.gif)
Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.
Chapter XII. — Governor of New Zealand—continued
Chapter XII.
Governor of New Zealand—continued.
His Departure.
He had thrown open the wide waste lands of the Colony to the whole people and to future generations of immigrants. He had framed a constitution for the Church, as he had for the State. He had left everything in readiness for bringing into operation the constitution he had shaped, loyally accepting its deformities and its blots. What was left for him to do? As if conscious that he had no longer a place in a constitutionally governed country, he then prepared to leave New Zealand. He did not leave it without committing one more act of insubordination. The Constitution Act provided that one-fourth of all sums derived from the sales of land throughout the Colony should be remitted to London and there paid to the account of the New Zealand Company in compensation for the expenditure it had incurred in settling the central portions of the Colony. The Governor loyally remitted the bulk of the money thus received, but directed that the portion of it derived from land-sales in the province of Auckland should be retained in the Colonial Treasury, on the ground that that province had all along lain outside of the Company's operations. The reason assigned was good, or at least the case was arguable, but the terms of the statute were express and left him no alternative. It was not the first time he had flown in the face of an Act of Parliament. Yet even then the rebellion was closely veiled. Should his "reasons fail to command the assent of Her Majesty's Government," he said, he desired that the Colonial Office should draw on the New Zealand Treasury for the amount in defect. As a matter of fact, page 91the sum was never paid till it was made a part of the first loan raised in England by New Zealand. We shall see how the Colonial Office dealt with the rebel.
Invalid Excuses.
His very departure was an act of mutiny. His official biographer states that he went "nominally on leave of absence." The leave must have been very nominal indeed, for there is no evidence that it was either asked for or granted. All the evidence is the other way. Another and equally authorised biographer states that his term of office had come to an end. He was appointed for no fixed term. Unaware of his departure the Secretary of State continued to address him as if he were still in New Zealand, and he was expressly charged with having left the Colony prematurely. He simply wanted a holiday and took it. The pretext was his mother's failing health. Eighteen years ago (in 1890) a high Chinese official applied to the Court at Pekin for permission to resign the government of his province and return to his native place in order to nurse his aged grandmother. A reason that was at length, after more than one application, held valid in ancestor-worshipping China could have no force in ancestor-eating New Zealand. It must still have had some force in England, and the Duke of Newcastle, in defending the derelict Governor against attack in the House of Lords, urged the fatal illness of his mother as a valid excuse for his departure, and disarmed opposition by mentioning that he had arrived in England too late to see his dying parent.
Colonists' Regrets.
Grey was not to be permitted to leave New Zealand like an ordinary man or even an ordinary Governor. Save only the Marquis of Ripon, the philo-Indian viceroy, no other Governor's departure has been so lamented. The settlers at Wellington, to whom his name had been an offence, forgot their grievances against him, overcame page 92their animosities, and joined in the chorus of regrets. They presented to him a piece of plate, which of course he could not personally receive, the Colonial Office assimilating the representative of the Sovereign to the Sovereign herself; it was deposited in the Museum at Auckland and bore the suitable inscription: Fundatori Quietis—"To the Author of the Peace." From such a trusty ally as Bishop Selwyn, moving his acquiescent clergy, he received an address that seemed to add the approbation of Heaven to that of Earth, and it greatly affected him as "one of the highest rewards he could conceive.''
Maori Laments.
But it was from the Native race he had conquered by arms and then conquered by genuine sympathy and true friendship that the most touching farewells were to come. Chiefs of note composed odes of grief. Other chiefs travelled long distances in those railwayless and roadless days in order to see their loved benefactor once more before he departed. Some presented him with valuable greenstone meres and other heirlooms, which, thirty years later, the writer saw him exhibit to the sons of those chiefs. They came from the Waikato plains which, twelve years later, he was to receive from this very race and these very chiefs and from Native villages that were to be burnt in war. But no second-sighted vision of any Maori Cassandra then darkened the prospect. All old sores were healed, and all old scores wiped out. Not only chiefs of staunch and tried loyalty, like Patuone, Te Whero Whero, and Te Rangitake, but the son of Rauparaha whose spirit he had broken by treacherous capture and prolonged imprisonment, and "the tiger of the Wairau,'' the formidable Rangihaeata, now loyal and a Christian, lamented the loss of the great Governor, the great reconciler. In a collective address Grey appealed to their nobler instincts. Together they had reared churches, hospitals, and schools. The natives had abandoned their false gods. Mills had been built. Good roads had been made. Agriculture had spread, and page 93prosperity everywhere prevailed. His parting request was that they would not hereafter suffer any evil deeds to sully the names of the patriots of early days, or obscure the good works that had been accomplished. Alas! less than a decade later, the very men to whom he appealed were to rise in rebellion, and were to do such evil deeds as would leave an ineffaceable stain on the memory of their race, while the churches and schools would be abandoned, the false gods would be reverted to, or new false gods devised, the mills would cease their whirr, the highways would echo with the tramp of armed bands, prosperity would disappear, and a whole race sink back many degrees in the scale of civilisation.