A Tribute to the Brave.

I shall quote in concluding this sketch of a truly statesmanlike moulder of New Zealand life from a noble and touching article written by Fitzgerald for the Christchurch “Press” of April 16, 1864, when the news arrived of the taking of Orakau Pa, after the Maoris' heroic defence for three days:—

“…. No human situation can be conceived more desperate or more hopeless—their lands gone, their race melting away like snow before the sun, and now their own time come at last … There will be men in after times whose pens will narrate the causes and outcomings of this contest and who will seek in the objects of the war the key to its disasters [to British arms]. They will say it was not a war for safety or for law, or for truth or liberty, but it was a war dictated by avarice and prosecuted for spoilation. It was a war to remove a neighbour's landmark, to destroy a race that we might dwell in their tents. No doubt these critics of the past will be wrong. They must be so, for is not the whole voice of the age against them? An enlightened, Christian, money-making people, we are quite satisfied with the morality of our own conduct; but still the events of the war remain unexplained. Still it will remain to be solved why more money, time and life should have been sacrificed in this war against a feeble foe, for a smaller result than in any war in which England has yet engaged. For our own parts, we have long ceased to speculate on the causes of these things; we wait and wonder. But if there be anything in the whole miserable story to excite the admiration of a generous mind, it is this sad spectacle of those grim and tawny figures, gaunt with the watching and weariness, the wounds and nakedness of a long campaign in the bush, staring over their ragged palisades on the hosts of their conquerors from whom escape was impossible, and wailing out their last chant of death and defiance, ake! ake! ake! —for ever! for ever! for ever!”

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