Champion of the Maoris.

The first Taranaki War had just ended, and more trouble was brewing in Taranaki and Waikato, presently to culminate in a fiercer war involving the two Provinces. Fitzgerald, being a South Island member, was able to take a more detached and impersonal view of the war and its causes than the North Island members of the Assembly who were for the most part determinedly anti-Maori. Those were the days when the more intemperate newspapers and colonists demanded a war of extermination.

page 27

Fitzgerald's chivalrous soul revolted at the crude arguments and the undisguised hate sentiments of the pro-war party, and particularly at the high-handed policy in Taranaki which had involved the country in war over a miserable little block of land, and he became a vigorous champion of peaceful methods and fair adjustment of Maori grievances.