Mr. Fitzgerald's Remedies.

Having thus sought to show that, both by interest and duty, the Mother-Country is bound to give effective aid to the Colony in this War, and glanced at that "Peace" which, as it seems to me, would be the only Peace that could insure quiet for the future and the mutual good of both Races, I shall ask to be permitted to offer a word or two on certain "Suggestions for the Pacification of New Zealand" put forth in the letter from Mr. Fitzgerald appearing in your issue of the 25th ultimo.

Commenting thereon, you remark that you wish that the person who makes them could be supposed to speak the feelings and wishes of the united Colonists of New Zealand instead of a particular Party, and, at the most, of a particular Island.

Let me thank you, Sir, for these pregnant words. Personally, Mr. Fitzgerald is one of our most popular Colonists, and as an efficient Promoter of that flower of Settlements, Canterbury, may well find a place in some future Maucaulay's "History of New Zealand" among those great Emigrant —those Wakefields, Foxes, Moles-worths, Petres, Dillons, Cargills, Cliffords, Godleys—who founded the finest Colony Britain ever possessed. Politically, however, Mr. Fitzgerald is, if I may use such a term, "nowhere."—In our young Colonial Legislature page 48 he is the Pan, melodious, of the glad Sheep Farmers of Canterbury—gentlemen whose knowledge of "Native Matters," dwelling as they do in a region where the Maori is only the Gipsy, is about equal to that of the Sheep Farmers of Cumberland. But, notwithstanding the pastoral and pacific character of his wealthy Constituency, Mr. Fitzgerald (like other of our Hibernian friends), appears to live in a state of chronic hostility to all constituted Authorities. So many, so sudden, are the changes in our little Australasian Ministries that no man can remember who composed them or how they fell—but Mr. Fitzgerald, I think, has been a member of half-a-dozen New Zealand Ministries and scarcely remained as many weeks with any one of them. Politically, indeed in these early days, he is rather a man of "crotchets;" and one of his present crotchets is that of his calling himself, and some three others,^* the "Peace Party" of New Zealand—a Party whose belief appears to be that if you keep perpetually firing codes of paper laws at Maori War-Pahs you will, eventually, knock them down.

This butterfly may go. But, if I do him no injustice, Mr. Fitzgerald has become the victim of another delusion which needs nipping in the bud, namely, the delusion that two Colonies in New Zealand would be better than one, six better than two, twelve better than six. For the most part, the Southern Settlements in New Zealand, particularly humane and hearty Nelson, have stuck close to their Northern Sisters in these their days of deuil, and have amply recognized the ties of race and blood. But, of late, the Americanized Australian Diggers who now rule the roast at Otago banded with certain Canterbury Cobdens, also represented by Mr. Fitzgerald, have bethought themselves of two schemes which might bring them great profit, possibly, but no honour. The one, that if they were to leave Auckland and New Plymouth and Hawkes Bay and Wellington, to settle this Native War by themselves, they would keep silver in the purse—the other, that if the North Island could be stripped from the South and reduced to a mere Crown Colony, a mere Missionary Preserve, the auriferous stream of immigration which once flowed so freely to it would flow thither no more, but would be attracted to the "fresh fields and pastures new" of Canterbury, Southland, and Otago—fields where the British Emigrant would not find himself shorn of his civil rights, or be crushed into the Serf of the Savage as, it is pictured, his plight would be in the North.

Now I trust, Sir, that the Mother-Country will never sanction any such base desertion of one group of her children by another as this would be—nor for a moment lend further ear to that spirit of "Provincialism"^* among

^* In civil matters, we are not Whigs and Tories in New Zealand, but "Centralists" and "Provincialists," that is those who would govern New Zealand by one Parliament, and those who would govern her by many. The six Provincial Councils given to the Colony by the Constitution were given to "Provincialism"——and I am bound to admit that the experience of ten years has proved that they were a most useful feature of the Constitution. But" Provincialism "wants more and more of them; and, now, every little Parish-Settlement in the Colony counting 1000 Settlers aspires to don the Purple, and to be raised to the dignity of a Province, like Auckland, Canterbury, Otago, Wellington, Nelson, and New Plymouth—and when we get about twenty little Provinces, "Provincialism" would parcel them out into little groups of twos and threes, and turn them into half-a-dozen little Coloniest each, possibly, in the end demanding a separate Flag.

page 50 us, so attractive to Mr. Fitzgerald, which has already split New Zealand into a dozen little quasi-Colonies—Provin-cialism which, despite the fable truths of the "Bundle of Sticks," would split her into a dozen more; and which, possibly, by the year 1900, might be calling for an army of yours to suppress the little furies of an antipodal colonial internecine War.

Again, on another and even graver point, I regret to say that Mr. Fitzgerald seems to me to be utterly, and somewhat ostentatiously and flippantly in the wrong. In counselling you to abandon New Zealand, he virtually says, "dont suffer yourselves to be alarmed lest if you withdraw your Troops the Settlers will kill all the Natives" Now, for a man sitting safe behind wool fleeces at Canterbury, where life and property are as secure as in Kent, it may be very grand to talk in this way. But in what, were it any other man, I should call his crass complacency, Mr. Fitzgerald appears to be oblivious to the fact that when Settlers of English birth and breeding have their children's throats cut, and the fruits of their toil of years made blackened ruins in a day, they dont take pen and ruler and cast up the cost of revenge before they take it.

Indeed, differing in toto from a comparatively new comer page 51 in the Colony like Mr. Fitzgerald, quite a South Island Settler, the great majority of the old residents in the North Island, the men who have lived among the Natives for twenty years, hold that so surely as you withdraw your Troops and retire from this War which you have given them, before you have helped them to win their way out of it by a final Peace, based on some such conditions as have been named, so surely, sooner or later, must War burst out again and become, possibly, a butchery.

The triumphant Maori would everywhere feel that the Victory was his—he would recommence his practice of twenty years of bullying the Weak—the Weak would again bend and bear and forbear—till, at last, some crowning war-grudge Massacre, such as that of the "King Family" at Wanganui after the last Revolt, would light the spark and drive the Settlers to madness—madness, though, with a method—for, proclaiming the whole of the magnificent North Island "Prize of War," they would, I think, invoke the near and sympathetic aid of Victoria and New South Wales; and, with your leave, possibly without your leave, would do their best, I fear, incited by cruel wrongs, to obliterate the Maori as a Race from off the face of the Earth.

Mr. Fitzgerald, too, is, I think, equally unhappy on Sir George Grey. Certainly, many think that a new, and a stormy-weather Pilot is now needed at the helm—but what Sir George did or did not do in Taranaki or Waikato has no real concern with the question of the Causes of the War, or how best to end it. As to the "Root" of the whole matter, the Root lying at Taranaki, the Taranaki Colonists (the men on the spot) hold that the miserable patch of Land at the Waitara page 52 (the ostensible cause of the original quarrel,) was fully and fairly purchased for the Crown of its true Owners by Governor Gore Browne—that the "after evidence," as it is called, got up by the Philo-Maori Attorneys of the Native, was not worth a straw—and that Governor Grey's abandonment of the Waitara was a mere bit of his old "Tract and Treacle "Policy—a mere sop in the pan, most unworthily, most ineffectually, given to conciliate the aggressive Rebels of the Land League.^*

If it had the slightest bearing on the question of the Causes of the War or on our future Policy, it might be shown that Governor Grey's abandonment of Waitara and his reclamation of Tataramaka were, virtually, two distinct and separate transactions with two distinct and separate bodies of Natives; and that the order of priority in which they were undertaken is a matter which had no atom of real influence in determining the future course of the rebel Tribes. But these, and fifty other little points in Sir George's treatment of the case are of no more weight than the colour of his Excellency's coat. The great "Root Truths" to be kept before us, and which we must not allow to be obscured by the little incidents emanating from or surrounding them—incidents dilated on by your various Waitara Natives to Te Teira's sale of his Land was the covert action of that monstrous "Land League" named at respondents, are these—that the opposition of the Waitara Natives to Te Teira's sale of his Land was the covert action of that monstrous "Land League" named at

^* Permit me to remark that the "Taranaki Land Question," as it has now come to be called throughout Australasia, is fully treated of in the second edition of my little work on New Zealand—a humble publication you once did me the honour to commend. The account there given of the monstrous affair has been freely drawn on by others—most welcome to the Waters, though they dont acknowledge the Stream.

page 53 page 38, and depicted in the addenda; and that the giving up of the Waitara to the Natives on any excuse, ground, or plea, whatsoever, was virtual submission to the dictates of such League: virtual recognition of the dethronement of Queen Victoria in New Zealand, and of the commencement of the dynasty of Te Potatau, the First.