of founding the colony of South Australia) is that page 246of maintaining a due proportion between the extent of land which is appropriated and the population by which it is occupied, by imposing such a price upon land as shall prevent its being bought until the number of its inhabitants is sufficient to make use of to advantage. Your Committee, persuaded by the soundness of this principle, consider the fact stated by Colonel Gawler to be conclusive as to the inadequacy of the price hitherto imposed upon land in South Australia, since the appropriation of so much greater an extent of land than is required to supply the wants of the inhabitants is altogether inconsistent with the attainment of the object justly considered of paramount importance by Mr Wakefield, that, namely of rendering the industry of the colonists as productive as possible, by maintaining in a newly settled colony the same system of combination of labour and division of employments which prevails in older societies. Hence an increase in the price of land in South Australia seems to your Committee to be necessary, in order to give effect to the principle upon which the colony was established.'

The New Zealand Committee of 1840 brought out a full statement of the case between the New Zealand Company and its various opponents. Here Wakefield was the most conspicuous figure, and his evidence teems with interest as regards the state of the country before settlement, the proceedings page 247of the company, its relations with the Government, the reserves of land for the benefit of the natives, the provisions for religion and education, the question of auction sales of land, the French expedition, and almost every point that could be raised. His assertions respecting the support originally promised to the company by Lord Howick led to a remarkable scene, thus described in his Art of Colonization:—

'I was examined for several days, Lord Howick not being present. When my examination was closed he attended the Committee for the first time, and complained of certain statements made by me as a witness, which he declared to be untrue. At his instance a day was fixed when I was to attend the Committee for the single purpose of being crossexamined by him, and destroyed if he made his charges good. When we met in the committee room, it contained, besides a full attendance of members of the Committee, other members of the House, who came there to witness the anticipated conflict. But hardly any conflict took place. Lord Howick, after arranging on the table a formidable mass of notes and documents, put some questions to me with a view of establishing one of his accusations. The answers established that I had spoken the exact truth, and that my accuser himself was mistaken. Instead of proceeding to another charge, he hastily gathered up his papers and left the room without a remark. The Committee's page 248blue-book reports the words that passed: if it also described the scene you would probably, upon reading it, agree with the lookers-on that in this murderous attack upon me Lord Howick was provokingly worsted.'

The scene, in truth, can in nowise be reproduced from the Report. Blue-books do not often stir as with the sound of a trumpet, but often would if tone and manner could be reproduced as well as language. It is to Lord Howick's honour that he attended a dinner given by the New Zealand Company to Wakefield in the following year, and was friendly to the Company as long as he remained in opposition. Whether the air of Downing Street, or, as Wakefield thought, jealousy of Mr Gladstone, subsequently biased him to a different course, cannot be determined. Mr Gladstone, it should be noted, was a member of the Committee of 1840, and had it depended upon him, its proceedings would not have been abortive. He voted for the statesmanlike draft report of the chairman, Lord Eliot, which the majority shelved without putting anything into its place. Lord Eliot proposed that New Zealand should be made an independent colony, and, agreeing that all unoccupied land should be vested in the Crown, and that the Crown should have the right of preemption over all land actually possessed by the natives, recommended that the Company should retain land equal in value to the amount expended by it page 249in colonization, and that until a settled revenue could be obtained, the funds necessary for State purposes should be advanced by it upon loan. Commissioners, 'wholly unconnected with New Zealand and New South Wales, and having no pecuniary interests in either colony,' were to be appointed by the Crown to regulate all questions. Crown land was to be sold by contract at a uniform price of not less than a pound an acre, and the proceeds were to be employed as an immigration fund for conveying labouring emigrants to the colony. This would have been a nearly ideal system of colonization, but the majority of the Committee elected to leave things as they were. Lord John Russell, then Colonial Secretary, was considerably influenced by Lord Eliot's abortive report, and not only approximated to the directors, as already related, but accepted a dinner from them. All seemed going well, when, to employ Carlyle's metaphor, the New Zealand minnow's little creek was perturbed by an oceanic catastrophe in the British Parliament. Lord John Russell went out, Lord Stanley came in, and war between the Government and the Company broke out anew:

It is not easy to determine why Lord Stanley should have thought it needful to undo his predecessor's work. He was the last man to be unduly deferential to missionaries. The company imputed all the 'large blue flies' of the Colonial Office to Sir James page 250Stephen; but Stanley was not Glenelg, nor Stephen's influence what it had been under that amiable nobleman. None ought to question Stanley's honesty of purpose: the probability is that he really discerned nothing beyond the purview of an ordinary Treasury clerk, and never suspected that this wolf of a Company was nursing an empire.

It must in justice to the Government be remembered that their patience had been severely strained by the extravagance of successive Governors of New South Wales, who had among them incurred two or three millions of liabilities with little visible return. This could not, however, justify the hostile tone towards the Company which Stanley assumed from the first, and his virtual repudiation of the engagements of his predecessor. In February 1843 he committed himself unreservedly to the Treaty of Waitangi, which was one of the leading questions for the great Parliamentary Committee of the following year. In May 1843, however, he came to an arrangement which allowed of the resumption of its suspended land sales, but they were again suspended in February 1844. On 26th April, Wakefield wrote to his sister:—

'Yesterday the New Zealand Company's proprietors learned all the truth about their affairs, which is a great relief to me. We declared war to the knife with the Colonial Office; and last night the House of Commons, on Aglionby's motion, appointed a select Committee to inquire into the whole subject.'

This Committee engendered one of the most formidable Blue Books ever produced as regards weight and size, although its contents are frequently highly interesting and readable. 'You may guess,' says Wakefield to his sister, 'how busy I have been when I tell you that our evidence appended to the Report occupies 800 or 900 pages of print.' Between minutes of testimony and documents, the number of pages is in fact exactly a thousand. The documents include Colonel Wakefield's reports of his voyages and purchases, embodying a vast store of miscellaneous observations; Dr Dieffenbach's reports on natural history; Colonel Wakefield's correspondence with various governors, lieutenant governors, commissioners of lands, and natives' protectors; his despatches home setting forth the afflictions he underwent from these personages; the whole history of the Wairau massacre and of Captain Fitzroy's condonation of it; the accounts of the company; and the highly controversial correspondence between their chairman and Lord Stanley and his under secretary. It will be remarked that scarcely any important document on the Company's side is dated at a time when Wakefield was out of England; his name, nevertheless, occurs only twice, as the father of Edward Jerningham Wakefield and as one of the recipients of an official letter of condolence on the death of Arthur Wakefield. The evidence, less voluminous than the appendices, abounds in details respecting the purchases of the Company, page 252the natives' notions of landed and other property, and their relations with Europeans in general. From this the Committee had to elicit, if it could, a judgment on the past transactions, a policy for the future administration of the islands, and a decision whether the Company was entitled to claim performance of the agreement entered into with Lord John Russell, and thwarted by his successor. Although ten out of fifteen members of the Committee were of Lord Stanley's political party, the result was a brilliant but barren victory for the Company, accurately described in two letters from Wakefield. The first, written on the very day (9th July 1844) of the passing of the resolutions on which the Committee's report was founded, is addressed to his brother-in-law from the House of Commons:—

'The resolutions have all passed, after a desperate fight, together with one proposed by Lord F. Egerton speaking in the handsomest terms of poor Arthur. The Report, to be based upon these resolutions, will be drawn by Lord Howick, and presented to the Committee in a fortnight. There is no doubt of its passing.'

A second letter, to his sister, is dated 4th July, but there must be some error:—

'As London secrets are very safe at Stoke, I write to tell you that we know what the Report of the Committee of the House of Commons will be, having seen a draft of it. It goes to exculpate us and condemn the Colonial Office upon almost every point of page 253difference, and will be, I think, a complete exculpation of poor Arthur's memory, and of William's and my boy's conduct throughout. This concerns ourselves and might [should] not have been mentioned first. As to the Company, and what I care more about, the colony, measures will be recommended for putting all to rights without delay. I expect the Report will be carried by a large majority in the Committee, including the chairman (Lord Howick, who drew it), Lord Francis Egerton, Sir John Hanmer, Mr Clive and other respectable Tories. What Hope and Stanley and Stephen are to do is their affair. Fitzroy must, I think, resign; and the animals who governed in Hobson's name, and afterwards with Shortland, will be sent about their business. This is not a too sanguine account.'

Wakefield was here, as often, over sanguine; he seemed, nevertheless, to have sound reasons for his confidence. Lord Howick's report was carried as he predicted, and as proceeding from an old antagonist of the New Zealand Company, and approved by a Committee neither packed in its interest nor engineered by its managers except for the manoeuvring necessary to get Lord Howick into the chair, it ought to have settled the question. It is an exceedingly able document, forcibly pointing out the mischief of the antagonism between the Crown and the Company which had existed from the first, though of course not admitting that Lord Howick himself and his col-page 254leagues were its chief authors, and even blaming the Company for the happy audacity which had preserved New Zealand to Britain. Coming, however, to the root of all actual difficulties, the indiscriminate recognition of native titles to land under the Treaty of Waitangi, Lord Howick points out that the lands held collectively, of which the possession was guaranteed to the original inhabitants of New Zealand, must have been regarded as the lands actually occupied by them, 'which would have removed from the field of discussion by far the greater part of the lands purchased by the Company. If native rights to the ownership of land had been admitted only when arising from occupation, there would have been no difficulty in giving at once to the settlers secure and quiet possession of the land they required, and they would thus have been able to begin without delay and in earnest the work of reclaiming the unoccupied soil.' Instead of this, they had been harassed by commissioners and lawsuits and a hydra growth of native claims which it was fondly deemed had been extinguished, and the majority were yet without valid titles. Practical remedies were proposed for healing this state of things, and the claim of the Company under the agreement made in November 1840 with Lord John Russell, under which the Company was to receive four acres for every pound it had expended, 'without reference to the validity, or otherwise, of its supposed purchases from the natives,' page 255was fully upheld. That this was the view of Lord John Russell himself is clear from a letter of his in the appendix addressed to the Governor of the Company, and dated 29th June 1844:—

'I believed the extent of land which it would be in the power of the Crown to grant to be far greater than would be enough to satisfy its engagements. I did not suppose that any claim could be set up by the natives to the millions of acres of land which are to be found in New Zealand neither occupied nor cultivated, nor in any fair sense owned by any individual. I believed, therefore, that in any case the Crown could fulfil its promise; and that when so many pounds had been proved to have been expended by the Company for purposes named in the agreement, the Crown would be able to grant to the Company four acres of land for each pound so expended.'

Lord Stanley, however, had no notion of giving in, and his despatches to New Zealand were of a nature to practically nullify the decision of the Committee. Much friction consequently arose. Wakefield tells his sister in an undated letter, which must have been written about this time:—

'The New Zealand war waxes fiercer every week. The correspondence with Lord Stanley has now got to a ludicrous pitch of Billingsgate on both sides. Cheat, liar, fool are not common words in the letters, but express ideas commonly found there. There is little to choose between the parties as to fierceness, page 256but we have the great advantage of having truth on our side. The correspondence rolls the proud Stanley in the dirt, and how he will ever bring himself to let the public see it passes my comprehension. His part in it is a series of tricks and falsehoods which our part remorselessly exposes. Lord John Russell, who is a most important witness in the cause, agrees with us on main points. I rely on the justice of the Prime Minister, to whom we shall probably be compelled to appeal.'

It is indeed likely that if Sir Robert Peel could have had his own way a settlement would have been arrived at. He always treated the question with becoming reserve and moderation, and disapproved of the Treaty of Waitangi, which had been ratified when he was out of office. He could not openly overrule so important a colleague as Stanley, but it was probably owing to his influence, augmented by the general tone of a debate raised by Charles Buller in March 1845, that Government for awhile seemed inclined to come to terms:—

'The recent debates about New Zealand,' Wakefield writes to his sister on 23d March, 'have had the desired effect; the Government, not Lord Stanley alone, but his principal colleagues, with his consent, having made us an overture of reconciliation. We have said "Yes" on the understanding that we are not to patch up the old arrangement, which is too vague, and makes us too dependent on the goodwill page 257of Government, but have a new one, which, subject to certain well-defined checks, shall render us independent. We require, in short, security for the future as well as indemnity for the past; and the reply has been, "Very well; it is best to make an effective and lasting arrangement whilst we are about it." The negotiation is now in full swing.'

A scheme was, in fact, drawn out in private communications between Charles Buller and Sir James Graham, which failed from the opposition of Lord Stanley. Wakefield writes to his sister, apparently on 6th June:—

'The negotiation is over and has not resulted in any agreement. Our proposal is rejected by Stanley; and we have rejected an offer from him to pay off the shareholders of the Company. The whole must come out next week, and will have at least the effect of improving our position: since the Government have entertained the plan of handing over to us the sovereignty of New Zealand, and have offered the shareholders full compensation of their loss of £300,000. I am better than might have been expected, and have been able to take all the part I wished in the negotiation and in rejecting the offer of the Government.'

Nothing remained for the New Zealand Company but to bring their case before Parliament, though with the certainty of being outvoted. They had already, on 16th April, even while the negotiations with Lord page 258Stanley were pending, presented an elaborate petition stating their grievances, and their case was now entrusted to Charles Buller. Nothing but his premature death prevented this gifted man from taking a foremost rank among the orators as well as the statesmen of his time. He had already, in 1843, delivered a great speech on colonization, not leading or intended to lead to a division, which may be found as an appendix to Wakefield's Art of Colonization, and his opening speech in the debate which commenced on 17th June was worthy of his best powers. The special proposal made was that the House should resolve itself into a Committee to consider the case of the Company, which the Government chose to regard as a vote of censure on the Colonial Secretary. The result under such circumstances could not be doubtful, but, considering that the Government's normal majority was ninety, its reduction to fifty-one was a signal triumph for reason and justice. Stanley's fiery eloquence could not be heard; he was safely bottled up in the House of Lords. It is easy to imagine him and Wakefield listening to the debate, each thinking how much better he himself could have conducted it, and chafing at the insuperable impediment that kept him dumb. Ellen Turner was indeed avenged! Nevertheless, Wakefield's side had little reason for complaint. Sheil's eloquence was enlisted in their cause, but they derived more really valuable support from impartial and not altogether friendly page 259speakers like Lord John Russell and Lord Howick. On the other side the official orators, Peel, Graham, Cardwell, while speaking with dignity and effect, indicated that they did not feel altogether comfortable in the position into which they had been dragged by the unruly Stanley. Nor could they well, the question being merely whether the Company, having undeniably received a promise of four acres of land for every pound they had expended, should be forthwith endowed with them out of the waste unoccupied lands belonging to the Crown, the other party to the compact; or whether a purely imaginary native right to these lands should be set up, ruinous to Company and settlers alike, and in no way advantageous to the natives, whose interests would have been much better consulted by a strict execution of the Company's original plan of reserves in their favour. But Peel was afraid of a native war.

The Company showed their confidence in their case by publishing a full report of the debate, with no comment beyond a reprint of certain documents in an appendix. The arrival of alarming news from New Zealand gave Buller an opportunity of raising the question once again on 21st July, but he was defeated by a majority of sixty-six, a result fully anticipated by Wakefield, who had written to his sister on 23d July:—

'All my power of writing, and even thinking, is so thoroughly engaged by the New Zealand affairs page 260that I really have been unable to write to you, nor can I say more than a few words now. We shall be beaten in the Commons by a larger majority than before, as Peel has staked his Government on the issue, and people would send New Zealand, not to mention all Polynesia, to the bottom of the sea rather than turn him out for such a cause. But Stanley is gradually ruining himself, and everybody says he will retire when things are quiet. We mean to fight to the last, even on our own stumps. I suffer from the excitement, and now talk of going abroad after the session for three months with Charles Buller. If I could keep out of business in England it would please me better, but of that I have no chance.'

Wakefield's predictions were so far justified that Lord Stanley resigned the Colonial Secretaryship before the end of the year, ostensibly from his opposition to the Free Trade policy of Sir Robert Peel; but Wakefield always asserted that resentment at his chief's lukewarmness in supporting his New Zealand policy had much to do with it. His successor was Mr Gladstone, no novice in colonial matters, but one who had served on many colonial committees, and had always displayed eminent fairness of mind. To him, in January 1846, Wakefield addressed an elaborate memoir, which marks the transition in his own activity from that of the advocate of a company to that of the framer of a page 261constitution. After a vigorous sketch of the prevailing dissatisfaction through all such parts of the British Colonial Empire as had not obtained relief by rebellion, and a terse and just definition of the fount of all the special ills of New Zealand as consisting in the 'placing of colonization in one set of hands and leaving all the rest of government in another set,' aptly compared to 'a pair of legs directed by different volitions, which would inevitably try to go different ways, and thus come to a standstill,' he proposes that the Company should retire from the scene altogether after receiving compensation, and that the colony should be divided into different selfgoverning municipalities, the Governor's office being abolished. Native affairs within the boundaries of the municipalities were to be left to the regulation of the governments; outside these precincts, to themselves. The scheme probably grew out of the negotiations then in progress for the foundation of the Otago settlement, and foreshadows the system of provincial governments which long prevailed in New Zealand. The plan is not put forward as the best conceivable, but as a substitute for the preferable scheme of administration by a chartered company, assumed to be now impracticable. It was shrewdly devised to enable the colonists to get rid of the Colonial Office, but seems to imply a more advanced condition than the New Zealand settlements had then attained. page 262Few Secretaries of State have had more ability or more inclination than Mr Gladstone to deal in a statesmanlike manner with colonial affairs. Two rocks he might have struck upon; his High Church sympathies, skilfully played upon by Wakefield in this very memoir, and his tendency to unwise parsimony. Could these have been repressed he might have done great things; but Free Trade at the moment swallowed up every other question, and he probably gave but little attention to New Zealand in his brief and troubled term of office, during which he was without a seat in Parliament. Wakefield's memoir, with other interesting documents, was published in a supplement to the Spectator of 6th June. A few days previously the disheartened Company had passed a resolution in favour of retiring altogether from the work of colonization. Two months afterwards as related above Wakefield was withdrawn from public affairs by the sudden stroke of illness, and when, after a long interval, the paralysed brain regained capacity for business, he found himself confronted with a new Secretary, a new Governor, a new Parliament, and, most important of all, a new spirit in the Company itself.

Mention may be made here of two minor writings of Wakefield's which fall within his Committee period. One, an annotated edition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, might have been of considerable importance if it had been completed, but only the page 263first volume, published in 1835, contains any notes of interest. Subsequent volumes were published up to 1840 with Wakefield's name as editor, but his engagements appear to have prevented his giving any serious attention to the book. The notes exhibit him as a sagacious rather than as a regularly-trained thinker. 'His practical conclusions,' says Mill, 'appear to me just and important; but he is not equally happy in incorporating his valuable speculations with the results of previous thought.' The commentary is now perhaps chiefly important for its notices of subsequent discoveries and social mutations which may tend to affect the conclusions of Smith, whose work, nevertheless, he says, 'is not only the most valuable book in the science, but one more valuable than all the others put together.' In fact, in Mill's opinion, Wakefield's doctrines are sound corollaries from Smith, though Smith himself might not have admitted it. In addition to the objects which an editor of The Wealth of Nations might be expected to propose to himself, Wakefield has two others. 'To warn the student against implicit faith in the doctrines of a science which yet wants a complete alphabet; to show how imperfect that science is after all that has been done for it, and to indicate some questions of great moment concerning which next to nothing has been done. Secondly, to apply the doctrines of Adam Smith and others to some new circumstances in the economical state page 264of our own country. Urged by the belief that economical suffering has been caused by misgovernment, we are proceeding to establish a virtual democracy. It is a grand but also a fearful experiment.'

De Tocqueville's great work on Democracy in America had been published in the same year as that in which these words were written, 1835. Whether Wakefield had seen it or not is uncertain; his reflections had evidently led him to the same conclusions. These are further expressed in a little volume, Popular Politics (1837), which may be commended to those who fancy that, because he wished the aristocracy to have their share in building up the Empire, he was therefore an aristocrat. It is on the contrary a manifesto of democratic principles, which might be termed violent and crude but for its evidently designed adaptation to untrained readers, in a style imitative of Cobbett. Most of the papers are reprints from previous publications then out of print. One of the most powerful is an account from personal observation of the horror excited by the introduction of public executions into Dunkirk. In another, a judge is represented as addressing a criminal on the good turn he is doing him by sentencing him to transportation: 'For what you have done here, depend on it, you will not be punished; if you abstain from crime in the colony, you will be richly rewarded for the crime which page 265brought you before me, fortunate rascal that you are!'

Wakefield's Radicalism, nevertheless, was of the opportunist order; he supported political reforms less on abstract grounds than as means to the ends defined in his election address to the people of Birmingham as 'high wages and high profits, both together, with high rents at the same time, such productive industry as should yield plenty for the workmen, plenty for the master, and plenty for the landlord—not by fits occasionally interrupting the ordinary state of distress, but permanently, so as to ensure to all classes at all times the means of a happy existence.'

Such was the creed of the man who has been held up to opprobrium as the tool of the aristocrat and the capitalist. But neither was he the instrument of the classes below them. He was fully as desirous that the landlord should obtain a fair rent as that the labourer should receive fair wages. Cobden and Bright denounced the selfishness of the land-owning class, an accusation retorted with equal vehemence upon the manufacturers. In Wakefield, and almost in Wakefield alone, except for Carlyle, whom he never mentions, we find perfect fairness to every class, and equal zeal for the well-being of all: an object which he thought, and Carlyle thought with him, easy of attainment, if due advantage were taken of the opportunities provided by the expansion of our Colonial Empire. There page 266was no feature in his programme which the Conservatives could not take up as well as the Radicals, and when after a while the Conservatives did in a measure take it up, they took up the Radical candidate for Birmingham along with it.