Having but a few hours to write, I must refrain from entering as minutely as I could wish on the contents of your letter, which seems to have been written with intent to intimidate a man of weak nerve, who would feebly renounce his rights and forgo the objects which have brought him to these remote regions.

page 85

But in this, Sir, you mistake me, for I am neither very ignorant of worldly affairs, nor very easily frightened out of my plans. The which, with the blessing of God, I will bring ere long to desired maturity.

Acting on the broad principle that New Zealand is not a possession of the British Crown, I come forward as the humble champion of present and future New Zealand liberties. That my timber has been cut and is daily cutting, is sold and is daily selling, to my great loss, the loss of many thousands of pounds, all this I well know. But what I never expected to know is that an agent of the Crown of England would warn me not to approach my own property. Were we living under a Dey of Algiers, such things might be believed, but they are monstrous in British annals.… Such a thing is impossible, for were the King to deprive me of my lands, I would be an oppressed man; and if warned off my property by the King, a persecuted man; and thirty millions of voices would be raised in my defence, for there is not a person in Great Britain, from the peer to the peasant, but will side with the oppressed.

I must ask in what I have aimed a blow at the liberties of the people of New Zealand? Is it by coming thousands of miles to arrest their too rapid demoralisation and degradation, and by wishing to raise them to the level of civilisation? Is it by devoting all my earthly substance to them? Is it by bringing a young family to dwell among them? By encountering dangers and privations, and by my willingness to live and die in their cause, that I show myself to be the dangerous man you are pleased to picture me?

Look at the United States, the Canadas, the West Indies, South America, the Cape of Good Hope, New Holland and Van Diemen's Land: and you may point an instructive moral to the New Zealanders. When the New Zealand chiefs who received a flag (for the benefit of a few white people who wanted registers for New Zealand-built ships), assisted at this extraordinary ceremony, how were they treated? As equals, or as inferiors? Did they dine at the same table with the whites; or is it true, as newspapers report, that they “were supplied with a plentiful mess of flour sweetened with sugar, on which they feasted”?

Is this the manner in which hereditary chiefs are to be treated? It is thus, sir, that the proud spirit of the native race is broken and degraded. They are spoken of as sovereigns, and treated as slaves. But there is yet a voice which shall be heard by these devoted page 86 people; they shall learn the truth, they shall see how hereditary chiefs ought to be treated. And then, if they think it is to their interest to treat me as you have so humanely advised, they may kill and eat me, and history shall tell her own version, which will never redound very greatly to the credit of those who represented me other than one of the earliest and best friends of the New Zealand people.