4.(See Page 6.)

The Crown's Pre-emptive Right.—I have no copy of the Treaty at hand, and forget, for the moment, whether this condition of selling only to the Crown was one actually embodied in the Treaty, or one which only grew out of it and became the great "land Law" of the Colony by some quick-following agreement and legislation. For a short period, in Governor Fitzroy's time, the Settlers, under certain restrictions, were allowed to purchase Land direct from the Natives; and under a very recent Act of the Colonial Legislature they may do so now. But this privilege has ever been but very slightly used, inasmuch as the private Settler in attempting to buy of Natives No. 1 has had no security, when once the purchase-money was paid down, that Natives No. 2 would not some day present themselves at his doors and demand, as the real owners of the soil, a second payment. Nine-tenths of the whole of the European lands in New Zealand have been acquired by the Settlers under the operation of the Crowns' "pre-emptive right;" and most assuredly, speaking from my own and many of my friends' personal experience of the "sharp practice," to use a mild term, of the Maori, I would rather give the Crown one pound per acre for a thousand acres of land to-morrow than any Native, or Tribe, or section of a Tribe, one shilling.