To the Editor of the Times,

Sir,—In your excellent Leader of the 24th ultimo on The Case of New Zealand, forwarded to you from the Colony, you observe that you "give it the it the publicity which is desired, but that you need scarcely be at the pains of remarking how much more evidence will be required before a conclusion can be safely reached."

As an ex-Colonist acquainted for twenty years with our future "Britain of the South," and still taking warm interest in the young fortunes of that beautiful Land, will you permit me to respond, to your invitation and to seek to supply some portion of that "more evidence" which you demand.

Exeter Hall and the Missionary Party—those who, unmindful of Lord Bacon, would "destitute plantations" each and all brought their "Case" before your tribunal, let me beg you now to hear the plain unvarnished tale of a mere private Colonist, of one who never took part in the public life of his Colony, and whose ambition there soared to nothing beyond the Plough and the Golden Fleece.

The Statement called "The Case of New Zealand" I have never seen—indeed I have purposely abstained from consulting it, so that what I have asked permission to to place before yon, however inferior it might be, might be page 2 something unprompted by others, and wholly my own. I am the more tempted, too, to profit by your intimation that more evidence is still needed in "re New Zealand," by the force of the fact of a rather mendacious pamphlet having just been circulated among the Members of your Legislature by the Aborigines Protection Society—circulated in the hope of some Night winning a crushing verdict, there, against a distant body of English Settlers pioneering the way for their Countrymen in the primeval wilderness of our Southern Thule.

Permit me, Sir, to refute, or comment on, these various Allegations in the order in which they stand; and in dealing with the first—the Allegation that it is the Colonist's "greed" of Land, his "trampling on the Native's rights page 4 and titles to Land," which has provoked the War—allow me just to recall to your recollection how and why it was that New Zealand ever came to be colonised by England at all, and on what great, novel, principle her colonisation was commenced and has been carried on.

New Zealand was created a British Colony in the year

1840, and the chief considerations which impelled the Crown to create it a British Colony were these:—the hope that if these wild Cannibal Islands of the distant South were raised to this estate the ferocious intermittent tribal fends between the Natives, threatening the utter self-extermination of the Race, might gradually be made to cease—the necessity of introducing some law and order among the Squatters of Kororareka (²) and the New Zealand Company's Settlers in Cook's Straits—and the desire to prevent France(³) from seizing on a promising naval possession standing before the very doors of Australia, and the germ, too, of a Country capable of expanding into the future mistress of the Oceanic South,—and the Crown was further tempted to give practical effect to these various considerations by the force of the fact that various of the Natives, sick for the time of tribal slaughters and ferocious internecine wars, and anxious to profit by that increased trade and wealth, that increased security of life and property, which they foresaw would follow in the wake of colonisation, had more than once moved the Crown to assume the Sovereignty of the Islands and give them the protection of the British flag.

Lord John Russell had the Colonial Office when New Zealand thus became a member of the Empire, and in those days the Nation was proud of its triumphs in the fields of Colonisation; for its Emigrant-Armies, with weapons of Plough and Axe, had created from the Wilderness a dozen page 5 young Englands, and given the State nobler Territories than she had ever secured by the Sword. But the Anglo-Saxon Settlement of New Countries had been ruthless to the Savage: in America, whole Tribes of the Red Indian had disappeared; in Australia, the Aborigenes were fading away; in Tasmania, the Black man was gone. A fresh wild Country had become ours for Settlement, and a strong desire sprang up that here, at least, the like reproaches should be spared us, and that in our colonisation of New Zealand, one of our chiefest cares should be the preservation and elevation of the Native Race.

It was seen that in America and Australia one great cause of the decrease and degradation of the Aborigenes had been the wholesale taking of their wild lands for the Plough and for the Fleece; and, forgetful of the wide difference between the requirements of a semi-nomad people like the Indians and the Australians living mainly by the chase, and those of a stationary people like the Maories, living mainly on rude garden produce and sea fish, it seems, somewhat paradoxally, to have been thought that as our ousting the Native from the broad territories of wild land he hunted over and used in America and Australia had led to his extinction, our securing to the Native the broad territories of wild land in New Zealand which he did not hunt over and use must lead to his preservation and increase.

Entering on our colonisation of New Zealand with these ideas, Captain Hobson of the Royal Navy, the first Governor, arrived in the Country with stringent instructions from Lord John Russell to carry these ideas out; and under the "Treaty of Waitongi," the Treaty by which the Native ceded and made over to the Crown the Sovereignty of the Islands, it was virtually agreed on the Dart of the Crown— page 6 firstly, That the whole area of New Zealand, an area of nearly eighty millions of acres, as large as that of Great Britain and Ireland, with all that "was on and under it, should be held to be the freehold property of that remnant of the Native Race, some 60,000 men, women and children, which was then left in the Country—secondly, That the Crown in seeking to acquire any portion of this vast area for the purposes of Colonisation should do so only by the way of "friendly purchase" from the Natives—and thirdly, That, to avoid confusion and to protect the weaker Race from imposition, the Natives, when they felt disposed to sell any portions of their vast unused territories, should do so only to the Crown—(⁴) which, thus, buying blocks of Wild Land wholesale in the raw state, would survey and classify such Land and then retail it to the actual Settler for the purposes of the Plough and the Fleece.

In its broad, boundless, emphatic, acknowledgment of the Native's right of ownership over every acre of the entire "Wilderness—in its care to protect the Native from the possible trickery of the Land-Shark,(5) and the grasping Speculator, by ordaining that the Native should alienate his Lands only by open public sale to the Queen—this u Treaty of Waitangi" was for more liberal, some would say far more Utopian, in its spirit and provisions than the great Treaty made with the Indians by Penn.

The Waitangi Treaty, too, has been no mere paper Treaty. Despite the immense difficulty of ascertaining who among the 60,000 Natives of the North Island were to be regarded as the Owners, or as the nearest approach to Owners, of the wild territories of a Country where twenty hostile Tribes, now advancing conquerors now retreating fugitives, had been waging ferocious Wars with page 7 each other for centuries—a Country where titles to Land, to use an expression, were derived or lost through conquest, re-conquest, occupancy, non-occupancy, slavery, accidental spilling of blood, through twenty clashing whims, codes, and customs of barbarism—(⁶) despite all this, the Crown, acting through its Governors and Local Authorities, ever scrupulously observed both the letter and the spirit of the Treaty; and from 1840, when the regular Colonisation of the Islands first commenced, up to the period of this present Revolt, almost every acre (⁴) of Land which had been obtained by the Settlers in New Zealand had been obtained for them by the Crown solely and wholly by way of friendly purchase—friendly purchase from such of the more enlightened among the Natives as had wished to realize something from their immense unused wild estates by selling portions of them; and who had been shrewd enough to see that the approach, or extension, of European Settlement caused by their sale of such portions, would bring markets to their doors, enrich them with a lucrative and a civilizing Trade, and quadruple the value of those great tracts of Wilderness which they still would possess.

But that "Exeter Hall and Missionary Party" to which I have referred, while compelled to admit that the "Treaty of Waitangi" has been faithfully maintained by the Crown and the Colonists for a period of nearly a quarter of a century, assert that it was infringed by the Crown and the Colonists in one late, solitary, case at Taranaki, inasmuch as there, a miserable plot of land was attempted to be taken from the Natives by force, and that it was such attempted "act of force" which provoked the present War. Now, the monstrous History of the "Taranaki Land Question"—familiar in our mouths as Household Words page 8 throughout New Zealand—shows that the course which Representative of the Crown had the wisdom and the man-fulness to pursue there, was a course in perfect conformity with the spirit of the Waitangi Treaty—shows that the turbulent Chief there who so impudently resisted the Crown in the matter of the Land had himself sold it, and was himself a trespasser on it—and proves that Governor Gore Browne, in deciding to enforce the Queen's purchased right and title to Waitera, was in no wise moved to do so by the value of the Land, or even fundamentally by the Land at all, but by the righteous necessity of settling the question as to whether Queen Victoria or Te Potatau the First was to rule in New Zealand, and whether the Colony was to be nursed on into a second England, or be abandoned to the Savage and again become a howling Waste.^*

I venture to think, then, Sir, that an impartial weighing of the facts on record in regard to the great principle on which the colonisation of New Zealand was commenced, and has been carried on, will not only show that in our Settlement and Civilisation of the Country we have exhibited no "greed" of Land, no contempt for the Native's rights and titles to Land—but will further show that it might with truth be declared that the whole history of .the colonising enterprises of all Nations, from the earliest times down to our own, would afford no single instance where the interests of the weaker Race, in the great matter of the Wild Lands of the new Country, were ever so amply recognized, so practically guarded, by the Colonisers, as those of the Maori have been recognized and guarded in New Zealand.

The Allegation that it is the "Native's need and scarcity of Land" which has contributed to place him in Revolt.

This is an Allegation so extravagant as to border on the ludicrous, and to strike Colonists on the spot with amazement that any extent of remoteness from the actual scene of operations suffered (or enjoyed) by the good people of England could ever have emboldened our Detractors to make it. Of course, the fact of the Native not needing the Land would afford us no shadow of justification were we to attempt to coerce him into parting with the Land. But when we find that it is charged against us here that we are scheming to get from the Poor Native that without which the Poor Native would starve, we may be permitted to show that Land is virtually a "drug" with the Poor Native, and that at the present moment he possesses a four hundred fold greater portion of it than he has ever used, or ever dreamt of using.

The New Zealanders, as before observed, were never a Hunting People; and, that, for the very sufficient reason that there was nothing in the Islands to hunt. For the last twenty years, three-fourths of their daily food and nine-tenths of their produce brought to market, has consisted of potatoes, maize, wheat, kumeras, taro, melons, and fruit, raised by rude cultivation in patches of garden-ground; and of pigs, cows, and poultry, feeding in and around their Pahs. The remaining fourth of their Larder is supplied mainly by fish—their largest villages being on the coast and their inland Settlements all within easy access of some arm of the sea, or lake, or teeming eel weir—and to their plenteous garden produce, their pigs, fowls, and fish, they now and then add, by way of dessert, a bit of stranded whale, a pigeon or wild duck, a luscious grub or two, a page 10 truffle, or a handful of Hinau berries—picked up for the most part within gun-shot of their dwelling places. The little clearings which yield them their substantial food and surplus sufficient to bring them sugar, blankets, and tobacco are ever found on the richest soil; and such are the goodly crops they yield that the Maori, the most active of the active in War but rather the lazy sun-basking Maori in peace, finds that a very small amount of field labour expended on a very small field will fill the belly and the pipe, and give him plenty and to spare. Hence it is that his farming and gardening operations are conducted on so singularly small a scale that it has been estimated from certain existing data that the 60,000 Natives of the North Island, where even now they must, I think, possess some 20,000,000 acres of Land, have not much more than 60,000 acres of such vast domain, the four hundredth part of it, under actual cultivation.

It has been thought by some that the ferocious internecine Wars which raged between the New Zealanders before the days of Colonisation were Wars occasioned mainly by their "need of Land" or their desire to extend tribal territory. But a weasel-like appetite for blood, hereditary feuds, adultery, Murder, violations of Tapu, were far more pregnant causes of War than Land. In 1822, when Hongi and his Ngapuhi devastated the Thames and Waikato country it was a raid only to slaughter and enslave. In 1830, when Te Whero Whero and his Waikato, devastated the Taranaki country it was a raid in revenge of murder; and though by Native custom the utter defeat and dispersion of Ngatiawa by Waikato gave the conquerors the whole of the magnificent territory of the conquered they returned to their own district without making a single Settlement in their new page 11 acquisition, or ever occupying or using a single acre of it.

The Maori, among his fellows, likes to boast of his ducal possessions. The vast territories of Wild Land handed over to him by the Treaty of Waitangi are of a certain worth to him for the purposes of sale, and give him a certain weight and status in the community far above his merits as a member of it; while he has been taught by bad advisers, and has been shrewd enough to see, that one of the most telling "cries" he could raise to excuse his rebeldom and enlist the sympathy of a very powerful party in England in his favour, is the cry that he is being "robbed of his Lands"—robbed of his little all—robbed of that which he must grasp to the last would he not perish from off the Earth.

Doubtless, in these ways, for such purposes, the Maori's broad domains are of a certain value to him—but as to the Allegation that the War is partly attributable to his real need, or use, of Land, there is no atom of foundation for it—the truth, as we have seen, being that at the present moment he is the owner of millions of acres of which he makes no manner of use—and the further truth being that he has so little real want of Land that if the whole of our cultivations, like Taranaki's beautiful farms and gardens, were abandoned to the "Noble Savage" to morrow, he would again play the Dog in the Manger, and in twelve months show us the spectacle of our hard-won Pastures and Corn Fields again dressed in the livery of barbarism, again jungles of weeds and deserts of dock and thistle.

The Allegation that the Colonists have provoked the War partly in the hope that the large Imperial Commissariat Expenditure caused by War would "Fill their Tills," and that the War, generally, is profitable to them.

Undoubtedly, the Commissariat Expenditure has brought a large amount of money into circulation, increased the trade of Auckland and of one or two of our other Ports, enhanced the price of cartage, stock, fuel, flour, butter, cheese, and eggs, and put many an extra guinea into our northern Trader's till, and into our northern Farmer's fob. But to hear the language of Messieurs Buxton, Mills &Co., one would almost imagine New Zealand to be some barren rock in the South Pacific where every second Man's chance of a meal depended on his catching a shilling tossed from the Mother Country's Commissariat Chest. ("Now, in many of the natural elements of wealth, New Zealand is a far richer Country than England; and it is but simple truth to say that our "producing classes," such as our Shepherd Princes, our Gold Miners, and others, together with our Merchants and Traders, our Mechanics and Labourers, who thrive by and revolve round our "producing classes," no more count on the profits drawn from England's Commissariat Chest than England's broad-acred Dukes may count on the profits drawn from furze faggots or plantation trimmings. Indeed, not only do the great body of Colonists derive no pecuniary advantages from the War worth a week's cost of War, but, in a pecuniary sense, War is disastrous to them. The great, fundamental, all-inclusive, desideratum in a young emigration field like New Zealand, where the population instead of numbering nearly 400 to the square mile as in England, does not as yet number 2, the Panacea for almost all its ills, is more People, more men, women and page 13 children, more capital and labour. This Panacea we find only in Emigration from the European world, and this auriferous stream of Emigration from the European world which, had golden Peace been preserved in New Zealand, would now be flowing freely to our shores, has been dammed up, or diverted from us, solely by this wretched War.

Again, see how War swallows up our infant Revenu half a million a year is the least that the little Army alone which it has made us raise is costing us; and as money, counted by what you can make of it, is twice as valuable in New Zealand as in England, this half million a year is just as sore a loss or burden to the handful of a hundred and forty thousand people in New Zealand, as millions a year, your three years' entire income, would be to your thirty millions of people here.

Then, glance at the large proportion of our scanty band of able-bodied men drawn from plough and axe to take up the rifle—at the utter check to the progress and extension of civilized industries, carried on in mine and field and forest, where you have a savage enemy ever on the pp—at the spectacle our murdered boys, and of our clusters of beautiful Homesteads, hewn from the Wilderness by the toil of years, made blackened ruins in a day! (⁷)

In truth, I but declare the sentiments of nine-tenths of my late fellow Colonists, when I say that I would gladly have counted down the value of one-third of any amount of property which as a Colonist I might have possessed in the North Island to have insured Peace there for twenty years, and prevented our petted pampered lacquered Savage from again indulging in what is half sport to him, but in what is half death to us, this, his third, costly, causeless, criminal, Revolt,

The Allegation that Colonisation has been injurious to the Native that the Colonists despise and misuse him.

I apprehend you will admit, Sir, that the greatest blessing any Community can possess is "Security of Life and Property;" and that, compared to this. State Church, Free Trade, light Taxation, low Franchise, Courts of Chancery, Courts of Divorce, Competitive Examinations, Lord Mayor's Shows, are but your mere social and political luxuries, your mere leather and prunella of Civilization which you might dispense with, yet live, and life enjoy. Let us, then, in considering whether Colonisation has injured or advantaged the Maori, make the test question, this—has the amount of Security of Life and Property enjoyed by him been greater before Colonisation, or after? The answer is this—in the period of sixty years elapsing between Cook's last visit to the Country and the commencement of our Colonisation of it in 1840 the Native Population decreased nearly one half; and that, mainly, from the ferocious feuds ever raging between the Tribes, In those days, the Maori carried his life in his hand; he lived in daily terror of being killed and eaten, alternated by hopes of some day killing and eating. The state of the Islands in those times was appalling—they were a slaughter house—the Land reeked with blood. I give you three instance of this in the Addenda, I could give you thirty. (⁸) This was before I Colonisation—after it, the Plough came, bearing the olive branch, and from 1840, when Colonisation first commenced, up to the period of this present Revolt, tribal wars and slaughters virtually ceased, and the "Security of Life and Property" gratuitously enjoyed by the Aboriginal Race in New Zealand has, substantially, been almost as great as that enjoyed by the tax-paying people of the British Isles.(⁹)

In but two decades, Colonisation has not succeeded in metamorphosing 60,000 warlike Savages into 60,000 peaceful Citizens—it has not turned them into agriculturists, traders, mechanics, artizans; made them breeched Burgesses of Auckland, given them seats in colonial Parliaments, or placed them on the electoral roll. 'Tis not so easy to change the Leopard's spots, and tame the Wild Man. The Savage may everywhere accept the blessings of law and order, but everywhere he loaths the curb of law and order; and despite the elaborate twaddle put forth by Chief Justice Martin, by Aborigenes Protection Societies, by dilletanti Philo-Maories, by foolish Daniels come to judgement, like Mr. Gorst, there has never been a day since the British Flag was planted in New Zealand when the Maori would have received, and conformed to, British Institutions, otherwise than at the point of the bayonet.

Some people from Utopia have escaped to New Zealand; but New Zealand is not Utopia. Colonisation, there, has not yet smoothed the Maori into a tax-paying Householder—it has not even discovered the Philosopher's stone. But, so far in New Zealand, Colonisation has preserved the remnant of the Race it found there from further self extermination—changed the Maori's love of internecine butchery into love for the Settler's silver and gold—extinguished Slavery and cannibalism, and enabled every man of the Race, where such has been his pleasure, to sit in safety under his vine—brought him Markets and enriched ' him with a Trade which has made him the wealthiest Aboriginal in the world—given him better food, given him the Surgeon and the healing art—opened to him the great Free School formed by and found in a civilised European community planted at his doors—and displayed before page 16 his eyes a hundred learnable industries creative of comfort and happiness for Man.

As to the charge that the Colonists in their daily inter-course with the Maori have treated him as the mere "Black Fellow," fit only for extirpation, nothing can be more opposite to the fact. The bearing and conduct of Race towards Race, as of man towards man, is ruled mainly by the real "estimate" which the one forms of the other, by what the one really thinks of the other. What "estimate," then, have the Colonists formed of the Maori? Here and there among us one is found who, taking the extreme "Missionary" view, regards, the Maori, in respect to the great virtues of innocence and inoffensiveness, as the impeccable Sheep, and who wont see in him one feature of the Wolf. (Here and there, too, we fincf a Settler, may ben some Vieux Moustache who has followed Havelock or Clive, who believes the Maori, like every other Black Skin among the Whites, to be only watching for a "Cawnpore.' But the iudgment the great bulk of the Colonists have: passed on the Maori is this—that, in his present state of semi-barbarism, he is mercenary, artful, and suspicious, shrewd but shallow and capricious, revengeful and designing, with no word even in his language signifying gratitude, J and vain, contemptuous, and holding no Race equal to his own; that his religion is but a lacquer-scratched off, revealing the imperious, audacious Savage, with the mind of the precocious child, the passions of the embruted man. But, per contra, we hold that there is good stuff of manhood in the Maori-that, great in War, he may be lazy, but not puny, in Peace-that stimulated by hope of gain he is capable of great, if fitful, exertion-that though a Bully to the weak he is brave before the strong-and that next to page 17 the Red Indian, physically and mentally, and with all his faults, he is far the finest Wild Man ever encountered by the Anglo-Saxon in the field of Colonisation.

In this brighter side of his character, too, we have not forgotten the signal military merits of the Maori, the noble addition he would make to the Colony's permanent Defense Force, to the ranks of our Rifle Rangers, our Volunteer Corps. Again, far before Red Deer or any noble game, he imparts a variety, a piquancy, a picturesqueness, to our fields and forests which many of us would sadly miss—while we are pleased to hope that if only he can be pre-served long enough for the trial, preserved, sad to say, against himself and Aborigines Destruction Societies, further civilization will eradicate or soften some of his dark traits, and develope and intensify some of his bright

'Tis clear, I think, Sir, that a Race of which we have ed such an "estimate," though not a Race which, as yet, we can much admire or belove, is assuredly no Race which we can wish to despise or misuse. It has never been despised or misused by us; and with your permission I will close this portion of my subject by hinting to the Pseudo-Philanthropists who accuse us of brutality wards the Maori that if they and the whole of your employing classes here, profiting by the noble words of the late Mr. Justice Talfourd, were to deport themselves to those under them with half that courtesy and Respect which New Zealand Colonists have ever shown towards the New Zealanders it would be all the better for your Poor Men, and none the worse for your Rich.

The Allegation that it is the Colonists who have had the government and the guidance of the Native; and that it is partly their legislative mismanagement or neglect of the Noble Savage which has now, again, metamorphosed him into the costly Rebel.

Here, again, the charge is directly opposite to the fact. From the first day of the colonisation of New Zealand in 1840, up to the present time, your Colonial Office, inspired by your Aborigines Protection Society, and your Exeter Hall, has set apart the Native Race in New Zealand as a peculiar and an exceptional feature of the Country, to be shaped and dealt with only by itself; and it is literally true that, in regard to "legislating for," and "managing"' the Maori, the English Settlers in New Zealand have had but little more to do with him than the English Settlers in the Isle of Man. '"Certainly, within, the last few years, your Colonial Office, acting through its Governors on the spot, has sought to strengthen its "Native Measures" b passing them through our Colonial Legislature as the acts and ordinances of that body. It has frequently, too, taken counsel with the various Ministerial Executives of our Local Government, and when, and when only, the advice tendered to it by them has been agreeable to it, has taken it. But, substantially, the Native Policy in New Zealand has been almost as much dictated by Downing Street since representative institutions were conferred on the Colony, as it was in the Semi-Bashaw days of Governors Hobson, Shortland, Fitzroy, and in the first days of Governor Grey—days when every edict of your Colonial Minister came to us bearing the "Sic volo, sic jubeo, stat pro ratione voluntas"—while so far from there having been even in these latest times any relaxation in the grip which your Colonial Office, inspired by your Missionary and Aborigines page 19 Protection Societies, has kept on "Native Affairs"—so far from its having, at this eleventh hour, listened to the voice of the Colonists therein, it is at this present moment seeking to patch up a false and flimsy peace with the Rebels in utter contempt and defiance of the solemn convictions of nineteen-twentieths of the whole of our colonial community.

Great misconception, too, exists on another point in connection with this "Management of the Maori," for while it is untruthfully asserted that the Colonists have had the management of him, others accuse the Colonists of trifling with the Home Government in the matter, and of not knowing their own minds therein, inasmuch as when, in compliance with the wishes of some of us, your Colonial Office did at last offer to hand the Maori over to the Colonists, they refused, altogether, to take charge of him.

Now, here, the facts are these. Since 1855, when Representative Institutions virtully came into force in New Zealand, certain of our more ambitious public men have undoubtedly, and more than once, moved your Colonial Office to transfer the management of the Native Race to our young colonial Parliament, and to suffer it to legislate for the Maori as it did for everything else in the Country. But until the "King Movement" troubles were dawning, and the Maori was budding into the Rebel, your Colonial Office, turning deaf ear to all such suggestions, had altogether declined to divest itself of its chosen office of Maori Guardian. When, however, the Native sky was dark, and storms were lowering, the Colonial Office rather altered its tone, and at last virtually assented to the fair-seeming proposition its very interesting, but somewhat fractious ward could, perhaps, be better curbed-in and regulated by a local page 20 Legislature on the spot than by an Office in Downing Street fifteen thousand miles away.

I am sure, I may say, that the Colonists did not believe that this "altered tone" proceeded from any selfish or cowardly motive on the part of your Colonial Office—from any desire on the part of the redoubtable British Lion to sneak out of a quarrel he had provoked—they remembered that different Chiefs of this famous Bureau might naturally entertain different Views; and when the late lamented Duke of New-castle virtually offered to turn the Maori over to them they believed he did so only from a desire to do what seemed to him the best for all. But, unfortunately, it did so happen that in the long interval elapsing between the first expressions of any desire on the part of a portion of the Colonists that the Maori should become their Ward, and the offer of the Colonial Office to make him such, the Ward had grown into a Ward so utterly disaffected and unruly as to have become one who might entail on the Colonists expences of chastisement and restraint infinitely beyond the depths of their slender colonial exchequer to defray. Hence, they respectfully declined the metamorphosed Trust—to use a I nautical figure, they had asked for the command of a Ship, and at the eleventh hour were offered the command of a Wreck. Your Colonial Office and your Missionary Party had managed, or mismanaged, to rouse our Native Hornets, and the Colonists declined to go, alone, and take the Nests. You, if I remember aright, Sir, were somewhat indignant at the Colonists for this—heroics aside, don't you now) think they were right?

In Downing Street and in the Colony, where the facts are known, it is known that save in the above instance the Colonist has never had even the chance of trying his page 21 'prentice hand at "legislating for" and "managing" the Native. Whether these were functions properly pertaining to the Colonist is quite another question; and one which I and many others should instantly answer in the negative. Bear in mind that when New Zealand became a British Colony in 1840 it was a primeval Wilderness, a fertile Wilderness if you will, but still a Wilderness. Even now, a large portion of it is as little smoothed by art and civilization as Britain was when Caesar chased the woad-stained Warriors along the shores of Kent. In such a Country, in an Emigration Field in such rude state, the few thousand squatters and graziers, farmers and traders, mechanics and labourers, professional men, capitalists, estate-creators and speculators, who make up the body called the New Zealand Colonists and who constitute the little pioneering population of the Country' have their hands full of work.—They have to wrest fields from forests, to plant the germs of towns and villages, to lay the foundations of social institutions, to ply a hundred industries necessary to enable them to advance their footing in the Wild Land and make portions of its deserts blossom like the rose.—These, the toils and duties of Anglo-Saxon Emigrants who go forth to subdue the waste have nowhere been more energetically undertaken, nowhere more manfully performed, than by the Colonists in New Zealand. To have asked, to have expected, to have allowed, such handful of willing Workers, to have charged themselves, in addition to their own legitimate labours, with the gigantic task and burden of civilizing and bitting-in to law and order a nation of Savages like the New Zealanders would surely have been as inconsiderate, as exacting, as to have placed page 22 the work of the man of forty before the child of four.

The British Colony of New Zealand, as I shall hope to show, is as much the valuable "property" of the millions of the British Nation at-home as of the thousands of the British Nation on the spot. Property, we know, has its duties; and as in the national work of colonising our New Zealand Property there were two great duties, two great and much co-equal tasks, before us—subduing the Wilderness, subduing the Maori—and as the Colonists effectually undertook the one, right and reason demanded that the Mother-Country, operating through a succession of chosen Governors and Administrators on the spot, should effectually undertake the other.

Though, however, the task of civilizing the New Zealander has hitherto been a task properly belonging to the Home Government to perform, and which, after its fashion, it has attempted to perform, the time is undoubtedly approaching when it will become a task which the Home Government might well share with the Colonial. Our first struggle with the wilderness is now pretty well over; we have founded and reduced to working order excellent social and civil institutions for ourselves; while every year adds to our number of well-to-do practical men who can afford to leave flocks and herds, and mines, and farms to attend the duties of legislation.

Despite the smug dictum, too, of a superfine member of your Fourth Estate^* who asserts that New Zealand Colonists, in common with all Colonists, are sordid "Bagmen," it has

^* The "Saturday Review." The frequency with which this doughty Journal bepommels Colonists would almost suggest the fear that its Colonisation Contributor, one Dies irae, must have been frightened by some rude Colonist—some rough, hirsute, Hotspur Settler from Australia or Now Zealand, angered to see a perfumed Penman who ne'er set squadron in the tented field, nor the division of a battle knows more than a Spinster, prattling so prettily of "guns and drums and wounds (God save the mark), and of parmaceti and villainous saltpetre." Smart and impudent is on many subjects, when the Saturday Cynic leaves the Tub to perform in that rough field of Colinisation, where is done Lord Bacon's "heroic work" of Colonisation it must, I fear, often remind practical, but irreverent Colonists of the "Dancing Dog at the Fox Hunt"

page 23 been said—need I add we are ready to believe—that not even among the Pilgrim Fathers of Massachusets or among the Virginian Cavaliers has a better sample of the Anglo-Saxon race ever left your shores than exist in the ranks of the New Zealand Settlers—invigorated as they are, or have been, by the blood of your Cliffords, Dillons, Petres, Staffords, Molesworth, Tancreds, Tollemachcs, Cholmondeleys, Congreves, Pierpoints, Vavasours, and Welds.(¹⁰) Such a community, so placed, and holding such an "estimate" of the Maori as I have shown it does, could surely help, and would gladly help, the Home Government to civilize the Savage; and I cannot but hope that when the two Parliaments sitting in Westminster and Wellington have, together, administered to the Maori that sole tonic in the pharmacopoeia of legislation which alone can now save him from a saddening end—the steel tonic of a thorough thrashing—they will continue towards him in Peace that "unity of action" which, for his salvation, they commenced towards him in War.

The Allegation that the Colonists, moved by sordid love of lucre, have suicidally sold to the Maori those arms and munitions of war which, alone, enable him to withstand and slaughter both her Majesty's gallant troops, and their own Volunteer and Defense Corps.

Here, at last, in part, there is, I regret to say, a true bill against us—not, though, as to the motive for suffering the sale of arms, but as to the fact thereof. A majority of page 24 our colonial legislature in Governor Browne's reign did, most besottedly, rescind a very wise and humane regulation made in Governor Grey's time, prohibiting the sale of arms to the Natives. It should, however, be clearly understood that this besotted act was done with the full approval of your representative, in the person of Governor Browne; and of that high functionary with which he stamped and legalized it. But if your Representative knew no better than to assent to such an ordnance, the majority of our House of Commons ought to have known far better than to pass it.

Their motive, however, in doing so was not that attributed them by Sir John Hay and other justly indignant Members of your House, in the debate on New Zealand affairs last July, fin Auckland, possibly, as in .London, there may be sordid traders in the ranks of commerce who for an extra £ 10 per cent, would sell their fathers—but if there be, such "ghouls of the till" are far too small and insignificant a body in our northen capital to be capable of exercising the slightest, influence there on the deliberations of our colonial Parliament. The main considerations which impelled the Queen s representative, Governor Browne, and a majority of our legislature to perpetrate the act of legalising the sale of arms to the Maori were these—that Governor Grey s regulations prohibiting such trade had become a dead letter; that the French, Yankee, Bremen, and Australian whalers recruiting in our hundred lone bays, and the Sydney traders plying round our coasts, collecting native produce, had long earned on a brisk trade in supplying the Maori with arms; and that as it was believed to be impracticable to stop or even materially check this contraband trade it would page 25 be better to legalize it—better, as it was held to be impossible to prevent the Maori from arming himself, that he should arm himself before our faces than behind our backs.

Undoubtedly, there was some force in these considerations—but had your Representatives and our Ministerial Executive been equal to the occasion—had they remembered that the supplying of the Maori with guns and powder was substantially the same criminal blunder as the supplying of the silly and vicious child with fireworks—they would have taken the most stingent measures to have enforced Governor Grey's regulations—have memorialized the Colonial Office to help them with half-a-dozen small gun-boats as revenue cruisers, have quadrupled the pains and penalties for infringing the law, and justly punished every second breach of it on the part of any Trader by nailing him by the ear to his own door.

Governor Gore Browne, and that working majority in our New Zealand Parliament which had seats in the Legislature during his dynasty, will ever be entitled to the gratitude both of the Mother-Country and of the Colony for the wisdom and manhood they evinced in resisting the monstrous pretensions of our pampered Savage—nor is it too much to say, that had they been premitted to carry out the policy they inaugurated at Taranaki, the Maori Revolt would have been crushed down two years ago, where it began, and both races, long ere this, been again busied in the paths of peace—but their failure to see the vast importance of preventing the further arming of the Native must always remain a blot on their legislative fame, and afford a signal instance of that "blindness to the future"—not wisely given—which at time smites the most astute and far-seeing of men.

It must, however, be remembered that Arms to the Maori means death to Settler as well as to Soldier. Still, after all that can be urged in palliation, this abrogation of Governor Grey's politic prohibition is a thing ever to be regretted by all who take an interest in New Zealand; and, touching it we may truly exclaim,

" Deep are our pangs, but deeper far to feel,

" We nursed the pinion which impelled the steel."

The Allegation that bodies of British Emigrants becoming, in the last twenty years, British Colonist in New Zealand, and going forth to their destination with the full privity and sanction of the British Government, have little or no more just claim to require England to aid them in a savage War than Poles would have to require her to march on Warsaw, or Danes to require her to protect Holstein.

The sweeping Proposition, here put in plain words, strange, almost unnatural, a one as it will seem to many, is, nevertheless, one which is now substantially maintained by those among you here who, rejecting the guidance of the "dry light" of Lord Bacon in the Field of Colonisation, prefer to follow the ignis fatuus of Professor Goldwin Smith.

In refuting it, I would premise my observations by disclaiming any feeling of insensibility as to the assistance which the Mother-Country has lent us in War. With a Moles worth, a Merivale, a Fortescue, at the Colonial Office, the amount of military and financial help which she has given us would have been far greater—with a Mills or a Buxton, "meddling and muddling" there, it would have been far less—therefore are we grateful to Mr. Card-well for his half loaf. But, were we to assent to the Allegation heading these remarks, we should virtually debase ourselves, when in our extremity we knock at the door page 27 door of your Horse Guards or Exchequer, to the condition there of your Beggars asking for Alms—whereas we opine we are your Equals there asking for our Rights—a status and position, which, as I will briefly seek to show, we are entitled to claim, and one which, while we remain colonial flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone, we shall assuredly ever determine to maintain.

. I assert, then, that the Mother-Country, represented by and acting through the British Government, is bound to help her Colonial Children in New Zealand in such a War as that now raging there, by and from Three great considerations and obligations—the First, the one arising from the circumstances that the various bodies of British Subjects who in the last twenty years have gone forth to New Zealand, and who now constitute the New Zealand Colonists, have left the shores of the Mother-Country to settle among Savages (Savages, too, under the avowed rule and management of the Crown) with the sanction and encouragement of the British Government. The Second, the obligation arising from the Mother-Country's part or chief Ownership of the "national property" of New Zealand;—the Third, the obligation arising from the fact of the New Zealand Colonists being Members of that great Colonial Community of the Empire which puts an immense annual sum into the pockets of the more domestic, stay-at-home portion of your People, and which very largely contributes to England's public revenue and well-being, and to the pay and support of her military and naval establishments.

But, if the "duty" of the British Government to afford aid in War to British Subjects settled in New Zealand was based solely and wholly on the First only of these facts, on the fact that for more than twenty years the British page 28 Government has sanctioned and encouraged^* the Settlement of such Subjects in such Colony that, alone, would be sufficient to fix and fasten such "duty" on the British Government; and all further facts or arguments tending to the same end however weighty and conclusive, might be dismissed as altogether superogatory.

Indeed, the "idea" that an enlightened, powerful, humane, and generally just, Government, such as you have the happiness to live under, would, after having encouraged thousands of its Citizens to plant new homes in one of its distant Territories, afterwards plead that it was not morally and paternally bound to aid such Citizens in making good their footing in such Territory and in protecting themselves from the deadly perils found to be existing there, would be an "idea" so crude and monstrous that no Government of this Country would for a moment ever seriously entertain it. It would be an "idea" which might tickel dilettanti Political Economists, and one which might be acted on in Lilliput, in Utopia, in Barataria—but there is no smack of civilised humanity about it; and I feel assured I may close this portion of my subject in the conviction

^* Were it necessary to prove the existence of the Snn at bright noon, a hundred overt acts on the part of the Crown could be instanced to prove that it has "sanctioned and encouraged" the emigration of its Subjects to New Zealand—let one suffice as a sample. The Crown for upwards of twenty years has maintained among its other governmental Departments of State, a Department of State presided over by Authorities officially designated "Her Majesty's Emigration Commissioners." This Department of State, among its other legitimate works, annually issues a most useful and popular Publication, ornate with the Lion and the Unicorn, styled the "Colonisation Circular"—a Publication so cheap and good, and one, which from the fact of its being issued by Authority, and from its being free from that puffing and exaggeration so common in private works on Colonies and Emigration, is so popular as to have become the great "Emigration Guide and Hand-Book for the Nation." Among other pertinent information given in such Emigration Guide Book of the Crown, there has long been a very captivating but very truthful picture presented to the public of the special advantages which New Zealand offers to the Emigrant: its race of Savages much addicted to the tomahawk and the fire-brand is nowhere mentioned: but its fine climate, its high wages, its free grants, its cheap land arc all eilated on—and every one who has the slightest familiarity with the annual Emigration Movement of this Country, knows that this "Government Guide-Book" has such weight and currency among our Emigrant-Classes as to exercise a very considerable and a very just influence on them in the great question, as to which of our many Emigration Fields it would be the best to chose.

page 29 that you will agree with me that such an "idea"—the one, in effect, that the Parent, after encouraging the Child to undertake an enterprise for their mutual good, may then hack out and refuse him succour in any pains or perils incurred therein—is an "idea" which will not only never be acted on by any English Government in our time, but one which would be especially revolting to the humane and healthy instincts of the English Nation.

If, however, anything further were needed to show that it is the bounden duty of the Home Government to assist the Colony in this Maori War, it might instantly be found in the irrefragable argument that the duty of protecting, defending, improving Property is a duty devolving on the Owners of it; and in the equally irrefragable argument that the Mother-Country is part, if not chief, Owner of the Colony of New Zealand. Is it not ridiculous to speak of a handful of 80,000 pioneer Emigrants, a smaller number of men than is found in many a single English Town, as being the Owners of a Country containing 80,000,000 acres of Land, a Country nearly as large as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland?

You place a Representative of the Queen in New Zealand—in the veto power lodged with your Colonial office, you possess, and when you please, you exercise the right of shaping the Local Government and the Legislative Acts of New Zealand—you annually draw a large Trade-created Revenue from New Zealand—and you make it a Country to which you encourage your surplus population to go, so that they may leave the more loaves and fishes for such of you as are better fitted to sit by the fire at-home.

Certainly the handful of our enterprising people who have been the first to profit by such encouragement, and who are smoothing the path in New Zealand for following tens of thousands of their fellows, have a great stake and interest in the Country they have settled in. They ought to be, they are part "Owners" of it; and they are chargeable with, and are found faithfully to perform, their share of the duties and obligations arising from such part Ownership. But is it not as palpable as the Sun at bright noon that the Colony of New Zealand, with due regard to Native Rights, is the great Freehold of our whole People—not, the peculiar Possession of any mere portion of our People. Is it not clear that New Zealand is the Common property of the Nation, and that, being such, the duty of protecting and improving it rests on the nation, and not exclusively on any mere fractional part thereof?

The circumstance of the Mother-Country having encouraged her Emigrant-Sons to settle in New Zealand; the circumstance of Mother-Country being part or chief "Owner" of New Zealand, are, either of them, amply sufficient to fix on her the absolute duty of contributing effective aid to her people there, in this emergency of a "Native War." "But if neither of these facts had any page 31 existence there would still remain one to be advanced which, in and by itself, should be sufficient to dictate to the Mother Country the same line of action—namely, the fact that New Zealand is an important member of that noble group of her Colonies from which, in the shape of "Trade-Profits," she draws, annually, a princely Revenue.

True, it does follow, either in the case of Communities or of Individuals, that because A pockets a goodly sum every year by and through B, A is therefore bound to recognize the quid pro quo, and to do anything in return for B. Undoubtedly, the thirty millions of people in the British Isles might profit to the extent of half as many pounds sterling a year by the Trade created for them by the six millions of their Countrymen in Colonies, refuse to help such Countrymen with a penny in distress, and yet be guilty of no crime therein, nor perhaps even of any breach of any nameable moral law. But Members of your Legislature like Mr. Arthur Mills, and the Disciples of Professor Goldwin Smith, are content, I think, to waive this point. The gist of their argument that the Mother-Country should expend nothing on Colonists either in Peace or War is this—that Colonists contribute nothing to the Public Revenue of the Parent State, And they leave us to infer that if we could show that we did contribute, adequately, to the Public Revenue of the Parent State the case against us would be dissolved, and that we should establish a right and title to come to the Parent State for help in our emergencies and should never find it refused.

Now, the Hon. Member for Taunton may not be capable of seeing it, but nevertheless it is clear that British Colonies and Colonists do contribute, and that very largely, to the Public Revenue of the parent State. Certainly, your Tax- page 32 gatherers dont knock at the Colonist's door—but Colonists put a good deal of that fine wool on Mr. Bull's back which enables his dexterous Shearer, Mr. Gladstone, to clip from him those goodly fleeces with which he crams his capacious Exchequer.

The giving of you a breadth of territory on which, as you boast, the Sun never sets; the relieving of you from that ridicule and contempt ever attaching to Littleness; the conferring on you the prestige (productive of real power) of Bigness, are services rendered you by Colonies and Colonists which virtually put or keep money in your pockets and which indirectly increase your Revenue—but you are debtors to Colonies for something more than this. The forming for you of a Nursery for your A.B. seamen, your right arm in War, the supplying of you with raw material for many of your manufactures, are services rendered you by Colonies and Colonists which virtually put or keep money in your pockets and increase your Revenue—but you are debtors to Colonies for something more than this. The relieving you of your surplus people, of those who pent up in your home-hive would consume far more honey than they would make—the relieving you of those who, remaining here, would be wrestling with you for the prizes in love, war, journalism, arms, arts, commerce; the relieving you of those who would increase your poor rates, your crime taxes, and fester into revolutionary Pariahs of the State, are services rendered you by Colonies and Colonists which America,(¹¹)^* which no foreign Emigration Field could have rendered you, and which put or keep millions a year in your pockets and very materially increase your Revenue—but still are you debtors to Colonies for something more than this. The actual value of such benefits as these

^* See page 83.

page 33 conferred by her Colonies on the Mother-Country can no more be shown in figures than can the benefits of the Sun.

But all these items in the account I am content, for the moment, to set aside—content, in showing that Colonists contribute handsomely to your national wealth, and indirectly to your Public Revenue, to trust entirely to certain pregnant "figures" put forth by your Board of Trade.

These prove this—that the amount of Export and Import Trade created for the Mother-Country by her Colonies already amounts to the sum of £40,000,000 a year.^* Now, I think you will agree with me that on an average of years the profits on this vast Trade reaped by the Mother-Country cannot be less than £10 per cent. If so, here at once is a sum of no less than £4,000,000 per annum put by Colonies and Colonists into the pockets of the people of the Mother-Country; and as this "Colonial Trade" is rapidly increasing, the aggregate 10 per cent, profits of it during the next twenty years may safely be counted at £100,000,000—a sum Which cannot do other than help, to some extent, to create and make up that "national condition of wealth and prosperity among you" which enables your People to pay their Taxes, and a portion of which sum will just as surely find its way into your Exchequer as if it were to be counted out in gold, shipped in some colonial galleon to Southampton, and carried thence to Mr. Gladstone's coffers at the Bank.

The sum which in the last twenty years, and even in those her mere infant days, New Zealand has contributed to these hard cash Colonial "pickings" of Mr. Bull's may have amounted to nearly £3,000,000—a sum, probably, equal to any which he had ever and altogether expended on her when, last year, his Statesmen refused to save her the loss of a few thousands per annum by guaranteeing required Loan!