The most admirable character among all the high Maori chiefs with whom our pioneers came in contact in the adventurous days of New Zealand colonisation was the head of the Ngati-Haua tribe, Wiremu Tamehana te Waharoa, the King-maker, as he came to be called. He was the leading figure in the cause of Maori nationalism before the Waikato War; he was essentially a peacemaker, and had his plans for native self-government been adopted there would have been no war. This sketch of his life explains in brief his altruistic aspirations, and the disappointment of all his hopes for the peaceful progress of the tribes.

Te Whakapono, te Aroha, me te Ture” (“Religion, Love, and the Law”) was the watchword of the political faith promulgated by the patriotic Wiremu Tamehana Tarapipipi te Waharoa, the principal founder of the Waikato Maori Kingdom seventy-seven years ago. It was a gospel founded on peace and a fine love of country, a desire to live on friendly terms with the pakeha, and at the same time to preserve national self-respect by establishing a kind of home rule for the Maori, under the supreme mana of the White Queen. Tamehana, a man inspired by pure love of country and imbued with a sense of justice and a desire for progress in the ways and industries of civilisation, was one in advance of most of his contemporaries in the colony, pakeha as well as Maori. He was a man of high principles and keen intellect.

One who knew him better than most of his pakeha acquaintances in New Zealand, the late Sir John Gorst, held him in very great esteem for his qualities of head and heart. When Gorst was in New Zealand on a visit in 1906, after more than forty years’ absence, he told me that in all his long life he had never met a more able debater or a more logical thinker than Wiremu Tamehana, a man whom most pakehas of his day—the men who did not know him—would have considered little better than a savage.

With all the powers of a wellbalanced intellect the chief of Ngati-Haua argued for the right of the Maoris to administer their affairs within their own boundaries. “The Queen for the pakeha, the King for the Maori, and God over all,” was his motto of peaceful campaign. It was not in any way inconsistent with loyalty to the accepted principle of British supreme domain. He had seen the evils of disunion and feuds among the tribes. “Religion, Love and the Law” —there was not much to quarrel with in that, surely. But an unsympathetic, and indeed actively hostile, government on the one hand and war-loving chieftains and tribes on the other, brought all the benevolent Tamehana's hopes to naught.