History has seen some remarkable changes in the popular estimation of prominent figures in the life of the nation. The lapse of time brings a more balanced and better-informed view of disputed causes, and a more generous attitude towards those who were once regarded as enemies. New Zealand has seen the vindication of Maori leaders who were in their day denounced as rebels, and whose principles and actions are now admitted to have been those of patriots fighting for their people's rights. In this sketch of a leader whose ethics were those of a peacemaker, the celebrated Te Whiti-o-Rongomai, of Taranaki, the writer shows that in history even the best-intentioned of Governments have sometimes failed to deal justly with a political opponent, and that might is sometimes confused with right.

The land, always the land, has been the cause of contention that led to the tragedy of war in New Zealand. There was only one exception, perhaps, Hone Heke's little war in the North. But that issue was not complicated, or aggravated, by the confiscation of land in revenge for rebellion against the white Queen's authority. In the wars of the Sixties the first and last issue was the land. The key to all the campaigns and expeditions, up to and including the fortunately bloodless invasion of Parihaka, Te Whiti's great camp, in 1881, is to be found in the taking of Maori land by force of arms. There is no need here to recapitulate those old unhappy wars, except to explain that the great blunder of the disputed Waitara purchase in 1860, with all the arbitrary acts that followed it, began the long and bitter struggle of the races which a more enlightened national opinion has closed and healed. The great tactical mistake of our Governments in the Sixties was the revengeful seizure of enormous areas of land, the ancestral homes of thousands of the Maori race. Apart from all questions of right and wrong, and the impossibility of proving fully who were innocent and who were guilty of the acts described as rebellion, it would have been far cheaper to have purchased all the land in Waikato and Taranaki and elsewhere that was confiscated by process of law and occupied by force of arms. The Waitara purchase was officially renounced by the Government, and the justice of Wiremu Kingi te Rangitaake's objection to the purchase was tacitly admitted, but the Government of the day blundered into another war, and followed it up by the policy that the Maori describes as “muru-whenua,” that is, the forcible taking of land without giving any equivalent for it. Probably the view held by the ruling politicians in the Sixties was that the Maori race was a dying one, bound to disappear before the pakeha, and that it was therefore not necessary to consider the future generations of the Maori, and the innocent children of the combatants. At any rate they were dispossessed of their best lands, and what reserves were made for them as a kind of afterthought were quite inadequate.

That was the position in Taranaki; that was the issue that embittered the Maori mind, and would have led to a renewal of the disastrous wars but for one man, and that man was Te Whiti, the prophet and priest and little king of Parihaka.

Peace, peace, was ever Te Whiti's call and watchword; it was the guiding principle of his life. Peace and good-will, and self-sacrifice in the cause of peace. He suffered imprisonment in the cause of his people's rights, he urged peace, non-resistance. “Guns and powder,” he told his people more than once, when there were signs of impatience at the aggressive actions of their pakeha opponents, “shall no longer be the protection of man. Our weapon is forbearance, patience, non-resistance. God is our refuge and our strength.” He made strange oracular utterances that often mystified the pakeha; he was described as a fanatic and a madman, but his fine madness saved his people and the country from fearful strife.

There certainly was truth in many of Te Whiti's prophecies. This was one of his sayings shortly before his arrest by the military in 1881, when he declared that he was willing to be made a sacrifice for his people: “Though I am killed, yet I shall live. The future is mine, and little children will answer in the future when questioned as to the author of peace, ‘Te Whiti,’ and I will bless them.”