New Zealand Becomes a British Colony.

In 1839 Mr. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, acting with the New Zealand Company, sent out an expedition to make preliminary arrangements for a settlement. Land was acquired at Port Nicholson, on the shore of Cook's Straits. The pioneer body of immigrants arrived on the 22nd January, 1840. Thus was the first regular settlement formed at Wellington.

Meanwhile, under quite separate auspices, it was determined to proclaim the sovereignty of the Queen over the Islands. Captain Hobson, R.N., was sent out, and arrived at the Bay of Islands just a week after the first immigrants reached Wellington. The celebrated Treaty of Waitangi between the Queen and a number of native chiefs was arranged in February of the same year, 1840. Under a liberal reading of its provisions and as regards the Middle Island, on the ground of discovery, the Queen assumed the sovereignty over the Islands. New Zealand was then declared a dependency of New South Wales, but on the 3rd March, 1841, it was constituted a separate colony, and Captain Hobson became the first Governor.

I have rapidly gone over this earlier history, and with great difficulty have managed to condense it to the limits I have employed. Let me here say that information about the Colonies is so unequally distributed that I am quite unable to determine how many of my audience have no knowledge of New Zealand and how many know a great deal more about it than I do, and are better fitted to take my place. As it is impossible for me to discriminate, I can only ask the kind indulgence of those to whom my statements are twice-told tales. I have this in my favour, that the aggregate amount of information has become so greatly in excess of human receptivity that it mostly passes through the mind as through a sieve. As a rule, I should think it would be quite safe for an editor to republish a newspaper at the end of six months with the comfortable conviction that fully half his readers would consider it the latest special edition.