THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE STORY OF THE EMPIRE. 
 Edited by Howard Angus Kennedy.
 
 The Story of the Empire 
 
 Series. 
 
 
 
 THE RISE OF THE EMPIRE. 
 
 By SIR WALTER BESANT. 
 
 THE STORY OF INDIA. 
 
 By DEMETRIUS C. BOULGER. 
 
 THE STORY OF AUSTRALIA. 
 
 By FLORA L. SHAW. 
 
 THE STORY OF CANADA. 
 
 By HOWARD A.- KENNEDY. 
 
 THE STORY OF SOUTH AFRICA. 
 
 By W. BASIL WORSFOLD. 
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 By WILLIAM PEMBER REEVES. 
 THE STORY OF WEST AFRICA. 
 
 IN PREPARATION.
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM PEMBER REEVES. 
 
 London : 
 
 HORACE MARSHALL & 5ON, 
 Temple House, 
 
 E.G.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER. PAGE. 
 
 I. THE FORTUNATE ISLES i 
 
 II. THE MAORIS 18 
 
 III. No MAN'S LAND 29 
 
 IV. BATTLE, MURDER AND SUDDEN DEATH 37 
 V. "A SHIP OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS" 46 
 
 VI. CROWN versus COMPANY 57 
 
 VII. IN THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION ... 74 
 
 VIII. GOOD GOVERNOR GREY 83 
 
 IX. CHURCHES, AND SHEEP 89 
 
 X. THE CONSTITUTION AND PARLIAMENT 98 
 
 XI. GOVERNOR BROWNE'S BAD BARGAIN 107 
 
 XII. TEN TO ONE 114 
 
 XIII. THE HAU - HAUS AND THE SELF- 
 
 RELIANCE POLICY 123 
 
 XIV. GOLD 136 
 
 XV. EXEUNT THE PROVINCES ENTER 
 
 DEMOS 142 
 
 XVI. LAND SETTLEMENT AND LOCAL 
 
 INDUSTRIES 152 
 
 XVII. THE STATE AND ITS FUNCTIONS ... 160 
 
 XVIII. THE NEW ZEALANDERS 171
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 
 
 'npHOUGH one of the parts of the earth 
 J_ best fitted for man, New Zealand was 
 probably about the last of such lands occupied 
 by the human race. The first European to find 
 it was a Dutch sea-captain who was looking for 
 something else, and who thought it a part of 
 South America, from which it is sundered by five 
 thousand miles of ocean. It takes its name 
 from a province of Holland to which it does 
 not bear the remotest likeness, and is usually 
 regarded as the antipodes of England, but is 
 not. It was taken possession of by an English 
 navigator whose action, at first adopted, was 
 afterwards reversed by his country's rulers ; and 
 it was only annexed at length by the English 
 Government which did not want it, to keep it 
 from the French who did. The Colony's capital 
 bears the name of a famous British commander, 
 whose only connection with the country was a 
 
 B
 
 2 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 
 
 flat refusal to include it in the Empire. Those 
 who settled it meant it to be a theatre for the 
 Wakefield Land System. The code of land 
 laws, however, which its settlers have gradually 
 developed is a complete negation of Wakefield's 
 principle. Some of the chief New Zealand 
 settlements were founded by Church associa- 
 tions; but the Colony's education system has 
 long been purely secular. From the first those 
 who governed the Islands laboured earnestly to 
 preserve and benefit the native race, and on the 
 whole the treatment extended to them has been 
 just and often generous yet the wars with them 
 were long, obstinate, and mischievous beyond 
 the common. The pioneer colonists looked 
 upon New Zealand as an agricultural country, 
 but its main industries have turned out to be 
 grazing and mining. From the character of its 
 original settlers it was expected to be the most 
 conservative of the colonies; it is just now 
 ranked as the most democratic. Not only by 
 its founders but for many years afterwards, Irish 
 were avowedly or tacitly excluded from the 
 immigrants sent to it. Now, however, at least 
 one person in eight in the Colony is of that 
 race. 
 
 It would be easy to expand this list into an 
 essay on the vanity of human wishes. It would 
 not be hard to add thereto a formidable 
 catalogue of serious mistakes made both in 
 England and New Zealand by those responsible
 
 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 
 
 169 
 
 167 169 
 
 '73 175 ' *77 179
 
 4 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 
 
 for the Colony's affairs mistakes, some f 
 which, at least, seem now to argue an almost 
 inconceivable lack of knowledge and foresight. 
 So constantly have the anticipations of its officials 
 and settlers been reversed in the story of New 
 Zealand that it becomes none too easy to trace 
 any thread of guiding wisdom or consistent 
 purpose therein. The broad result, however, 
 has been a fine and vigorous colony. Some will 
 see in its record of early struggles, difficulties and 
 mistakes endured, paid for and surmounted, a 
 signal instance of the overruling care of Provi- 
 dence. To the cynic the tale must be merely a 
 minor portion of the "supreme ironic pro- 
 cession with laughter of gods in the background." 
 To the writer it seems, at least, to give a very 
 notable proof of the collective ability of a 
 colonizing race to overcome obstacles and repair 
 blunders. The Colony of New Zealand is not 
 a monument of the genius of any one man or 
 group of men. It is the outcome of the vitality 
 and industry of a people obstinate but resource- 
 ful, selfish but honest, often ill - informed 
 and wrong, but with the saving virtue of an 
 ability to learn from their own mistakes. 
 
 From one standpoint the story of New 
 Zealand ought not to take long to tell. It 
 stretches over less time than that of almost any 
 land with any pretensions to size, beauty, or 
 interest. New Zealand was only discovered by 
 Europeans in the reign of our King Charles I.,
 
 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 5 
 
 and even then the Dutch explorer who sighted 
 its lofty coasts did not set foot upon them. The 
 first European to step on to its shores did so 
 only when the great American colonies were 
 beginning to fret at the ties which bound them 
 to England. The pioneers of New Zealand 
 colonization, the missionaries, whalers, and flax 
 and timber traders, did not come upon the 
 scene until the years of Napoleon's decline and 
 fall. Queen Victoria had been on the throne 
 for three years before the Colonial Office was 
 reluctantly compelled to add the Islands to an 
 Empire which the official mind regarded as 
 already overgrown. 
 
 Yet so striking, varied and attractive are the 
 country's features, so full of bustle, change and 
 experiment have its few years been, that lack of 
 material is about the last complaint that need 
 be made by a writer on New Zealand. The list 
 of books on the Colony is indeed so long that 
 its bibliography is a much larger volume than 
 this ; and the chief plea to be urged for this 
 sketch must be its brevity a quality none too 
 common in colonial literature. 
 
 A New Zealander writing in London may be 
 forgiven if he begins by warning English readers 
 not to expect in the aspect of New Zealand 
 either a replica of the British Islands or any- 
 thing resembling Australia. The long, narrow, 
 mountainous islands upon which Abel Jansen 
 Tasman stumbled in December, 1642, are so far
 
 6 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 
 
 from being the antipodes of Britain that they lie 
 on an average twelve degrees nearer the equator. 
 Take Liverpool as a central city of the United 
 Kingdom ; it lies nearly on the 53rd parallel of 
 north latitude. Wellington, the most central 
 city of New Zealand, is not far from the 4ist 
 parallel of southern latitude. True, New Zealand 
 has no warm Gulf Stream to wash her shores. 
 But neither is she chilled by east winds blowing 
 upon her from the colder half of a continent. 
 Neither her contour nor climate is in the 
 least Australian. It is not merely that twelve 
 hundred miles of ocean separate the flat, 
 rounded, massive-looking continent from the 
 high, slender, irregular islands. The ocean is 
 deep and stormy. Until the nineteenth century 
 there was absolutely no going to and fro across 
 it. Many plants are found in both, but they are 
 almost all small and not in any way conspicuous. 
 Only one bird of passage migrates across the 
 intervening sea. The dominating trees of Aus- 
 tralia are myrtles (called eucalypts) ; those of 
 New Zealand are beeches (called birches), and 
 various species of pines. The strange mar- 
 supials, the snakes, the great running birds, 
 the wild dogs of Australia, have no counterpart 
 in New Zealand. The climate of Australia, 
 south of Capricorn, is, except on the eastern 
 and south-eastern coast, as hot and dry as the 
 South African. And the Australian mountains, 
 moderate in height and flattened, as a rule, at
 
 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 7 
 
 the summit, remind one not a little of the 
 table-topped elevations so familiar to riders on 
 the veldt and karroo. The western coast of 
 New Zealand is one of the rainiest parts of the 
 Empire. Even the drier east coast seldom 
 suffers from drought. On the west side the 
 thermometer scarcely ever rises above 80 deg. 
 in the shade ; on the other, not often above go 
 deg. New Zealand, too, is a land of volcanic 
 peaks and cones. Some of the loftier volcanoes 
 are still active, and the steam of their craters 
 mounts skyward above white fields of eternal 
 snow. The whole length of the South Island 
 is ridged by Alpine ranges, which, though not 
 quite equal in height to the giants of Switzer- 
 land, do not lose by comparison with the 
 finest of the Pyrenees. 
 
 No man with an eye for the beautiful or the 
 novel would call Australia either unlovely or 
 dull. It is not, however, a land of sharp and 
 sudden contrasts ; New Zealand is. Her dense 
 jungle-like forests show such a wealth of intricate, 
 tangled, luxuriant life, that the delighted botanist 
 hardly knows which way to turn first. Not only 
 are the giant trees crowded closely together, but 
 the spaces between their column-like trunks are 
 filled with bushes, ferns, reeds and shrubs of 
 every size and kind. Creepers and llianas swing 
 from the trees and bind the thickets together. 
 A profusion of parasitic growths, orchids, 
 grasses, climbing ferns and lichens almost
 
 8 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 
 
 conceals the tree-trunks. Many of the forest 
 flowers the white convolvulus, the starry 
 clematis, the feathery blood-red rata are lovely 
 and abundant. In the month of February, 
 when the rata flowers, there are gorges in the 
 New Zealand Alps which are ablaze for miles 
 with 
 
 " Flowers that with one scarlet gleam 
 Cover a hundred leagues, and seem 
 To set the hills on fire." 
 
 Of greater interest, even, are the forest birds, of 
 which at least four or five are songsters of no 
 mean delicacy and sweetness. 
 
 The wood of the trees is not only useful 
 timber, but when cut and polished is often 
 beautiful in grain. Unhappily, the destruction 
 of this lovely and valuable forest goes on 
 rapidly. The trees, as is usually the case with 
 those the wood of which is hard, grow slowly. 
 They feel exposure to wind, and seem to need 
 the society and shelter of their fellows. It is 
 almost impossible to restore a New Zealand 
 forest when once destroyed. Then, most of the 
 finest trees are found on rich soil. The land is 
 wanted for grazing and cultivation. The settler 
 comes with axe and fire-stick, and in a few 
 hours unsightly ashes and black funereal 
 stumps have replaced the noble woods 
 which Nature took centuries to grow. The 
 process is inevitable, and in great part needful, 
 frightfully wasteful as it seems. But the forest
 
 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 9 
 
 reserves of the Colony, large as they are, should 
 be made even more ample. Twelve hundred 
 thousand acres are not enough as the New 
 Zealanders will regretfully admit when a decade 
 or so hence they begin to import timber instead 
 of exporting it. As for interfering with reserves 
 already made, any legislator who suggests it 
 should propose his motion with a noose round 
 his neck, after the laudable custom followed in a 
 certain classic republic. 
 
 I have said that New Zealand is marked by 
 sudden changes and sharp contrasts. Nothing 
 could well be more utterly different than the 
 luxuriant jungles of the wet west coast with 
 their prevailing tint of rich dark green, their 
 narrow, rank, moist valleys and steep mountain- 
 sides and the eastern scenery of the South 
 Island. The sounds or fiords of the south-west 
 are perhaps the loveliest series of gulfs in the 
 world. Inlet succeeds inlet, deep, calm, and 
 winding far in amongst the steep and towering 
 mountains. The lower slopes of these are 
 clothed with a thick tangle of forest, where 
 foliage is kept eternally fresh and vivid by rain 
 and mist. White torrents and waterfalls every- 
 where seam the verdure. 
 
 Cross to the east coast. There the plains and 
 dales were open, grassy, almost treeless. They 
 were easy of access and for the most part fertile 
 an ideal country for that unaesthetic person, 
 the practical settler. Flocks and herds roamed
 
 10 THE FORTUNATE ISLES, 
 
 amongst the pale tussock grass of the slopes 
 and flats without fear either of man, beast, 
 climate or poisonous plant. A few wooden 
 buildings and a certain extent of wire fencing 
 represented all the initial expenses of the 
 pioneer. Pastoral settlement speedily overran 
 such a land, followed more slowly and partially 
 by agriculture. The settler came, not with axe 
 and fire to ravage and deform, but as builder, 
 planter and gardener. Being in nineteen cases 
 out of twenty a Briton or a child of one, he set 
 to work to fill this void land with everything 
 British which he could transport or transplant. 
 His gardens were filled with the flowers, the 
 vegetables, the fruit trees of the old land. The 
 oak, the willow, the poplar, the spruce, the ash 
 grew in his plantations. His cattle were Short- 
 horns, Herefords and Devons. The grasses 
 they fed upon were mixtures of cocks-foot, 
 timothy and white clover. When it was found 
 that the red clover would not flourish for want 
 of penetrating insects, the humble bee was im- 
 ported, and with complete success, as many a 
 field now ruddy with crimson blossom testifies. 
 The hedges which surround these fields are also 
 English, but with a difference. The stunted 
 furze which beautifies English commons is at 
 the other end of the earth a hedge plant, which 
 makes a thick barrier from five to eight feet 
 high, and, with its sweet-smelling blooms, has 
 made the New Zealand fields "green pictures
 
 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. II 
 
 set in frames of gold." The very birds which 
 rise from the clover or wheat, and nest in the 
 trees or hedgerows of furze or quickset, are for the 
 most part English the skylark, the blackbird, 
 finches (green and gold), and that eternal impu- 
 dent vagabond the sparrow. Near Christchurch 
 rooks caw in the windy skies. Trout give excel- 
 lent sport in a hundred streams. The hare 
 increases in size and weight. The pheasant has 
 spread from end to end of the Colony. The 
 Briton of the south has indeed taken with him 
 all that he could of the old country. 
 
 He has also brought a few things which he 
 wishes he had left behind. The house-fly and 
 the flea thrive mightily. The Norway rat has 
 driven the native black rat into the recesses of 
 the forest. A score of weeds have come, mixed 
 with badly - screened grass -seed, or in any of 
 a hundred other ways. The watercress 
 threatened at one time to choke half 
 the streams. The sweetbriar, taking kindly to 
 both soil and climate, not only grows tall 
 enough to arch over the head of a man on 
 horseback, but covers whole hillsides, to the ruin 
 of pasture. Introduced, innocently enough, by 
 the missionaries, it goes by their name in some 
 districts. The rabbit, multiplying in millions, 
 became a very terror to the sheep farmers, 
 is even yet the subject of anxious care and 
 inspection, and only slowly yields to fencing, 
 poison, traps, dogs, guns, stoats, weasels, ferrets,
 
 12 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 
 
 cats, and a host of instruments of destruction. 
 Moreover, just as Vortigern had reason to regret 
 that he had called in the Saxon to drive out the 
 Picts and Scots, so the New Zealanders have 
 already found the stoat and weasel but dubious 
 blessings. They have been a veritable Hengist 
 and Horsa to more than one poultry farmer and 
 owner of lambs. On the whole, however, though 
 acclimatization has given the Colony one or two 
 plagues and some minor nuisances, it would be 
 ridiculous to pretend that these for a moment 
 weigh in the scale against its good works. Most 
 of the vegetable pests, though they may flourish 
 abnormally for a few years in the virgin soil, 
 soon become less vigorous. With the growth of 
 population even the rabbit ceases to be a serious 
 evil, except to a few half-empty tracts. The 
 truth is that outside her forests and swamps New 
 Zealand showed the most completely unoccu- 
 pied soil of any fertile and temperate land on 
 the globe. It seems probable that until about 
 five or six hundred years ago she had no human 
 inhabitants whatever. Her lakes and rivers had 
 but few fish, her birds were not specially numer- 
 ous, her grasses [were not to be compared in 
 their nourishing qualities with the English. Of 
 animals there were virtually none. Even the rat 
 before mentioned and the now extinct dog of 
 the Maori villages were Maori importations 
 from Polynesia but a few centuries ago. 
 
 Not only, therefore, have English forms of
 
 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 13 
 
 life been of necessity drawn upon to fill the void 
 spaces, but other countries have furnished their 
 quota. The stately but heavy eucalypt of 
 Tasmania is the commonest of exotic trees. The 
 almost artificial stiffness and regularity of the 
 Norfolk Island pine, and the sweet-smelling 
 golden blooms of the Australian wattle, are sights 
 as familiar in New Zealand as in their native lands. 
 The sombre pines of California cover thousands 
 of acres. The merino sheep brought from Spain 
 via Saxony and Australia is the basis of the 
 flocks. The black swan and magpie represent 
 the birds of New Holland. The red deer came 
 from Germany. And side by side with these 
 strangers and with the trees and plants which 
 colonists call specifically "English" for the word 
 " British " is almost unknown in the Colony 
 the native flora is beginning to be cultivated in 
 gardens and grounds. Neglected by the first 
 generation, it is better appreciated by their 
 children themselves natives of the soil. 
 
 In the north and warmed island the traveller 
 also meets sharp contrasts, not so much between 
 east and west as between the coasts and the 
 central plateau. For the most part, all the coasts, 
 except the south-east, are, or have been, forest 
 clad. Nearly everywhere they are green, hilly 
 and abundantly watered ; windy, but not plagued 
 with extremes of cold and heat. Frost touches 
 them but for a short time in mid-winter. They 
 are indeed shores 
 
 " Made green with the running of rivers 
 And gracious with temperate air."
 
 14 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 
 
 New Zealand throughout is a land of streams. 
 From the height and narrowness of the islands 
 the currents of the rivers and of the brooks or, 
 as the colonists term them, "creeks" are 
 swift. In flood-time most of them become 
 raging torrents. Many were the horses and 
 riders swept away to hopeless death as they 
 stumbled over the hidden stony beds of turbid 
 mountain crossings in the pioneering days before 
 bridges were. Many a footman goldseeker or 
 labourer wandering in search of work disap- 
 peared thus, unseen and unrecorded. Heavy 
 were the losses in sheep and cattle, costly and 
 infuriating the delays, caused by flooded rivers. 
 Few are the old colonists who have not known 
 what it is to wait through wet and weary hours, 
 it might be days, gloomily smoking, grumbling 
 and waiting for some flood to abate and some 
 ford to become passable. Even yet, despite 
 millions spent on public works, such troubles are 
 not unknown. 
 
 The extreme south and north of the North 
 Island could hardly, by any stretch of imagina- 
 tion, be called rich and fertile. But the island 
 demonstrates the " falsehood of extremes," for 
 between them is found some of the finest and 
 pleasantest land in the southern hemisphere. 
 Nearly all of this, however, lies within fifty miles 
 of one or other coast. When you have left these 
 tracts, and have risen a thousand feet or so, you 
 come to a volcanic plateau, clad for the most
 
 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 15 
 
 part in dark green and rusty bracken or tussocks 
 of faded yellow. Right in the centre rise the 
 great volcanoes, Ruapehu, Tongariro and Tara- 
 wera, majestic in their outlines, fascinating 
 because of the restless fires within and the out- 
 breaks which have been and will again take 
 place. Scattered about this plateau are lakes of 
 every shape and size, from Taupo called Te 
 Moana (the sea) by the Maoris to the tiniest 
 lakelets and ponds. Here are found pools and 
 springs of every degree of heat. Some are 
 boiling cauldrons into which the unwary fall 
 now and again to meet a death terrible, yet if 
 the dying words of some of them may be 
 believed not always agonizing, so completely 
 does the shock of contact with the boiling water 
 kill the nervous system. Many pools are the 
 colour of black broth. Foul with mud and 
 sulphur, they seethe and splutter in their dark 
 pits, sending up clouds of steam and sulphurous 
 fumes. Others are of the clearest green or 
 deepest, purest blue, through which thousands of 
 silver bubbles shoot up to the surface, flash, and 
 vanish. But the main use of the hot springs 
 is found in their combination of certain 
 chemical properties, sulphuric - acid, sulphur- 
 alkaline. Nowhere in the world, probably, are 
 found healing waters at once so powerful and 
 so various in their uses. Generations ago the 
 Maori tribes knew something of their effects. 
 Now invalids come from far and near in
 
 1 6 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 
 
 hundreds and thousands, and when the distrac- 
 tions and appliances of the sanitary stations equal 
 those of the European spas they will come in 
 tens of thousands, for the plateau is not only a 
 health resort but a wonderland. Its geysers 
 rank with those of Iceland and the Yellowstone. 
 Seen in the clear sunny air, these columns of 
 water and white foam, mounting, swaying, blown 
 by the wind into silver spray, and with attendant 
 rainbows glittering in the light, are sights which 
 silence even the chattering tourist for awhile. 
 Solfataras, mud volcanoes and fumaroles are 
 counted in hundreds in the volcanic zone. If 
 there were not such curiosities, still the beauty of 
 the mountains, lakes, streams and patches of 
 forest would, with the bright invigorating air, 
 make the holiday-maker seek them in numbers. 
 Through the middle of this curious region runs 
 the Waikato, the longest and on the whole most 
 tranquil and useful of that excitable race the 
 rivers of New Zealand. Even the Waikato has 
 its adventures. In one spot it is suddenly 
 compressed to a sixth of its breadth, and, boiling 
 between walls of rock, leaps in one mass of blue 
 water and white foam into a deep, tree- 
 fringed pool below. This is the Huka Water- 
 fall. It is but one of the many beautiful falls to 
 be met with in the Islands. 
 
 But enough of the scenery of the Colony. 
 This is to be a story, not a sketch-book. 
 Enough that the drama of New Zealand's
 
 THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 17 
 
 history, now in the second act, has been placed 
 on one of the most remarkable and favourable 
 stages in the globe. Much too much of its 
 wild and singular beauty must be ruined in the 
 process of settlement. But very much is inde- 
 structible. The colonists are also awakening to 
 the truth that mere Vandalism is as stupid as it 
 is brutal. Societies are being established for 
 the preservation of scenery. The Government 
 has undertaken to protect the more famous 
 spots. Within recent years three islands lying 
 off different parts of the coast have been re- 
 served as asylums for native birds. Two 
 years ago, too, the lovely mountainous territory 
 of the Urewera tribe was by Act of Parliament 
 made inalienable, so that so long as the tribe 
 lasts their ferns, their birds and their trees, shall 
 not vanish from the earth.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE MAORIS. 
 
 NEARLY at the end of 1642, Tasman, a 
 sea captain in the service of the Dutch 
 East India Company, sighted the western ranges of 
 the Southern Alps. He was four months out from 
 Java, investigating the extent of New Holland, 
 and in particular its possible continuation 
 southward as a great Antarctic continent. He 
 had just discovered Tasmania, and was des- 
 tined, ere returning home, to light upon Fiji 
 and the Friendly Islands. So true is it that the 
 most striking discoveries are made by men who 
 are searching for what they never find. In 
 clear weather the coast of Westland is a grand 
 spectacle, and even through the dry, matter-of- 
 fact entries of Tasman's log we can see that it 
 impressed him. He notes that the mountains 
 seemed lifted aloft in the air. With his two ships, 
 the small " Heemskirk " and tiny "Zeehan," he
 
 THE MAORIS. 19 
 
 began to coast cautiously northward, looking for 
 an opening eastward. He seems to have re- 
 garded New Zealand simply as a lofty barrier 
 across his path, to be passed at the first chance. 
 Groping along, he actually turned into the wide 
 opening which, narrowing further east into 
 Cook's Strait, divides the North and South 
 Islands. He anchored in Golden Bay ; but 
 luck was against him. First of all the natives 
 of the bay paddled out to view his 
 ships, and, falling on a boat's crew, clubbed 
 four out of seven of the men. Tasman's 
 account which I take leave to doubt makes 
 the attack senselessly wanton and unprovoked. 
 He says that he took no vengeance, but sailed 
 away further into the strait. By night, the 
 officers of the "Zeehan," coming on board, let 
 him know their suspicion that an opening 
 existed to the east. But next morning a strong 
 gale had sprung up. Cook's Strait is now 
 playfully termed " the windpipe of the Pacific." 
 Tasman, therefore, turned and ran on northward, 
 merely catching glimpses, through scud and 
 cloud, of the North Island. Finally, at what is 
 now North Cape, he discerned to his joy a free 
 passage to the east. He made one attempt to 
 land, in search of water, on a little group of 
 islands hard by, which, as it was Christmastide, 
 he called Three Kings, after Caspar, Melchior, 
 and Balthasar. But a throng of natives, shaking 
 spears and shouting with hoarse voices, terrified
 
 20 THE MAORIS. 
 
 his boat's crew. He gave up the attempt and 
 sailed away, glad, no doubt, to leave this vague 
 realm of storm and savages. He had called it 
 Staaten Land, on the wild guess that it extended 
 to the island of that name off the coast of Terra 
 del Fuego. The Dutch authorities altered the 
 name to New Zealand. Their secretive com- 
 mercial policy made them shroud Tasman's 
 discoveries in mystery. It is said that his chart 
 was engraved on the Amsterdam Merchants' 
 Exchange. The full text of his log has only 
 been quite recently published. His curt entries 
 dealing with the appearance of the New Zealand 
 coast and its natives seem usually truthful 
 enough. It is noteworthy that he describes the 
 natives of Golden or, as he named it, 
 Murderers' Bay as having double canoes. 
 When the country was annexed, two hundred 
 years afterwards, the New Zealanders had 
 forgotten how to build them. 
 
 In double canoes, doubtless, the Maoris 
 voyaged safely over the thousands of miles 
 of open ocean which separate New Zealand 
 from the tropical islands of Eastern Polynesia. 
 It was thence that they unquestionably came. 
 They are of the same race as the brown, 
 handsome people who inhabit the South Sea 
 Islands from Hawaii to Rarotonga, and who, in 
 Fiji, mingle their blood with the darker and 
 inferior Melanesians of the west. All the 
 Polynesians speak dialects of the same musical
 
 THE MAORIS. 21 
 
 tongue. A glance at. Tregear's "Comparative 
 Polynesian Dictionary" will satisfy any reader 
 on that point. The Rarotongans call them- 
 selves "Maori," and can understand the New 
 Zealand speech; so, as a rule, can the other 
 South Sea tribes. All are well though rather 
 heavily built, active when they choose, and 
 passionately fond of war and sport. The New 
 Zealanders are good riders and capital football 
 players. The Samoans are so fond of cricket 
 that they will spend weeks in playing gigantic 
 matches, fifty a side. Bold as seamen and 
 skilful as fishermen, the Polynesians are, 
 however, primarily cultivators of the soil. 
 They never rose high enough in the scale to be 
 miners or merchants. In the absence of 
 mammals, wild and tame, in their islands, they 
 could be neither hunters nor herdsmen. Fierce 
 and bloodthirsty in war, they were good- 
 natured and hospitable in peace and affectionate 
 in family life. 
 
 There is no reason to think that the New 
 Zealanders are any more akin to the modern 
 Malays than they are to the Australian blacks ; 
 nor have attempts to connect them with the red 
 men of America succeeded. They are much 
 more like some of the Aryans of Northern 
 India. But the truth is, their fortunes before 
 their race settled in Polynesia are a pure matter 
 of guess-work. Some centuries ago, driven out 
 by feuds or shortness of food, they left their
 
 22 THE MAORIS. 
 
 pleasant tropical isles, and found their way to 
 Aotearoa, as they called New Zealand. 
 Landing at different points, and at widely 
 different dates, they spread about the pleasant 
 land. Always needing fish, they placed their 
 villages near the sea beaches or the rivers and 
 lakes. In the forests they found birds, and, not 
 having the bo w-and- arrow, made shift to snare 
 and spear them ingeniously. In their canoes 
 they would paddle as far as twelve miles from 
 land. Amongst other fish they caught sharks, 
 killing them before they hauled them into the 
 crank canoes, and drying them in thousands for 
 winter food. The fern-root they found as 
 plentiful as it was nutritious ; but their vegetable 
 staples were a root called taro and the kumara, 
 or sweet potato, which they had brought with 
 them from their Polynesian home. What 
 between fish, birds and vegetables, with occa- 
 sional delicacies in the shape of dogs and rats, 
 they were by no means badly provisioned, and 
 they cooked their food carefully and well, chiefly 
 by steaming in ovens lined with heated stones. 
 Without tea, coffee, sugar, alcohol or tobacco, 
 they had also but seldom the stimulant 
 given by flesh meat. The cannibalism was 
 almost confined to triumphal banquets on the 
 bodies of enemies slain in battle. Without the 
 aid of metals or pottery, without wool, cotton, 
 silk or linen, almost without leather, they yet 
 contrived to clothe, feed and house themselves
 
 THE MAORIS. 23 
 
 and to make some advance in the arts of 
 carving, building and dyeing. The native flax 
 dressed by them made kilts and mantles soft, 
 warm and silky. With the aid of fire and 
 hatchets and chisels' of the hard green jade, 
 they not only hewed logs and shaped boards, 
 but, with incredible patience, covered the 
 hardest wood with artistic and elaborate 
 carvings. The decorative work on their canoe- 
 prows, on their weather-boards, weapons, and 
 the lintels of their doors, has real beauty. The 
 curious and grotesque curves and spirals 
 tattooed over the faces of their chiefs showed 
 no contemptible sense of line in the artist. 
 The dyed patterns on their mantles, and on the 
 dried reeds and rushes with which they lined 
 their council-halls, displayed a barbaric but by 
 no means tasteless love of colour. Both their 
 muscular men and dark-eyed women were tall 
 and bulky, and ought, one might have thought, 
 to have increased and multiplied till they had 
 filled both islands. 
 
 They did not, however. I see no reason to 
 believe that they ever numbered more than a 
 hundred and fifty thousand. Except on the 
 shores of Cook's Straits, they only planted a 
 few scattered outposts in the South Island. 
 Yet that is the larger island of the two. It is 
 also the colder, and therein lies the chief secret 
 of the check to the Maori increase. They were 
 a tropical race transplanted into a temperate
 
 24 THE MAORIS. 
 
 climate. They showed much the same tendency 
 to cling to the North Island as the negroes in 
 North America to herd in the Gulf States. 
 Their dress, their food and their ways were 
 those of dwellers on shores out of reach of frost 
 and snow. Though of stout and robust figure, 
 they are almost always weak in the chest and 
 throat. Should the Maoris die out, the medical 
 verdict might be summed up in the one word 
 tuberculosis. Nor do they show much nervous 
 power when attacked by disease. Cheerful and 
 sociable when in health, they droop quickly 
 when ill, and seem sometimes to die from sheer 
 lack of the will to live. Bright and imaginative, 
 almost, as the Kelts of Europe, their spirits 
 are easily affected by superstitious dread. 
 Authentic cases are known of a healthy Maori 
 giving up the ghost through believing himself to 
 be doomed by a wizard. 
 
 Another check on the increase of their race 
 was and still is their immorality, with its 
 plain result in a low birth-rate. There are, 
 however, other evil influences under which this 
 attractive and interesting people are fading away. 
 Though no longer savages, they have never 
 become thoroughly civilized. Partial civilization 
 has been a blight to their national life. It has 
 ruined the efficacy of their communal system 
 without replacing it with any equal moral force 
 and industrial stimulus. It has deprived them 
 of the business and pleasure of their lives
 
 THE MAORIS. 25 
 
 their tribal wars and given them no spur to 
 exertion by way of a substitute. It has fatally 
 wounded their pride and self-respect, and yet 
 has not given them habits of labour and self- 
 restraint. A hundred years ago the tribes were 
 organized and disciplined communes. No unit 
 or family could starve or lack shelter; the 
 humblest could count on the most open- 
 handed hospitality from his fellows. The tribal 
 territory was the property of all. The tilling, 
 the fishing, the fowling were work for the com- 
 munity. The chief was not a despot, but the 
 president of a council, and in war would not be 
 given the command unless he was the most 
 capable captain. Every man was a soldier, and, 
 under the perpetual stress of possible war, had 
 to be a trained, self-denying athlete. The 
 stockaded and intrenched villages, or pas, were, 
 for defensive reasons, built on the highest 
 and therefore the healthiest positions. The 
 ditches, the palisades, the terraces of these forts 
 were constructed with great labour as well as no 
 small skill. The fighting was hand to hand. 
 The wielding of their weapons the wooden 
 spear, the club, the quaint mere and the stone 
 tomahawk required strength and endurance 
 as well as a skill only to be obtained by hard 
 practice. The very sports and dances of the 
 Maori were such as only the active and vigorous 
 could excel in. Slaves there were, but not 
 enough to relieve the freemen from the necessity
 
 26 THE MAORIS. 
 
 for hard work. Strange sacred customs, such as 
 tapu (vulgarly Anglicized as taboo) and muru, 
 laughable as they seem to us, tended to preserve 
 public health, to ensure respect for authority 
 and to prevent any undue accumulation of goods 
 and chattels in the hands of one man. Every 
 male adult had to be an active, brave, self- 
 respecting, disciplined citizen. Certain colonial 
 writers have exhausted their powers of ridicule 
 no very difficult task upon Maori communism. 
 But the system, in full working order, at least 
 developed the finest race of savages the world 
 has seen, and taught them barbaric virtues 
 which have won from their white supplanters 
 not only respect but liking. The average 
 colonist regards a Mongolian with repulsion, a 
 Negro with contempt, and looks on an Australian 
 black as very near to a wild beast ; but he likes 
 the Maoris, and is sorry that they are dying out. 
 No doubt the remnants of the Maori communal 
 system are useless, and perhaps worse than use- 
 less. The tribes still own land in common, and 
 much of it. They might be very wealthy landlords 
 if they cared to lease their estates on the best 
 terms they could bargain for. As it is, they 
 receive yearly very large sums in rent. They 
 could be rich farmers if they cared to master 
 the science of farming. They have brains to 
 learn more difficult things. They might be 
 healthy men and women if they would accept 
 the teachings of sanitary science as sincerely as
 
 THE MAORIS. 2^ 
 
 they took in the religious teachings of the early 
 missionaries. If they could be made to realise 
 that foul air, insufficient dress, putrid food, 
 alternations of feast and famine, and long bouts 
 of sedulous idleness are destroying them as a 
 people and need not do so, then their decay 
 might be arrested and the fair hopes of the 
 missionary pioneers yet be justified. So long as 
 they soak maize in the streams until it is rotten 
 and eat it together with dried shark food the 
 merest whiff of which will make a white man 
 sick ; so long as they will wear a suit of clothes 
 one day and a tattered blanket the next, and sit 
 smoking crowded in huts the reek of which 
 strikes you like a blow in the face ; so long as 
 they will cluster round dead bodies during their 
 tangis or wakes ; so long as they will ignore 
 drainage just so long will they remain a blighted 
 and dwindling race, and observers without eyes 
 will talk as though there was something fateful 
 and mysterious in their decline. One glimmer 
 of hope for them has quite lately been glimpsed. 
 They are caring more for the education of their 
 children. Three years ago the Government re- 
 organized the native schools, had the children 
 taught sanitary lessons with the help of magic 
 lanterns, and gave power to committees of native 
 villagers to prosecute the parents of truants. 
 The result has been a prompt, marked and 
 growing improvement in the attendance and the 
 general interest. Better still, the educated
 
 THE MAORIS. 
 
 Maori youths are awakening to the sad plight of 
 their people. Pathetic as their regrets are, the 
 healthy discontent they show may lead to better 
 things.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 NO MAN'S LAND. 
 
 THE Dutch made no use of their Australian 
 discoveries. They were repelled by the 
 heat, the drought, and the barrenness of the 
 north-western coasts of New Holland. For a 
 century and a quarter after Tasman's flying visit, 
 New Zealand remained virtually unknown. Then 
 the veil was lifted once and for all. Captain James 
 Cook, in the " Endeavour," sighted New Zealand 
 in 1769. He had the time to study the country, 
 and the ability too. In four visits he surveyed 
 the coast, described the aspect and products of 
 the islands, and noted down a mass of invaluable 
 details concerning the native tribes. Everyone 
 may not be able to perceive the literary charm 
 which certain eulogists have been privileged to 
 find in Cook's admirable record of interesting 
 facts. But he may well seem great enough as a 
 navigator and observer, to be easily able to survive 
 a worse style say Hawkesworth's. He found 
 New Zealand a line on the map, and left it an
 
 30 NO MAN'S LAND. 
 
 Archipelago, a feat which many generations of 
 her colonists will value above the shaping of 
 sentences. The feature of his experiences which 
 most strikes the reader now, is the extraordinary 
 courage and pugnacity of the natives. They 
 took the "Endeavour" for a gigantic white- 
 winged sea-bird, and her pinnace for a young 
 bird. They thought the sailors gods, and 
 the discharge of their muskets divine thunder- 
 bolts. Yet, when Cook and a boat's-crew 
 landed, a defiant war-chief at once threatened 
 the boat, and persisted until he was shot dead. 
 Almost all Cook's attempts to trade and converse 
 with the Maoris ended in the same way a 
 scuffle and a musket-shot. Yet the savages 
 were never cowed, and came again. They were 
 shot for the smallest thefts. Once Cook fired on 
 the crew of a canoe merely for refusing to stop 
 and answer questions about their habits and 
 customs. He killed four of them an act of which 
 he calmly notes that he himself could not, on 
 reflection, approve. Yet, for that age, he was 
 singularly humane, and so prudent that he did 
 not lose a man on his first and most troubled 
 visit to New Zealand. During this voyage he 
 killed ten Maoris. Later intercourse was much 
 more peaceful, though Captain Furneaux, of 
 Cook's consort, the "Adventure," less lucky, or 
 less cautious, lost an entire boat's crew, killed 
 and eaten. Cook himself was always able to 
 get wood and water for his ships, and to carry on
 
 NO MAN'S LAND. 31 
 
 his surveys with such accuracy and deliberation 
 that they remained the standard authority on 
 the outlines of the islands for some seventy 
 years. He took possession of the country in 
 the name of George the Third. He gave the 
 natives seed potatoes, and turned fowls and 
 pigs loose to furnish them with flesh-meat. To 
 this day, the wild pigs which the settlers shoot 
 and spear in the forests and mountain valleys, 
 are called after Captain Cook, and furnish many 
 a solitary shepherd and farmer with a much 
 more wholesome meal than they would get from 
 " tame " pork. 
 
 For two generations, the English Government 
 paid no attention to the new-found land. What 
 with losing America, and fighting the French, it 
 had its hands full. It colonized Australia with 
 convicts and found it a costly and dubious 
 experiment. The Government was well satisfied 
 to ignore New Zealand. But adventurous 
 English spirits were not. In the seas round 
 New Zealand were found the whale and the fur- 
 seal. The Maoris might be cannibals, but they 
 were eager to trade. In their forests grew trees 
 capable of supplying first-class masts and spars. 
 Strange weapons, ornaments, and cloaks were 
 offered by the savages, as well as food and the 
 dressed fibre of the native flax. Moreover, a 
 peculiar and profitable, if ghastly, trade sprang 
 up in tattooed heads. A well-preserved specimen 
 fetched as much as twenty pounds. Hitherto
 
 32 NO MANS LAND. 
 
 hung up as trophies of victory in the pas, these 
 relics of battle were quickly turned to account, 
 at first for iron, then for muskets, powder, and 
 lead. When the "natural supply" of heads of 
 slain enemies ran short, slaves, who had hitherto 
 never been allowed the aristocratic privilege and 
 dignity of being tattooed, had their faces pre- 
 pared for the market. Sometimes, it is recorded, 
 a slave, after months of painful preparation, had 
 the audacity to run away with his own head 
 before the day of sale and decapitation. 
 Commodore Wilkes, when exploring in the 
 American " Vincennes,"boughttwo heads from the 
 steward of a missionary brig. It was missionary 
 effort, however, which at length killed the traffic 
 and the art of tattooing along with it. Cook 
 had found the Maoris still in the Stone Age. 
 They were far too intelligent to stay there a day 
 after the use of metals had been demonstrated 
 to them. Wits much less acute than a Maori's 
 would appreciate the difference between hacking 
 at hardwood trees with a jade tomahawk, and 
 cutting them down with a European axe. So 
 New Zealand's shores became, very early in this 
 century, the favourite haunt of whalers, sealers, 
 and nondescript trading schooners. Deserters 
 and shipwrecked seamen were adopted by the 
 tribes. An occasional runaway convict from 
 Australia added spice to the mixture. The lot 
 of these unacknowledged and unofficial pioneers 
 of our race was chequered. Some castaways
 
 NO MAN'S LAND. 33 
 
 were promptly knocked on the head and eaten. 
 Some suffered in slavery. Others were admitted 
 into the tribes, and married to one, sometimes 
 two or three, wives. The relatives of these last 
 occasionally resorted to an effectual method of 
 securing their fidelity by tattooing them. Once 
 enlisted, they were expected to distinguish 
 themselves in the incessant tribal wars. Most of 
 them took their share of fighting with gusto. 
 As trade between whites and Maoris grew, each 
 tribe made a point of having a white agent- 
 general, called its Pakeha Maori (Foreigner 
 Maorified), to conduct their trade and business 
 with his fellows. These gentry were for the 
 most part admirably qualified to spread the vices 
 of civilization and discredit its precepts. But, 
 illiterate ruffians as most of them were, they had 
 their uses in aiding peaceful intercourse between 
 the races. One of them, Maning by name, 
 who lived with a tribe on the beautiful 
 inlet of Hokianga, was an Irish adventurer, 
 possessed not only of uncommon courage 
 and acuteness, but of real literary talent and 
 a genial and charming humour. He lived to 
 see savagery replaced by colonization, and 
 to become a judicial officer in the service of 
 the Queen's Government. Some of his 
 reminiscences, embodied in a volume entitled 
 "Old New Zealand," still form the best 
 book which the Colony has been able to 
 produce. Nowhere has the comedy and
 
 34 NO MAN S LAND. 
 
 childishness of savage life been so delightfully 
 portrayed. 
 
 Maoris, shipping before the mast on board 
 whalers and traders, made some of the best 
 seamen on the Pacific. They visited Sydney 
 and other civilized ports, where their fine 
 physique, bold bearing, and strangely tattooed 
 faces, heightened the interest felt in them as 
 specimens of their ferocious and dreaded race. 
 Stories of the Maoris went far and wide of 
 their fierce fights, their cannibal orgies, their 
 grotesque ornaments and customs, their lonely, 
 fertile and little-known country. Humane men 
 conceived the wish to civilize and Christianize 
 this people. Benjamin Franklin had planned 
 something of the kind when the news of Cook's 
 discovery first reached England. Thirty years 
 later, Samuel Marsden, a New South Wales 
 chaplain, resolved to be the Gregory or 
 Augustine of this Britain of the South. The 
 wish became the master-passion of his life, and 
 he lived to fulfil it. Led by him and his 
 companions, Hall and Kendall, the missionaries 
 entered the islands in 1814, and though for 
 many years their progress was slow, it had 
 become rapid and general in the decade before 
 the annexation of 1840. They gave the Maoris 
 a written language. Into this, with the aid of 
 Professor Lee, of Cambridge, the scriptures were 
 translated. Marsden had a sound belief in the 
 virtues of teaching savages the decencies and
 
 NO MAN'S LAND. 35 
 
 handicrafts of civilized life. He looked upon 
 such knowledge as the best path to religious 
 belief. Almost alone amongst his class, he was 
 far-sighted enough to perceive, at any rate in the 
 latter years of his life, that the only hope of 
 New Zealand lay in annexation, and that any 
 dream of a Protestant Paraguay was Utopian. 
 Quite naturally, but most unfortunately, most 
 missionaries thought otherwise, and were at the 
 outset of colonization placed in antagonism to 
 the pioneers. The missionaries taught the 
 elements of a rough-and-ready civilization, which 
 the chiefs were acute enough to value. But the 
 courage and singleness of purpose of many of 
 them gave them a higher claim to respect. To 
 do the Maoris justice, they recognised it, and 
 the long journeys which the preachers of peace 
 were able to make, from tribe to tribe of 
 cannibals and warriors, say something for the 
 generosity of the latter as well as for the 
 devotion of the travellers. In the face of 
 occasional insult and plunder, the work went on. 
 Missionary stations, pleasant oases in the desert 
 of barbarism, began to dot the land. The ruins 
 of many of these are still to be seen, surrounded 
 by straggling plots run to waste, "where once a 
 garden smiled." When Charles Darwin, during 
 the voyage of the " Beagle," visited the Bay of 
 Islands, the missionary station at Waimate 
 struck him as the one bright spot in a gloomy 
 and ill-ordered land. Darwin, by the way, was
 
 36 NO MAN'S LAND. 
 
 singularly despondent in his estimate both of 
 Australia and New Zealand. Colonial evolution 
 was clearly not amongst his studies. 
 
 Colonists as a rule shrug their shoulders when 
 questioned as to the depth of Maori religious 
 feeling. It is enough to point out that a 
 Christianity which induced barbarian masters to 
 release their slaves without payment or conditions 
 must have had a reality in it at which the kindred 
 of Anglo-Saxon sugar-planters have no right to 
 sneer. Comic as Maori sectarianism became, it 
 was not more ridiculous than British. It is true 
 that rival tribes gloried in belonging to different 
 denominations, and in slighting converts be- 
 longing to other churches. On one occasion, 
 a white wayfarer, when asking shelter for the 
 night at a pa, was gravely asked to name his 
 church. He recognised that his night's shelter 
 was at stake, and had no notion what was the 
 reigning sect of the village. Sharpened by 
 hunger, his wit was equal to the emergency, and 
 his answer, " to the true church," gained him 
 supper and a bed. Too much stress has been 
 laid on the spectacle of missionaries engaging in 
 public controversies, and of semi-savage converts 
 wrangling over rites and ceremonies and 
 discussing points of theology which might well 
 puzzle a Greek metaphysician. Such incidents 
 were but an efflorescence on the surface of what 
 for a number of years was a true and pretty 
 general earnestness.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 BATTLE, MURDER AND SUDDEN DEATH. 
 
 MARSDEN sketches his first night in New 
 Zealand. The missionary paced up 
 and down on the sea beach by which a tribe was 
 encamped. The air was pleasant, the stars 
 shone brightly, in front of him the sea was 
 smooth. Around lay the Maori warriors sleep- 
 ing, wrapped in their dyed mantles and with 
 their spears stuck upright in the ground. It was 
 a quiet scene. Most of the scenes of that time 
 which have come down to us were not of 
 quietness. A few of them are worth telling here 
 as examples of the condition of things which the 
 missionaries landed to confront, and amidst 
 which they worked. 
 
 In 1810, four years before Marsden's coming, 
 the ship " Boyd " made a voyage from Sydney 
 to Whangaroa for timber. Amongst the crew 
 were several Maoris. One of these, George, a 
 young rangatira, or gentleman, was twice flogged
 
 38 BATTLE, MURDER AND SUDDEN DEATH. 
 
 for refusing to work on the plea of illness. The 
 captain added insult to the stripes by the words, 
 " You are no chief! " The sting of this lay in 
 the sacredness attached by Maori custom to a 
 chiefs person, which was tapu i.e., a thing not 
 to be touched. George vowed vengeance, and 
 on reaching Whangaroa showed his stripes to 
 his kinsfolk, as Boadicea hers to the Britons of 
 old. The tribesmen, with that craft of which 
 the apparently frank and cheerful Maori has so 
 ample a share, quietly laid their plans. The 
 captain was welcomed. To divide their foes, 
 the Maori beguiled him and a party of sailors 
 into the forest, where they killed them all. 
 Then, dressing themselves in the clothes of the 
 dead, the slayers made off to the " Boyd." 
 Easily coming alongside in their disguises, they 
 leaped on the decks and massacred crew and 
 passengers without pity. George himself 
 clubbed half-a-dozen. Yet, even in his fury, he 
 spared a ship's boy who had been kind to him, 
 and a woman and two girl-children. All four 
 were afterwards rescued by Mr. Berry, of 
 Sydney, and took refuge with a friendly neigh- 
 bouring chief, Te Pehi. Meanwhile, the " Boyd" 
 had been stripped and burned. In the orgie 
 that followed, George's father snapped a musket 
 over a barrel of gunpowder, and, with a dozen of 
 his friends, was blown to pieces. 
 
 Then ensued a tragedy of errors. The 
 captains of certain whalers lying in the Bay of
 
 BATTLE, MURDER AND SUDDEN DEATH. 39 
 
 Islands, hearing that the survivors of the " Boyd " 
 were at Te Pehi's village, concluded that that 
 kindly chief was a partner in the massacre. 
 Organizing a night attack, the whalers destroyed 
 the village and its guiltless owners. The 
 unlucky Te Pehi, fleeing wounded, fell into the 
 hands of some of George's people, who, regarding 
 him as a sympathiser with the whites, made an 
 end of him. Finally, to avenge him, some of 
 the survivors of his tribe afterwards killed and 
 ate three seamen who had had nothing to do with 
 any stage of the miserable drama. 
 
 The merchant-skippers who in brigs and 
 schooners hung round the coasts of the Islands 
 thought little either of kidnapping men or 
 carrying off women. They would turn their 
 victims adrift in Australia or on some South Sea 
 islet, as their humour moved them. With even 
 more cruel callousness, they would sometimes 
 put Maoris carried off from one tribe on shore 
 amongst another and maybe hostile tribe. 
 Slavery was the best fate such unfortunates 
 could expect. On one occasion, the missionaries 
 in the Bay of Islands rescued from bondage 
 twelve who had in this fashion been thrown 
 amongst their sworn enemies. Their only 
 offence was that they had happened to be trading 
 on board a brig in their own port when a fair 
 wind sprang up. The rascal in command 
 carried them off rather than waste any of the 
 wind by sending them on shore.
 
 40 RATTLE, MURDER AND SUDDEN DEATH. 
 
 Pre-eminent in infamy amongst these ruffianly 
 traders was a certain Stewart. In the year 
 1830, he was hanging about Cook's Straits in 
 the brig " Elizabeth." There he agreed to 
 become the instrument of one of the most 
 diabolical acts of vengeance in Maori annals. 
 Some time before, one Te Pehi, a North Island 
 chief, had been killed in a chance brawl by the 
 natives of Kaiapoi in the South Island. Te 
 Pehi's son, Rauparaha, a warrior famed alike for 
 craft and cruelty, bided his time. The 
 appearance of Stewart, ripe for any villany, gave 
 him his chance. For thirty tons of flax, the 
 " Elizabeth " was hired to take Rauparaha and a 
 war-party, not to Kaiapoi, but to Akaroa, 
 a beautiful harbour amongst the hills of the 
 peninsula called after Sir Joseph Banks. It 
 lay many miles away from Kaiapoi, but was 
 inhabited by natives of the same tribe. 
 Rauparaha and his men hid below. Stewart, by 
 swearing that he had no Maoris on board, but 
 merely came to trade, tempted the local chief 
 and his friends on deck. They were at once 
 seized, the common people killed, the chief and 
 his wife and daughter bound. Rauparaha then 
 landed, fired the village, and killed all he could 
 catch. Coming on board again, the victors 
 feasted on the slain, Stewart looking on. 
 Human flesh was cooked in the brig's coppers. 
 The entrapped chief was put in irons lent by 
 Stewart. Though manacled, he signed to his
 
 BATTLE, MURDER AND SUDDEN DEATH. 41 
 
 wife, whose hands were free, to kill their young 
 daughter. The woman did so, thus saving the 
 child from a worse fate. Returning to Cook's 
 Straits, Rauparaha and comrades went on shore. 
 Stewart held the unhappy captive chief as a 
 pledge until his flax was paid over. It was paid 
 over. Then this British sea-captain gave up his 
 security, who with his wife was tortured and 
 killed, enduring his torments with the stoicism 
 of a North American Indian. The instrument 
 of his death was a red-hot ramrod. The 
 " Elizabeth," flax in hold, sailed to Sydney. 
 But Stewart's exploit had been a little too 
 outrageous, even for the South Pacific of those 
 days. He was arrested and tried by order of 
 Governor Darling, who, it is only fair to say, did 
 his best to have him hanged. But, incredible 
 as it seems, public sympathy was on the side of 
 this pander to savages, this pimp to cannibals. 
 Witnesses were spirited away, and at length the 
 prosecution was abandoned. Soon after, Stewart 
 died at sea, off Cape Horn. Surgeon-Major 
 Thompson, in his book on the early days of New 
 Zealand, says that he dropped dead on the deck of 
 the "Elizabeth," and that his carcase, reeking with 
 rum, was pitched overboard without ceremony. 
 The Akaroa chief had not so easy a death. 
 
 Meanwhile Rauparaha had organised a grand 
 attack on the Kaiapoi pa. With complete 
 secrecy he brought down his men from Cook's 
 Straits and surprised his enemies peacefully
 
 42 BATTLE, MURDER AND SUDDEN DEATH. 
 
 digging in the potato grounds outside their 
 stockade. A wild rush took place. Most of 
 the Kaiapois escaped into the /a, shut the gate 
 and repulsed a hasty assault. Others fled 
 southward, and skulking amid swamps and sand- 
 hills got clear away and roused their distant 
 fellow tribesmen. A strong relieving force was 
 got) together, and marching to the beleaguered 
 pa, slipped past Rauparaha and entered it at 
 night. But sorties were repulsed, and the 
 garrison had to stand on the defensive. Unlike 
 most pas, theirs was well supplied with food and 
 water. At last Rauparaha, reaching the stockade 
 by skilful sapping, piled up brushwood against 
 it. This the besieged, taking advantage of a 
 favourable wind, boldly fired. Unhappily for 
 them, the wind, suddenly shifting, blew the 
 flames upon their walls, and Rauparaha's 
 warriors charged through the burning breach. 
 Piles of human bones were witnesses, many years 
 after, to the massacre and feast which followed 
 the fall of Kaiapoi. Nearly seventy years have 
 passed since these deeds were done. Kaiapoi, 
 a pretty little country town, is the site of about 
 the most flourishing woollen-mill of the Colony. 
 Kapiti, Rauparaha's stronghold, is just being 
 reserved by the Government as an asylum 
 for certain native birds, which stoats and 
 weasels threaten to extirpate in the North 
 Island. Over the English grasses which now 
 cover the hills round Akaroa sheep and cattle
 
 UATTLE, MURDER AND SUDDEN DEATH. 43 
 
 roam in peace, and standing by the green bays 
 of the harbour you will probably hear nothing 
 louder than a cow- bell, the crack of a whip, 
 or the creaking wheels of some passing dray. 
 Then it is pleasant to remember that Rauparaha's 
 son became a missionary amongst the tribes 
 which his father had harried, and that 
 it is now nearly a generation since Maori blood 
 was shed in conflict on New Zealand soil. 
 
 From 1820 to 1840 was a time of war far 
 surpassing in bloodshed and ruin anything 
 witnessed in the Islands before or since. For 
 the first time the Maoris used fire-arms. Probably 
 a fourth of their race perished in this ill-starred 
 epoch. Hongi, a chief of the Ngapuhi tribe, 
 is usually spoken of as the first chief to introduce 
 the musket into the tribal wars. This was not 
 so. Another Ngapuhi chief, the leader of an 
 attack on the men of Tauranga, armed his men 
 with thirty-five muskets, which they used with 
 crushing effect. This was in 1818. Hongi saw 
 the bravest warriors run before the new and 
 terrible weapon. He never forgot the sight. 
 A hopeful pupil of Marsden in Sydney, he 
 knew the ways of the white men. In 1820, he 
 and a brother chief were taken to England by 
 Kendall to help in the translation of the scriptures. 
 The pair were lionized, and on all sides presents 
 were made to them. They were presented to 
 King George IV., who gave Hongi a suit of 
 armour. On his return, this translator of the
 
 44 BATTLE, MURDER AND SUDDEN DEATH. 
 
 scriptures heard at Sydney that his tribe was at 
 war and that one of his relatives had been killed. 
 Now was his time. He at once sold all his 
 presents except the suit of armour and bought 
 three hundred muskets and a supply of powder 
 and bullets. The Sydney Government did not 
 prevent him. Landing in New Zealand, he 
 determined to imitate Napoleon. Allowing for 
 the enormous difference in his arena, he managed 
 to be nearly as mischievous. His luckless 
 enemies, armed only with spears, tomahawks, 
 stones and clubs, were shot and enslaved by 
 thousands and eaten by hundreds. Wide districts 
 were swept bare of people. No man cared for 
 anything except to procure a gun and thereby 
 have a chance to save his life. A musket was, 
 indeed, a pearl of great price. In their desperate 
 straits the tribes sold flax, timber, potatoes, mats, 
 tattooed heads, pigs even their precious land 
 for fire-arms. Without them their lives were not 
 worth a month's purchase. Men and women 
 toiled almost frantically at growing and 
 preparing flax or providing anything ex- 
 changeable for muskets, powder and lead. 
 Undoubtedly whites were welcomed, both as 
 traders and fighters, with a readiness unknown 
 before. In 1835, New Zealand exports to Sydney 
 were valued at ;i 13,000, her imports at ,31,000. 
 It was a poor set-off against an era of butchery. 
 Hongi used to go to battle in King George's suit 
 of armour. In a fight in 1827 he rashly went
 
 BATTLE, MURDER AND SUDDEN DEATH. 45 
 
 without it and was shot in the lungs. He did 
 not die of the wound for fifteen months. It is 
 said that he used to entertain select friends by 
 letting the wind whistle through the bullet-hole 
 in his chest. Surgeon -Major Thompson embodies 
 the story in his book, so, perhaps, a writer who 
 is not a surgeon ought not to doubt it.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 "A SHIP OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS." 
 
 "OETWEEN 1830 and 1840, then, New 
 l) Zealand had drifted into a new phase 
 of existence. Instead of being an unknown 
 land, peopled by ferocious cannibals, to whose 
 shores ship-captains gave as wide a berth as 
 possible, she was now a country with a White 
 element and a constant trade. Missionaries 
 were labouring not only along the coasts but 
 in many districts of the interior, and a large 
 minority of the natives were being brought 
 under the influence of Christianity. The 
 Whites were made up of four classes first, 
 the missionaries ; second, the Pakeha Maoris ; 
 third, the whalers and sealers of the South
 
 "A SHIP OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS." 47 
 
 Island ; and, fourth, the traders and others 
 settled in the Bay of Islands. In the last- 
 named beautiful haven, Kororareka now called 
 Russell formed a sort of Alsatia. As many as 
 a thousand Whites lived there at times. On one 
 occasion, thirty-five large whaling ships were 
 counted as they lay off its beach in the bay. 
 The crews of these found among the rum-shops 
 and Maori houris of Kororareka a veritable 
 South Sea Island paradise. The Maori chiefs 
 of the neighbourhood pandered to their vices 
 and grew rich thereby. So outrageous were the 
 scenes in the place that its own people had to 
 organise some sort of government. This took 
 the form of a vigilance committee, each member 
 of which came to its meetings armed with 
 musket and cutlass. Their tribunal was, of 
 course, that of Judge Lynch. They arrested 
 certain of the most unbearable offenders, tarred 
 and feathered them, and drummed them out of 
 the township. When feathers were lacking for 
 the decoration, the white fluff of the native bull- 
 rush made an efficient substitute. In the absence 
 of a gaol, the Vigilants were known to keep a 
 culprit in duress by shutting him up for the night 
 in a sea chest ventilated by means of gimlet- 
 holes. 
 
 They were not, however, the only representa- 
 tives of law and order in New Zealand. The 
 British authorities in New South Wales were now, 
 perforce, keeping their eye on this troublesome
 
 48 "A SHIP OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS." 
 
 archipelago in the south-east. A statute was 
 passed authorising the trial and punishment 
 of persons guilty of murder and other crimes in 
 certain savage and disturbed countries, amongst 
 which were specified New Zealand, Otaheite, 
 and Honduras. One white ruffian was actually 
 arrested in New Zealand, taken back to Sydney 
 and executed. An Australian Governor pro- 
 hibited the inhuman traffic in preserved and 
 tattooed heads by attaching thereto a penalty 
 of 40, coupled with exposure of the trader's 
 name. 
 
 In England more than one influential believer 
 in colonies had long been watching New Zealand. 
 As early as 1825, a Company was formed to 
 purchase land and settle colonists in the North 
 Island. This Company's agent, Captain Herd, 
 went so far as to buy land on the Hokianga 
 Estuary and conduct thither a party of settlers. 
 One of the first experiences of the new-comers 
 was, however, the sight of a native war-dance, 
 the terrifying effects of which, added to more 
 practical difficulties, caused most of them to 
 fold their tents and depart to Australia. In 
 1829, a deputation of the Friends of Coloniza- 
 tion waited upon the Duke of Wellington, then 
 Prime Minister, to urge that New Zealand should 
 be acquired and settled. The Duke, under the 
 advice of the Church Missionary Society, flatly 
 refused to think of such a thing. It was then 
 that he made the historically noteworthy
 
 "A SHIP OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS." 49 
 
 observation that, even supposing New Zealand 
 were as valuable as the deputation made out, 
 Great Britain had already colonies enough. When 
 one reflects what the British Colonial Empire 
 was in 1829, and what it has since become, the 
 remark is a memorable example of the absence 
 of the imaginative quality in statesmen. But 
 the Duke of Wellington was not by any means 
 alone in a reluctance to annex New Zealand. 
 Four years earlier a number of Maori chiefs 
 had petitioned for British protection, which had 
 not been granted. The truth is not only that 
 the Empire seemed large enough to others 
 besides the Duke, but that the missionaries 
 stood in the way. As representing the most 
 respectable and the only self-sacrificing element 
 amongst those interested in the islands, they 
 were listened to. It would have been strange 
 had it been otherwise. Nevertheless, the growing 
 trade and the increasing number of unauthorised 
 white settlers made it necessary that something 
 should be done. Consequently, in 1834 Sir 
 George Gipps sent to the Bay of Islands Mr. 
 James Busby to reside there as British Resident. 
 He was paid a salary, and provided with ^200 
 a year to distribute in 'presents to the native 
 chiefs. He had no authority and was not backed 
 by any force. He was aptly nick-named "the 
 ship of war without guns." For some years 
 Mr. Busby lived there, going through as strange 
 an experience as has often fallen to the lot of 
 
 E
 
 50 "A SHIP OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS." 
 
 a British official. Had he been a man of genius 
 
 he might possibly have managed the inhabitants 
 
 of this Alsatia. As it was, these latter did not 
 
 like him, and complained that his manners were 
 
 exclusive and his wit caustic. Probably this 
 
 meant nothing more than that he declined to 
 
 share their orgies. But, as not infrequently 
 
 happens when conscientious officials are 
 
 appointed to reside in barbarous countries 
 
 without definite duties, Mr. Busby proceeded 
 
 to make work for himself. He drew up a 
 
 federal constitution for the Maori tribes. He 
 
 induced a number of chiefs to accept this 
 
 comical scheme, and, as a first step to the 
 
 organization of the New Zealand race, procured 
 
 and hoisted a national flag. The flag was duly 
 
 run up, but, if we except a severe snubbing 
 
 administered to Mr. Busby by his official 
 
 superiors, its hoisting formed the first and 
 
 last act in the federation of Maori tribes under 
 
 parliamentary institutions. A little before this 
 
 an even more ridiculous and pretentious fiasco 
 
 took place. An adventurer of French parentage, 
 
 a certain Baron de Thierry, proclaimed himself 
 
 King of New Zealand, and bought, or imagined 
 
 he bought for thirty axes 40,000 acres of land 
 
 from the natives. He landed at Hokianga with 
 
 a retinue of ninety-three followers. The Maoris 
 
 of the neighbourhood gravely pointed out to him 
 
 a plot of three hundred acres, which was all they 
 
 would acknowledge of his purchase. Unabashed,
 
 "A SHIP OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS. 51 
 
 he began the making of a carriage-road which was 
 to cross the island. Quickly it was found that 
 his pockets were empty. Laughed at by whites 
 and natives alike, he at once subsided into the 
 harmless obscurity of a hut at Kororareka. 
 
 Yet this little burlesque was destined to have 
 its share in hastening the appearance of England 
 on the scene. Thierry had tried to enlist the 
 sympathies of the French Government. So also 
 had another Frenchman, Langlois, the captain 
 of a whaling ship, who professed to have bought 
 300,000 acres of land from the natives of Banks 
 Peninsula in the South Island. Partly owing to 
 his exertions, a French company called " The 
 Nanto-Bordelaise Company" was incorporated, 
 the object of which was to found a French 
 colony on the shores of the charming harbour 
 of Akaroa, on the land said to have been 
 purchased by Langlois. In this company Louis 
 Philippe was a shareholder. In 1837, also, the 
 Catholic missionary Pompallier was dispatched 
 to New Zealand to labour among the Maoris. 
 Such were the sea-routes of that day that it 
 took him some twelve months voyaging amid 
 every kind of hardship and discomfort to reach 
 his journey's end. In New Zealand the fact 
 that he showed Thierry some consideration, and 
 that he and his Catholic workers in the mission- 
 field were not always on the best of terms with 
 their Protestant competitors, aroused well- 
 founded suspicions that the French had their
 
 52 "A SHIP OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS. 
 
 eye upon New Zealand. The English mission- 
 aries were now on the horns of a dilemma. They 
 did not want a colony, but if there was to be 
 annexation, the English flag would, of course, 
 be far preferable. Moreover, a fresh influence 
 had caused the plot to thicken, and was also 
 making for annexation. This was the appearance 
 on the scene of the " land-sharks " shrewd 
 adventurers who had come to the conclusion 
 that the colonization of New Zealand was near at 
 hand, and were buying up preposterously large 
 tracts of land on all sides. Most of the purchases 
 were either altogether fictitious, or else were im- 
 perfect and made for absurdly low prices. By 
 1840 it was estimated that 20,000,000 acres, or 
 nearly a third of the area of New Zealand, was 
 supposed to have been gobbled up piecemeal 
 by the land-sharks. The claims arising out of 
 these transactions were certain at the best to 
 cause confusion, ill-feeling and trouble, and 
 indeed did so. Some legally-constituted authority 
 was clearly wanted to deal with them. Otherwise 
 armed strife between the warlike Maoris and 
 adventurers claiming their lands was inevitable. 
 Both Marsden and his ablest lieutenant, Henry 
 Williams, had come to see in 1838 that the only 
 hope for the country lay in annexation. 
 
 Yet, in the face of all these moving causes, 
 the Colonial Office was still hanging back. Its 
 hand was forced by a body of persons who 
 appeared on the scene not in New Zealand, but
 
 "A SHIP OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS." 53 
 
 in England. They were composed of men of 
 good standing, in some cases of rank and even 
 personal distinction. They were not traders, 
 but colonizers, and as such could not be ignored, 
 for their objects were legitimate and their hands 
 as clean as those of the missionaries. They 
 first formed a body called " The New Zealand 
 Association," and when this failed to get a 
 charter and collapsed, they erected on its ruins 
 the well-known " New Zealand Company." At 
 their head were John Lambton, Earl of Durham, 
 and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Their more 
 prominent members included Mr. Francis 
 Baring and Sir William Molesworth. The 
 Earl of Durham was a genius of irregular 
 temper, who played a great part in another 
 colonial theatre Canada. Gibbon Wakefield, 
 in spite of striking defects, is likely to be 
 remembered as long as the history of Australia 
 and New Zealand is read. In company with 
 Sir William Molesworth, he did much to aid 
 the agitation which put an end to the trans- 
 portation of convicts to Australia. He was 
 actively concerned in the foundation of South 
 Australia, where his system of high prices for 
 land was destined shortly to bring about one of 
 the maddest little land "booms" in colonial 
 history. But these things were not enough to 
 occupy his daring, original, and indefatigable 
 spirit. He threw himself into the colonization 
 of New Zealand. He and his brother, Colonel
 
 54 "A SHIP OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS." 
 
 Wakefield, became the brain and hand of the 
 New Zealand Company. After repeated efforts 
 to obtain the help and sanction of the English 
 Government, they decided to go on unauthorized. 
 Colonel Wakefield, as Agent for the Company, 
 was despatched in May, 1839, to the southern 
 end of the North Island, and there he entered 
 into a series of negotiations with the Maori 
 chiefs which led to extensive land purchases. 
 Ultimately Colonel Wakefield claimed that he 
 had bought many millions of acres indeed, 
 nearly the whole of what are now the provincial 
 districts of Wellington and Taranaki, and a 
 large slice of Nelson. It is quite probable that 
 he believed he had. It is certain that the 
 Maoris, for their part, never had the least 
 notion of selling the greater portion of this 
 immense area. It is equally probable that such 
 chiefs as Rauparaha and Raugiheata, who were 
 parties to the bargain, knew that Wakefield 
 thought he was buying the country. Fifty-eight 
 chiefs in all signed the deeds of sale. Even if 
 they understood what they were doing, they had 
 no right, under the Maori law and custom, thus 
 to alienate the heritage of their tribes. Had 
 Colonel Wakefield's alleged purchases been 
 upheld, the Company would have acquired 
 nine-tenths of the lands of no less than ten 
 powerful tribes. The price paid for this was 
 goods valued at something less than .^9,000. 
 The list of articles handed over at the Wakefield
 
 A SHIP OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS. 
 
 55 
 
 purchases is remarkable enough to be worth 
 quoting : 
 
 300 red blankets. 
 
 200 muskets. 
 
 16 single-barrelled guns. 
 
 8 double-barrelled guns. 
 
 2 tierces tobacco. 
 
 15 cwt. tobacco. 
 
 148 iron pots. 
 
 6 cases soap. 
 
 15 fowling pieces. 
 
 81 kegs gunpowder. 
 
 2 casks ball cartridges. 
 
 4 kegs lead slates. 
 
 200 cartouche boxes. 
 
 60 tomahawks. 
 
 2 cases pipes. 
 
 10 gross pipes. 
 
 72 spades. 
 
 100 steel axes. 
 
 20 axes. 
 
 46 adzes. 
 
 3,200 fish-hooks. 
 
 24 bullet moulds. 
 
 1,500 flints. 
 
 276 shirts. 
 
 92 jackets. 
 
 92 trousers. 
 
 300 yards cotton duck. 
 
 200 yards calico. 
 
 300 yards check. 
 
 200 yards print. 
 
 480 pocket handkerchiefs. 
 
 72 writing slates. 
 
 600 pencils. 
 
 204 looking glasses. 
 
 276 pocket knives. 
 
 204 pairs scissors. 
 
 12 pairs shoes. 
 
 12 hats. 
 
 6 Ibs. beads. 
 
 12 hair umbrellas. 
 
 100 yards ribbons. 
 
 144 Jews' harps. 
 
 36 razors. 
 
 180 dressing combs. 
 
 72 hoes. 
 
 2 suits superfine clothes. 
 
 36 shaving boxes. 
 
 12 shaving brushes. 
 
 12 sticks sealing wax. 
 
 11 quires cartridge paper. 
 
 12 flushing coats. 
 24 combs. 
 
 60 red nightcaps. 
 
 Meanwhile the Company had been advertising, 
 writing, canvassing, and button-holeing in 
 England, had kept a newspaper on foot, and 
 had secured friends in Parliament and in 
 London mercantile circles. By giving scrip 
 supposed to represent plots and farms in its 
 New Zealand territory, it secured numbers of 
 settlers, many of whom were men of character,
 
 56 "A SHIP OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS." 
 
 education and ability. Towards the end of 1839 
 its preparations were complete, and the first batch 
 of its settlers were shipped to Port Nicholson. 
 They landed there on January 22nd, 1840, but 
 in June, 1839, the Colonial Office had at length 
 given way. What between .the active horde of 
 traders and land-sharks in New Zealand itself- 
 what between the menace of French interference 
 and the pressure at home of the New Zealand 
 Company, the official mind could hold out no 
 longer. Captain Hobson, of the Royal Navy, 
 was directed to go to the Bay of Islands, and 
 was armed with a dormant commission author- 
 izing him, after annexing New Zealand, to 
 govern it in the name of Her Majesty. In 
 Sydney a royal proclamation was issued under 
 which New Zealand was included within the 
 political boundary of the colony of New South 
 Wales. Captain Hobson was to act as Lieu- 
 tenant-Governor, with the Governor of New 
 South Wales as his superior officer. On January 
 29th, 1840, therefore, he stepped on shore at 
 Kororareka and was loyally received by the 
 Alsatians. The history of New Zealand as a 
 portion of the British Empire dates from that 
 day.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CROWN versus COMPANY. 
 
 HOUGH Governor Hobson landed in 
 JL January, the formal annexation of the 
 Colony did not take place until May. He had 
 first to take possession ; and this could only be 
 effectually done with the consent of the native 
 tribes. The northern chiefs were therefore 
 summoned to meet the Queen's representative 
 at Waitangi (Water of Weeping). Tents and a 
 platform were erected and the question of 
 annexation argued at length. The French 
 Bishop Pompallier appeared in full canonicals 
 to oppose the new departure. On the other 
 hand, Henry Williams, representing the Protestant 
 missionaries, threw all his weight into the scale 
 on the Governor's side and acted as translator. 
 While a minority of the chiefs were still 
 hostile, Waka Nene, the most influential of the 
 Ngapuhi tribe, spoke strongly and eloquently for
 
 58 CROWN versus COMPANY. 
 
 annexation. His speech gained the day and 
 a treaty was drawn up and signed. 
 
 By the preamble, Queen Victoria invited the 
 confederated and independent Chiefs of New 
 Zealand to concur in Articles to the following 
 effect : 
 
 (1) The Chiefs of New Zealand ceded to Her Majesty, 
 
 absolutely and without reservation, all their rights 
 and powers of Sovereignty. 
 
 (2) Her Majesty guaranteed to the Chiefs and Tribes of 
 New Zealand, full, exclusive, and undisturbed pos- 
 session of their Lands and Estates, Forests, Fisheries 
 and other properties ; but the Chiefs yielded to Her 
 Majesty the exclusive right of Pre-emption over such 
 lands as the proprietors thereof might be disposed to 
 alienate, at such prices as might be agreed upon. 
 
 (3) Her Majesty gave to the natives of New Zealand all 
 
 the Rights and Privileges of British Subjects. 
 
 Nearly fifty chiefs signed the treaty there 
 and then, and within six months so energeti- 
 cally did the missionaries and Government 
 agents carry it throughout the tribes it 
 had been signed by five hundred and twelve. 
 Only about one chief of first-class rank and 
 importance refused to sign it. This was that 
 fine barbarian Te Heu Heu, whose home lay 
 at the foot of the great volcanoes by Lake 
 Taupo on the plateau in the centre of the 
 North Island. Te Heu Heu was the last of 
 the old heathen warriors. He stood fully six 
 feet high, a patriarch and leader of men who 
 scoffed at the white men and their religion
 
 CROWN versus COMPANY. 59 
 
 and defied Governor and missionaries alike to 
 the end. As he could neither be coerced 
 nor persuaded he was let alone. For the 
 rest, it may fairly be claimed that the 
 Maori race accepted the Treaty of Waitangi. 
 
 They had very good reason to do so. To 
 this day they regard it as the Magna Charta of 
 their liberties. They were fully aware that 
 under it the supreme authority passed to the 
 Queen ; but they were quite able to under- 
 stand that their tribal lands were guaranteed 
 to them. In other words, they were recog- 
 nised as the owners in fee simple of the whole 
 of New Zealand. As one of them afterwards 
 expressed it, " The shadow passes to the 
 Queen, the substance stays with us." At the 
 same time Governor Hobson had announced 
 to the white settlers by proclamation that the 
 Government would not recognise the validity 
 of any of their land titles not given under the 
 Queen's authority. It is not easy to see how 
 else he could have dealt with the land-sharks ; 
 but at the same time his treaty and his pro- 
 clamation were bound to paralyse settlement, 
 to exasperate the entire white population, and 
 to plunge the infant colony into a sea of 
 troubles. Outside the missionaries and the 
 officials everyone was uneasy and alarmed. 
 All the settlers were either land owners, land 
 claimants, or would-be land purchasers. Yet 
 they found themselves at one and the same time
 
 60 CROWN versus COMPANY. 
 
 left without titles to all that they possessed, 
 and debarred from the right of buying any- 
 thing more except from the Crown. Space 
 will not admit here of a discussion of the vexed 
 question of the land clause in the Treaty of 
 Waitangi. As a rule civilised nations do not 
 recognise the right of scattered handfuls of 
 barbarians to the ownership of immense tracts 
 of soil, only a fraction of which they cultivate 
 or use. However, from the noblest and most 
 philanthropic motives an exception to this rule 
 was made in the case of New Zealand, and 
 by treaty some seventy thousand Maoris were 
 given a title guaranteed by England the best 
 title in the world to some sixty-six million 
 acres of valuable land. Putting aside the 
 question of equity, it may be observed that, 
 had not this been done, the Maoris, advised by 
 the missionaries, would certainly have refused 
 their assent to the Treaty. The millions ster- 
 ling which have had to be spent in New Zealand 
 directly and indirectly in acquiring Maori land 
 for settlement supply of course no argument 
 whatever against the equity of the Treaty. 
 When honour is in the scale it outweighs 
 money. Yet had Captain Hobson been able 
 to conceive what was entailed in the piecemeal 
 purchase of a country held under tribal owner- 
 ship it is difficult to think that he would have 
 signed the Treaty without hesitation. He 
 could not, of course, imagine that he was giving
 
 CROWN versus COMPANY. 61 
 
 legal force to a system under which the buying 
 of a block of land would involve years of bargain- 
 ing even when a majority of its owners wished 
 to sell; that the ascertainment of a title would 
 mean tedious and costly examination by 
 courts of experts of a labyrinth of strange and 
 conflicting barbaric customs; that land might 
 be paid for again and again and yet be declared 
 unsold ; that an almost empty wilderness might 
 be bought first from its handful of occupants, 
 then from the conquerors who had laid it waste, 
 and yet after all be reclaimed by returned slaves 
 or fugitives who had quitted it years before. 
 Governor Hobson could not foresee that cases 
 would occur in which the whole purchase- 
 money of broad lands would be swallowed up 
 in the costs of sale, or that a greedy tribe of 
 expert middlemen would in days to come 
 bleed Maori and settler alike. Yet it would 
 have been but reasonable for the Colonial 
 Office to exert itself to palliate the effects of the 
 staggering blows it thus dealt the pioneer 
 colonists of New Zealand. They were not all 
 land-sharks ; most of them were nothing of the 
 sort. It was but natural that they felt with 
 extreme bitterness that the Queen's Government 
 only appeared on the scene as the friend and 
 protector of the aborigines. For the whites the 
 Government had for years little but suspicion 
 and restraint. 
 
 It would have been only just and statesmanlike
 
 62 CROWN versus COMPANY. 
 
 if the recognition of Maori ownership had 
 been accompanied by a vigorous policy of 
 native land purchase by the authorities. But it 
 was not. Captain Hobson was only scantily 
 supplied with money he had ^"60,000 sent 
 him in three years and did not himself appear 
 to recognize the paramount need for endowing 
 the Colony with waste land for settlement. He 
 is said to have held that there need be no hurry 
 in the matter inasmuch as the steady decrease 
 of the Maoris would of itself solve the problem. 
 Nearly sixty years have passed since then, and 
 the Maori race is by no means extinct. But 
 Captain Hobson, though a conscientious and 
 gallant man, was no more imbued with the 
 colonizing spirit than might be expected of any 
 honest English naval officer. Moreover, he was 
 just what a man in his irksome and difficult 
 position should not have been an invalid. 
 Within a few weeks after the signing of the 
 Treaty of Waitangi he was stricken with 
 paralysis. Instead of being relieved he was 
 left to die slowly at his post. To have met the 
 really great difficulties and the combination of 
 petty worries and annoyances which beset him, 
 the new governor should have had the best of 
 health and spirits. The complications around 
 him grew daily more entangled. In the North 
 he had a population amongst which the tradi- 
 tions of the old Alsatian life lingered long. 
 Confronting the whites were the native tribes,
 
 CROWN versus COMPANY. 63 
 
 who, if united and irritated, could have swept 
 all before them. Hobson, a man accustomed 
 to command rather than to manage, was in- 
 structed to control the Maoris by moral suasion. 
 He was to respect their institutions and cus- 
 toms when these were consistent with humanity 
 and decency, otherwise not. How in the last 
 resort he was to stamp out inhuman and 
 indecent customs was left unexplained. Cer- 
 tainly not by force; for it would have been 
 flattery to apply such a term to the tiny handful 
 of armed men at his back. 
 
 Moreover, for the reasons already sketched, 
 the English in New Zealand formed a house 
 divided against itself. As though the differences 
 in the north between Maori officials, Alsatians of 
 the old school and settlers of the new, were not 
 sufficient, there was the large and daily increasing 
 antagonistic element being brought into the 
 centre of the Colony by the New Zealand Com- 
 pany. With an energy quite unchecked by any 
 knowledge of the real condition of New Zealand, 
 the directors of the Company in London kept on 
 sending out ship-load after ship-load of emi- 
 grants to the districts around Cook's Straits. 
 The centre of their operations was Port Nichol- 
 son, but bodies of their settlers were planted at 
 Wanganui and New Plymouth, further north, 
 and at Nelson in the South Island. Upon 
 these at the very outset came the thunderbolt 
 of Governor Hobson's proclamation refusing
 
 64 CROWN versus COMPANY. 
 
 recognition to their land purchases. Of this and 
 of the land clause in the Treaty of Waitangi 
 the natives were made fully aware by the 
 missionaries. Rauparaha, before referred to 
 and still the most influential chief near Cook's 
 Straits, was exactly the man to take advantage 
 of the situation. Crafty by nature, he was wise 
 by experience, cold-blooded, and treacherous. 
 He had taken the muskets and gunpowder of 
 the Company, and was now only too pleased 
 to refuse them the price they thought to receive. 
 It was, of course, impossible to justify Colonel 
 Wakefield's purchase. But it was certainly 
 incumbent on the Government to find a modus 
 vivendi with the least possible delay. On the 
 one hand they had thousands of decent, intelli- 
 gent English colonists newly landed in a savage 
 country and not in any way responsible for the 
 company's haste and carelessness. The settlers 
 at any rate had paid ample value for their land. 
 On the other hand were the native tribes who, 
 as the price of land went in those days, had 
 certainly received the equivalent for a consider- 
 able territory. There was room for an equitable 
 arrangement just as there was most pressing 
 need for promptitude. Instead of that, a Com- 
 missioner was appointed who did not arrive 
 until months after the Governor, and whose 
 final award was not given for years. When he 
 did give it he cut down the Company's purchase 
 of twenty million acres to two hundred and
 
 CROWN versus COMPANY. 65 
 
 eighty-three thousand. Meantime, the long and 
 weary months dragged on and the unfortunate 
 settlers were either not put in possession of their 
 land at all, or had as little security for their 
 farms as for their lives. To show the state of 
 the country it may be noted that the two tribes 
 from whom Colonel Wakefield bought the land 
 round Port Nicholson quarrelled amongst them- 
 selves over the division of the goods he paid 
 them. The Ngatiraukawa treacherously attacked 
 the Ngatiawa, were soundly beaten and lost 
 seventy men. Moreover, the Company's settle- 
 ment at Port Nicholson was perversely planted 
 just on that place in the inner harbour which is 
 exposed to the force of the ocean. It had to be 
 shifted to a more sheltered spot, and this the 
 natives denied they ever sold. From that 
 moment began a series of disputes which led to 
 murder and petty warfare, and were hardly at an 
 end seven years later. The settlers, however, 
 held the disputed land on which they had 
 squatted, and which is now the site of Welling- 
 ton, the capital of New Zealand. 
 
 Cooped up in their narrow plots by the sea, 
 Colonel Wakefield and his settlers established 
 a provisional Government. Captain Hobson, 
 hearing probably some very exaggerated 
 account of this, sent down his Lieutenant, 
 Mr. Willoughby Shortland, in a Government 
 vessel, with sailors and marines to put down 
 this act of insubordination. Mr. Shortland, 
 
 F
 
 66 CROWN versus COMPANY. 
 
 who suffered from the not uncommon failing 
 of a desire to magnify his office, made the 
 process as ridiculous as possible and landed 
 amongst the settlers, who had gathered to 
 welcome him, in the fashion of a royal com- 
 mander sent to suppress a rebellion. It is 
 not to be wondered at if a feeling grew up 
 among the New Zealand settlers directed 
 against both officials and missionaries, which 
 at times intensified to great bitterness and 
 which took many years to die down. Even 
 now its faint relics may be observed in a 
 vague feeling pf dislike and contempt for the 
 Colonial Office. The New Zealand Company, 
 however, cannot be acquitted of blame in 
 more respects than one. Not only were their 
 purchases such as I have sketched, not only 
 did they hurry out thousands of settlers 
 without proper knowledge or consideration, 
 but they unquestionably committed a capital 
 error in their choice of localities for settle- 
 ments. Wellington, with its central position 
 and magnificent harbour, is undeniably the 
 key of New Zealand. It was in after years 
 very properly made the seat of Government, 
 and is always likely to remain so. But it was 
 an almost criminal error on the part of the 
 Company to plump down its settlers in 
 districts that were occupied and certain to be 
 stubbornly held by warlike natives. Nearly 
 the whole of the South Island had no human
 
 CROWN versus COMPANY. 67 
 
 occupants. The east and south-east of that 
 island lay open to the first comer. Moreover, 
 the country there was not only fertile but 
 treeless, and, therefore, singularly suited for 
 rapid and profitable settlement. It is quite easy 
 to see now that had the New Zealand Com- 
 pany begun its first operations there a host of 
 failures and troubles would have been avoided. 
 The settlement of the North Island should not 
 have been begun until after an understanding 
 had been come to with the Imperial authori- 
 ties and missionaries, and on a proper and 
 legal system of land purchase. This and other 
 things the Company might have found out 
 if it had taken early steps to do so. The 
 truth is that the first occupation of New 
 Zealand was rushed, and, like everything else 
 that is done in a hurry, it was in part done 
 very badly. 
 
 So little was known or thought of the South 
 Island that sovereignty was not proclaimed 
 over it until four months after the Governor's 
 arrival in the North, and even then the royal 
 flag was not hoisted there. The consequence 
 was a narrow escape from an attempt by the 
 French to plant a colony at Akaroa in Banks 
 Peninsula. The French frigate " L'Aube " put 
 in at the Bay of Islands in July, 1840, bound 
 for the south. Her captain, hospitably enter- 
 tained by Hobson, let fall some incautious 
 words about the object of his voyage. Hobson
 
 68 CROWN versus COMPANY. 
 
 took the alarm and promptly dispatched the 
 " Britomart " to hoist the English flag at 
 Akaroa. Thanks to bad weather, the " Brito- 
 mart " only reached the threatened port a few 
 days before the Frenchmen. Then it was 
 found that an emigrant ship with a number of 
 French settlers was coming with all the con- 
 stituent parts of a small colony. The captain 
 of " L'Aube " finding himself forestalled good- 
 humouredly made the best of it. A number of 
 the immigrants did indeed land. Some of 
 them were afterwards .taken away to the Mar- 
 quesas Islands in the South Seas. Others 
 remained permanently settled at Akaroa. 
 There around a bay, still called French Bay, 
 they planted vineyards and built cottages in a 
 fashion having some pathetic reminiscences of 
 rural France. There they used to be visited 
 from time to time by French men-of-war ; but 
 they gave no trouble to anyone, and their 
 children, by removal or intermarriage, became 
 blended with the English population which in 
 later days surrounded them. 
 
 Captain Hobson now had to choose a 
 capital. He made so good a choice that his 
 name is likely to be remembered therefor as 
 long as New Zealand lasts. By founding the 
 city of Auckland he not only took up a strategic 
 position which cut the Maori tribes almost in 
 half, but selected an unrivalled trading centre. 
 The narrow neck of land on which Auckland
 
 CROWN versus COMPANY. 69 
 
 stands between the winding Waitemata on the 
 east and the broader Manukau Harbour on the 
 west will, before many years, be overspread 
 from side to side by a great mercantile 
 city. The unerring eye of Captain Cook 
 had, seventy years before, noted the Hauraki 
 Gulf as an admirable position. Hobson's 
 adviser in choosing it as his seat of Govern- 
 ment is said to have been the missionary, 
 Henry Williams. In any case the selection was 
 a master-stroke. Twenty-four years later Auck- 
 land ceased to be the capital of the Colony ; 
 but though in this she had to yield to the 
 superior claims of Wellington, she could afford 
 to lose the privilege. First in size and beauty, 
 she is to-day second to no other New Zealand 
 city in prosperity and progress. 
 
 Hobson had other advisers besides the 
 missionaries. In some of them he was for- 
 tunate. Mr. William Swainson, his Attorney- 
 General, was an English lawyer of striking 
 ability in certain directions. Luckily one of 
 these lay in drafting statutes. On him devolved 
 the drawing-up of the laws of the infant Colony. 
 In doing so he ventured to be much simpler in 
 language and much less of a slave to technical 
 subtleties than was usual in his day. By an 
 ordinance dealing with conveyancing, he swept 
 away a host of cumbrous English precedents 
 relating to that great branch of law. Other 
 excellent enactments dealt with legal procedure
 
 70 CROWN versus COMPANY. 
 
 and marriage. Mr. Swainson's ordinances were 
 not only good in themselves but set an example 
 in New Zealand which later law reformers were 
 only too glad to follow and improve upon. 
 Another official of ability and high character 
 was Sir William Martin, Chief Justice, long 
 known, not only as a refined gentleman and 
 upright judge, but as an enthusiastic and 
 unswerving champion of what he believed to 
 be the rights of the Maori race. But a more 
 commanding figure than either Martin or 
 Swainson was George Augustus Selwyn, the 
 first Bishop of the Colony. No better selection 
 could have been made than that by which Mr. 
 Gladstone sent this muscular Christian to 
 organise and administer a church of mingled 
 savages and pioneers. Bishop Selwyn was both 
 physically and mentally a ruler of men. When 
 in the wilderness he could outride or outwalk 
 his guides, and could press on when hunger 
 made his companions flag wearily. He would 
 stride through rivers in his Bishop's dress and 
 laugh at such trifles as wet clothes ; when at 
 sea in his missionary schooner he could haul 
 on the ropes or take the helm and did so. 
 If his manner and actions savoured at times 
 somewhat of the dramatic, and if he had more of 
 iron than of honey in his nature, it must be re- 
 membered that his duty lay in wild places and 
 amongst rough men, where strength of will and 
 force of character were more needed than
 
 CROWN versus COMPANY. 71 
 
 gentler virtues. For more than a generation he 
 laboured strenuously amongst Maoris and 
 Europeans, loved by many and respected by 
 all. He organised the Episcopal Church in 
 New Zealand upon a basis which showed a 
 rare insight into the democratic character of the 
 community with which he had to deal. The 
 basis of his system is found in the representa- 
 tive synods of clergy and ;laity which assemble 
 annually in each New Zealand diocese. The 
 first draft of this church constitution came 
 indeed from the brain and hand of Sir George 
 Grey, but for the rest the credit of it belongs to 
 Selwyn. 
 
 Governor Hobson died at Auckland after 
 ruling New Zealand for a little less than three 
 years. His best monument is the city which 
 he founded, and the best verdict on his life is 
 by common consent written in a letter 
 addressed by a Maori chief to the Queen. 
 " Let not," said this petition, " the new Governor 
 be a boy or one puffed up. Let not a troubler 
 come amongst us. Let him be a good man 
 like this Governor who has just died." When 
 these words were written the judgment of the 
 English in New Zealand would have been less 
 complimentary. But time has vindicated 
 Hobson's honesty and courage, and in some 
 important respects even his discernment. For 
 the rest, it must be remembered that he was 
 sent to New Zealand not to push on settlement
 
 72 CROWN versus COMPANY. 
 
 but to protect the natives against settlers. This 
 he faithfully and consistently did. 
 
 In 1842 it took eight months before an 
 official writing from New Zealand to England 
 could hope to get an answer. The time was 
 far distant when the results of a cricket match 
 in the Southern hemisphere could be pro- 
 claimed in the streets of London before noon 
 on the day of play. It was not therefore sur- 
 prising that Hobson's successor did not reach 
 the Colony for more than a year after his death. 
 Meantime the Government was carried on by 
 Mr. Secretary Shortland, not the ablest of his 
 officials. He soon very nearly blundered into 
 war with the Maoris, some of whom had been 
 killing and eating certain of another tribe. The 
 Acting-Governor was, however, held back by 
 Selwyn, Martin, and Swainson. The two 
 former walked on foot through the disturbed 
 district, in peril but unharmed, to proffer their 
 good advice. The Attorney-General advised 
 that what the Acting-Governor contemplated 
 was ultra vires, an opinion so palpably and 
 daringly wrong that some have thought it a 
 desperate device to save the country. Poor 
 Mr. Shortland's next troubles were financial. 
 To replenish the treasury chest he tried to 
 borrow ^10,000 in Sydney. But New Zealand, 
 which has lately borrowed many times that 
 sum at about three per cent, interest, could 
 not then raise the money at fifteen per cent.
 
 CROWN versus COMPANY. 73 
 
 Mr. Shortland next drew bills on the English 
 treasury, which were dishonoured, though the 
 mother country afterwards relented so far as 
 to lend the sum, adding it to the public debt 
 of the Colony. Finally, the Governor whose 
 arrival superseded Mr. Shortland made a 
 beginning by publicly insulting that gentleman. 
 Very wisely the Secretary at once resigned, and 
 was sent by Downing Street to govern a small 
 island in the West Indies.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 IN THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION. 
 
 IF neither Captain Hobson nor Mr. Shortland 
 found official life in New Zealand other- 
 wise than thorny, their career was smooth and 
 prosperous compared to that of the personage 
 who next appeared on the scene. Admiral 
 then Captain Robert Fitzroy will have a kind 
 of immortality as the commander of the 
 "Beagle" Darwin's "Beagle." His scientific 
 work as a hydrographer at the Admiralty is still 
 spoken of in high terms. He was unquestion- 
 ably a well-meaning sailor. But his short career 
 in New Zealand is an awful example of the 
 evils which the Colonial Office can inflict on a 
 distant part of the Empire by a bad appoint- 
 ment. It is true that Fitzroy was not fairly 
 supported by the authorities at home. They 
 supplied him with neither men nor money. 
 But a study of his two years of rule fails to 
 reveal any pitfall in his pathway into which he 
 did not straightway blunder.
 
 IN THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION. 75 
 
 In justice, it should be said that the unlucky 
 Governor landed at Auckland to find an ample 
 inheritance of trouble awaiting him. In June, 
 1843, tne Cook's Straits settlers had at last 
 come to the death-grip with Rauparaha and his 
 ally Rangiheata. The encounter took place in 
 the fertile Wairau Valley, in the north-east corner 
 of the South Island. Here was some land 
 which the New Zealand Company claimed. 
 The Company insisted upon having it, and put 
 up huts there. These the Maoris burned down. 
 With foolish hardihood, Captain Arthur Wake- 
 field, Colonel Wakefield's brother, obtained a 
 warrant for the arrest of Rauparaha on a charge 
 of arson, and set out to arrest him at the head 
 of a posse of Nelson settlers. Rauparaha, 
 surrounded by his armed followers, met and 
 of course defied them. They made as though 
 to arrest him. There was a scuffle ; a gun went 
 off, and in the confused conflict which followed, 
 the undisciplined settlers were panic-stricken 
 and ran. Five gentlemen and four labourers, 
 ashamed to follow, gave themselves up to 
 Rauparaha. But Rangiheata had a blood feud 
 with the English. Some time before, a Maori 
 woman, a relative of his, had been murdered 
 by a white who, however, when tried in the 
 Supreme Court, had been acquitted. Now was 
 the hour for vengeance. Rangiheata fell upon 
 the unresisting prisoners and tomahawked them 
 all. Captain Wakefield, thus untimely slain,
 
 76 IN THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION. 
 
 was not only an able pioneer leader, but a man 
 of high worth, of singularly fine and winning 
 character, and far the most popular of his 
 family. The Wairau Massacre, as it was called, 
 gave a shock to the young colony. The Maoris 
 triumphantly declared that the mana (prestige) 
 of the English was gone. Twenty-two settlers 
 in all were killed that day and five wounded. 
 The native loss was only four killed and eight 
 wounded. So easily was the first tussle between 
 Maori and settler won by the natives. 
 
 The colony waited to see what Governor 
 Fitzroy would do. Influenced by his philo- 
 Maori advisers, he decided that, as the Com- 
 pany's title to the land was faulty, Rauparaha 
 and Rangiheata must be freely forgiven. He 
 journeyed south and at Otaki, in the Wellington 
 district, held a public conference with the chiefs. 
 Both there and subsequently his language and 
 manner failed to impress the natives, while they 
 deeply incensed the settlers. The former put 
 down their hasty pardon to weakness, while the 
 latter found themselves scolded in a style so 
 violent and undignified that they declared the 
 new Governor could not be master of his own 
 actions. That Gibbon Wakefield's brother 
 should have been savagely butchered and not 
 avenged was bad enough ; that his fellow-settlers 
 should be rated for their share in the disaster, 
 seemed a thing not to be endured. The Maoris 
 grew insolent, the settlers sullen, and for years
 
 IN THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION. 77 
 
 afterwards a kind of petty warfare lingered on 
 in the Wellington district. 
 
 Governor Fitzroy was no more successful in 
 Taranaki. There the Company, after claiming 
 the entire territory, had had their claim cut 
 down by the Commissioner's award to 60,000 
 acres. But even this was now disputed, on the 
 ground that it had been bought from a native 
 tribe the Waikato who had indeed conquered 
 it and carried away its owners as slaves, but 
 had never taken possession of the soil by 
 occupation. When Colonel Wakefield bought 
 it, the land was virtually empty, but when the 
 enslaved Taranaki tribesmen were afterwards 
 released through the influence of Christianity, 
 they returned to the desolated land and disputed 
 the claim of the Company. On this nice point 
 Captain Fitzroy had to adjudicate. He decided 
 that the returned slaves were the true owners of 
 the land. Instead of paying them fairly for the 
 60,000 acres which they did not require he 
 handed the bulk of it back to them, penning 
 the unhappy white settlers up in a miserable 
 strip of 3,200 acres. The result was the 
 temporary ruin of the Taranaki settlement and 
 the sowing of the seeds of an intense feeling 
 of resentment and injustice which bore evil 
 fruit in later days. 
 
 Nor was Captain Fitzroy more skilful in 
 dealing with finance than in his land trans 
 actions. His very insufficient revenue was
 
 78 IN THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION. 
 
 largely derived from Customs duties. Now, 
 trade at the Bay of Islands had, by this time, 
 greatly fallen away. Whalers and timber vessels 
 no longer resorted there as in the good old 
 Alsatian days. Both whites and settlers 
 grumbled at the change, which they chose to 
 attribute to the Government Customs duties. 
 To conciliate them, the Governor abolished 
 Customs duties at Kororareka. Naturally a 
 cry at once went up from other parts of the 
 colony for a similar concession. The unhappy 
 Governor, endeavouring to please them all, like 
 the donkey- owner in ^Esop's fable, abolished 
 Customs duties everywhere; but the prospect 
 of a compensating land-tax gave such a shock 
 to the colony, that he was obliged to levy them 
 once more. His next error was the abandon- 
 ment of the Government monopoly of land 
 purchase from the Maoris. As might be ex- 
 pected, the pressure upon all rulers in New 
 Zealand to do this and to allow private 
 bargaining with the natives for land has always 
 been very strong, especially in the Auckland 
 district. Repeated experience has, however, 
 shown that the results are baneful to all con- 
 cerned demoralizing to the natives, and by 
 no means always profitable to the white 
 negotiators. When Fitzroy proclaimed that 
 settlers might purchase land from the natives, 
 he imposed a duty of ten shillings an acre 
 upon each sale. Then, when this was bitterly
 
 IN THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION. 79 
 
 complained of, he reduced the fee to one 
 penny. Finally, he fell back on the desperate 
 expedient of issuing paper money, a thing 
 which he had no right to do. All these 
 mistakes and others he managed to commit 
 within two short years. Fortunately for the 
 colony, he, in some 'of them, flatly disregarded 
 instructions from Downing Street. Hence his 
 providential recall. 
 
 The last and worst of Governor Fitzroy's 
 misfortunes was an unsuccessful war. To do 
 him justice, he and his missionary advisers 
 tried hard enough to avert any conflict with 
 the Maoris. If conciliation pushed to the 
 verge of submission could have kept the peace 
 it would have been kept. But conciliation, 
 without firmness, will not impress barbarians. 
 The Maoris were not impressed by the well- 
 meaning, vacillating Governor. They set to 
 work, instead, to impress him. They invited 
 him to a huge banquet near Auckland, and 
 danced a war-dance before their guest with 
 the deliberate intention of over-aweing him. 
 Indeed, the spectacle of fifteen hundred 
 warriors, stripped to the waist, stamping, sway- 
 ing, leaping, and uttering deep guttural shouts, 
 brandishing their muskets, and chanting wild 
 rhythmic songs in perfect time, while their 
 tattooed features worked convulsively, was cal- 
 culated to affect even stronger nerves than the 
 Governor's.
 
 80 IN THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION. 
 
 In 1845, Hone Heke, son-in-law of the great 
 Hongi, presuming on the weakness of the 
 Government, swaggered into Kororareka, plun- 
 dered some of the houses, and cut down a flag- 
 staff on the hill over the town on which the 
 English flag was flying. Some white of the 
 beach-comber species is said to have suggested 
 the act to him by assuring him that the flag-staff 
 represented the Queen's sovereignty the evil 
 influence which had drawn trade and money 
 away to Auckland. Heke had no grievance 
 whatever against the settlers. At the moment 
 Fitzroy had not a hundred soldiers in the country. 
 He hurried up to the scene of disturbance. 
 Luckily Heke's tribe the Ngapuhi were 
 divided. Part, under Waka Nene, held with 
 the English. Accepting Nene's advice, Fitzroy 
 allowed Heke to pay ten muskets in compen- 
 sation for the flag-staff, and then foolishly gave 
 back the fine as a present and departed. 
 Nene and the friendly chiefs undertook to keep 
 peace. They failed, for Heke again cut down 
 the flag-staff. This of course brought war defi- 
 nitely on. The famous flag-staff was re-erected, 
 and a party of soldiers and sailors set to guard it 
 and Kororareka. Heke, however, notified that 
 he would take the town and did so. He 
 marched against it with eight hundred men. One 
 party attacked the flag-staff, another the town. 
 The twenty defenders of the flag-staff fought 
 hard, but numbers prevailed. During the attack
 
 IN THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION. 8 1 
 
 on the town the small garrison was paralysed by 
 the blowing-up of their powder magazine. With 
 the townspeople they took refuge on board the 
 ships which lay in the bay. For the third time 
 the flag-staff was cut down, and the victorious 
 Maoris streaming into the houses plundered and 
 burnt, while the ships' crews lay off shore look- 
 ing at their antics. It was a greater blow to the 
 English mana than even the Wairau massacre. 
 
 Troops were procured from Sydney, but they 
 had no artillery. The natives relied on their 
 pas or stockades. These, skilfully constructed 
 by means of triple rows of heavy palisades, 
 divided by shallow ditches which did duty for 
 rifle pits, could not be carried without being 
 breached by cannon. A fruitless attack upon 
 one of them having demonstrated this, guns 
 were fetched from Australia, and Heke and his 
 men were brought to bay at their principal pa, 
 Ohaeawai. Colonel Despard commanded the 
 besiegers, who out-numbered the defenders by 
 more than three to one. After bombarding the 
 palisades for some days, the colonel, in defiance 
 of the advice of his artillery-officer who de- 
 clared there was no practicable breach ordered 
 an assault. Two hundred soldiers and sailors 
 were told off for the duty and charged up to the 
 palisades. Only two or three got inside. In a 
 quarter of an hour half the force were shot 
 down, and the survivors only saved by the 
 bugle-recall which Despard ordered to be 
 
 o
 
 82 IN THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION. 
 
 sounded. Forty, including a captain and two 
 lieutenants, were killed on the spot or died of 
 their wounds. Sixty-two others were wounded. 
 Brave Lieutenant Philpotts, the first through 
 the stockade, lay dead, sword in hand, inside 
 the pa, shot at close quarters by a mere boy. 
 The wounded could not be removed for two 
 days. During the night the triumphant Maoris 
 yelled and danced their war-dance. They tor- 
 tured with burning kauri gum an unfortunate 
 soldier whom they had captured alive, and 
 whose screams could be plainly heard in the 
 English camp. Despard, whose artillery 
 ammunition had run short, remained watching 
 the pa for several days. But when he was in 
 a position to renew his bombardment, the 
 natives quietly abandoned the place by night, 
 without loss. According to their notions of 
 warfare, such a withdrawal was not a defeat. 
 
 Such are the facts of one of the worst defeats 
 sustained by our arms in New Zealand. It will 
 scarcely be believed that after this humiliation 
 Captain Fitzroy, on missionary advice, endea- 
 voured to make peace of course, without avail. 
 Heke became a hero in the eyes of his race. 
 The news of Ohaeawai reached England, and 
 brought things to a climax at the Colonial 
 Office. Fitzroy was recalled, and Captain Grey, 
 the Governor of South Australia, whose sense 
 and determination had lifted that colony out of 
 the mire, was wisely selected to replace him.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 GOOD GOVERNOR GREY. 
 
 /""CAPTAIN Grey came in the nick of time. 
 
 \*_s He arrived in November, 1845, to find 
 Kororareka in ashes, Auckland panic-stricken, 
 the Company's settlers in the south harassed by 
 the Maoris and embittered against the Govern- 
 ment, the missionaries objects of tormenting 
 suspicions, and the natives disaffected and 
 exultant. The colonists had no money and no 
 hope. Four hundred Crown grants were lying 
 unissued in the Auckland Land Office because 
 their owners could not pay the fee of i apiece 
 due on them. Happily Lord John Russell not 
 only gave the unfortunate settlers a thoroughly 
 capable ruler, but supplied him with sufficient 
 troops and a certain amount of money. His 
 first business was to end the war. This he did 
 by attacking Heke's strongest pa, Ruapekapeka. 
 Colonel Despard again commanded our 
 troops, which, as at Ohaeawai, greatly out- 
 numbered the garrison. The pa, with its cleverly
 
 84 GOOD GOVERNOR GREY. 
 
 constructed defences, fell by an accident. Our 
 artillery fire, continued for several days, was 
 rather to the surprise of our Maori allies not 
 stopped on Sunday. The defenders, Christians 
 also, wishing to hold divine service, withdrew to 
 an outwork behind their main fort to be out of 
 reach of the cannon balls. A few soldiers and 
 friendly natives, struck by the deserted aspect 
 of the pa, crept up and got inside before they 
 were discovered. The insurgents, after a plucky 
 effort to retake their own fortress, fled with loss. 
 The blow thus given ended the war. Heke 
 sued for peace and was pardoned. From that day 
 to this there has been no outbreak amongst the 
 tribes north of Auckland, and Heke's relation and 
 namesake, Hone Heke, M.H.R., is now a mem- 
 ber of the New Zealand House of Representa- 
 tives, which he addresses in excellent English. 
 
 The petty warfare in the Cook's Straits 
 district took longer to end. It was a series of 
 isolated murders, trifling skirmishes, night sur- 
 prises, marchings and counter-marchings. Their 
 dreary insignificance is redeemed by one story 
 of heroism. An outpost of the fifty-eighth regi- 
 ment had been surprised at dawn. The bugler, 
 a lad named Allen, was raising his bugle to 
 sound the alarm when a blow from a tomahawk 
 half-severed his arm. Snatching the bugle with 
 the other hand, he managed to blow a warning 
 note before a second tomahawk-stroke stretched 
 him dead.
 
 GOOD GOVERNOR GREY. 85 
 
 Rauparaha, so often mentioned, now a very old 
 man, was nominally not concerned in these 
 troubles. He lived quietly in a sea-coast village 
 by the Straits enjoying the reputation earned by 
 nearly fifty years of fighting, massacring and plot- 
 ting. The Governor, however, satisfied himself 
 that the old chief was secretly instigating the in- 
 surgents. By a cleverly-managed surprise he 
 captured Rauparaha in his village, whence he 
 was carried kicking and biting on board a man- 
 of-war. The move proved successful. The 
 chiefs mana among the Maoris was fatally 
 injured by the humiliation. 
 
 Peace quickly came. It is true that at the end 
 of the year 1846 there came a small outbreak 
 which caused a tiny hamlet, now the town of 
 Wanganui, to be attacked and plundered. But 
 the natives, who retired into the bush, were 
 quietly brought to submission by having their 
 trade stopped and in particular their supply of 
 tobacco cut off. Fourteen years of quiet now 
 followed the two years of disturbance. During 
 the fighting our loss had been eighty-five whites 
 killed, and one hundred and sixty-seven wounded. 
 Small as this total seems, it was larger than the 
 casualties of the insurgents. 
 
 For his success Governor Grey was made Sir 
 George, and greatly pleased the natives by choos- 
 ing Waka Nene and another friendly chief to act 
 as esquires at his investiture. But it was in the 
 use he made of the restored tranquillity that he
 
 86 GOOD GOVERNOR GREY. 
 
 showed his true capacity. He employed the 
 natives as labourers in making roads, useful both 
 for war and peace. The Maoris found wages 
 better than warfare. He gained their confidence 
 and interested himself in their material welfare 
 as well as in their customs, songs, and old tradi- 
 tions. After a good deal of tedious litigation 
 he was able to settle nearly all the outstanding 
 land claims. His influence with the Maoris 
 enabled him to buy considerable tracts of land. 
 By him the Colonial Office was persuaded to 
 have a reasonable force retained for the pro- 
 tection of the colony. He abolished the paper 
 currency. He put an end to the office of 
 " Protector of the Aborigines," the source of 
 much well-meant but unpractical advice. When 
 Earl Grey sent out in 1846 a constitution 
 prematurely conferring upon the colonists the 
 right of governing themselves and also of 
 governing the Maoris Sir George had the moral 
 courage and good sense to stand in the way of 
 its adoption. For this, and for refusing to allow 
 private purchase of native land, he was bitterly 
 attacked ; but he stood his ground, to the 
 advantage of both races. Especially in the 
 settlements of the New Zealand Company was 
 the agitation for free institutions carried on with 
 vigour and ability. 
 
 In addition to this hornet's nest, the Governor 
 had enemies amongst the missionaries. A 
 certain number of these belonging to the
 
 GOOD GOVERNOR GREY. 87 
 
 Church of England had, between 1830 and 
 1845, bought about 216,000 acres of land from 
 the natives. The English Commissioners cut 
 down this purchase to about 66,000 acres. 
 Even then there was some litigation and much 
 bitterness. Some of the very missionaries who 
 had been most prominent in thwarting the land 
 purchases of the New Zealand Company were 
 themselves purchasers of land. As may be 
 imagined, the criticisms directed at them were 
 savage and often grossly unjust and exaggerated. 
 The Governor became involved in this miserable 
 controversy, which only slowly died away when 
 he passed ordinances that did much to settle 
 doubtful and disputed claims. 
 
 With the Maoris, Grey's relations were as 
 pleasant as pacific. The chiefs recognised his 
 imperturbable courage and self-control and were 
 charmed by his unfailing courtesy and winning 
 manners. The study of their character, their 
 songs, customs, and art was not only to him a 
 labour of love, but bore practical fruit in the 
 knowledge it gave him of the race. Few men 
 have ever understood them better. He could 
 humour their childishness and respect their 
 intelligence. When a powerful chief refused to 
 allow one of the Governor's roads to be pushed 
 through his tribe's land, Grey said nothing, but 
 sent the chiefs wife a present of a wheeled 
 carriage. Before long the road was permitted. 
 But on the all-important question of the validity
 
 88 
 
 GOOD GOVERNOR GREY. 
 
 of the land clause in the treaty of Waitangi the 
 Governor always gave the Maoris the fullest 
 assurance. He helped to found schools for 
 them and interested himself in the all-important 
 question of their physical health.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 CHURCHES, AND SHEEP. 
 
 THE Company's settlements were no longer 
 confined to the shores of Cook's Straits. 
 The South Island less certain reserves had 
 been bought from its handful of Maori owners. In 
 1848 and 1850 that was done which ought to 
 have been done a decade sooner, and the void 
 spaces of Otago and Canterbury were made the 
 sites of settlements. The Otago pioneers landed 
 in March, 1848. They were a band of Scotch 
 Presbyterians, appropriately headed by a 
 Captain Cargill, a Peninsular veteran and a 
 descendant of Donald Cargill. As these pages 
 go to press, Otago is celebrating her jubilee, and 
 the mayor of her chief city, Captain Cargill's 
 son, is the first citizen of a town of nearly 
 50,000 inhabitants which in energy and beauty 
 is worthy of its name Dunedin. For years, 
 however, the progress of the young settlement 
 was slow. It had no Maori troubles worth 
 speaking of, but the hills near its site, rugged
 
 QO CHURCHES, AND SHEEP. 
 
 and bush-covered, were troublesome to clear 
 and settle, the winter climate is bleaker than 
 that of northern or central New Zealand, and 
 a good deal of Scottish endurance and tough- 
 ness was needed before the colonists won their 
 way through to the more fertile and open 
 territory which lay waiting for them, both on 
 their right hand and on their left, in the broad 
 province of Otago. Like General Grant in his 
 last campaign, they had to keep on " pegging 
 away," and they did. Their leaders felt keenly 
 the difficulty of getting good school teaching 
 for the children, a defect so well repaired later 
 on that the primary schools of Otago are now, 
 perhaps, the best in New Zealand, while 
 Dunedin was the seat of the Colony's first 
 university college. They stood stoutly by their 
 kirk, and gave it a valuable endowment of land. 
 They had a gaol, the prisoners of which in 
 early days were sometimes let out for a half- 
 holiday, with the warning from the gaoler, 
 Johnnie Barr, that if they did not come back 
 by eight o'clock they would be locked out for 
 the night. The usual dress of the settlers was 
 a blue shirt, moleskin or corduroy trousers, 
 and a slouch hat. Their leader, Captain 
 Cargill, wore always a blue "bonnet" 
 with a crimson knob thereon. They named 
 their harbour Port Chalmers, and a stream, hard 
 by their city Dunedin, the Water of Leith. The 
 industrious, brave, successful, and cantankerous
 
 CHURCHES, AND SHEEP. 9 1 
 
 little settlement soon ceased to be altogether 
 Scotch. Indeed, the pioneers, called the " Old 
 Identities," seemed almost swamped by the flood 
 of gold-seekers which poured in in the years after 
 1 86 1. Nevertheless, Otago is still the head- 
 quarters of that large and very active element 
 in the population of the Colony which makes the 
 features and accent of North Britain more familiar 
 to New Zealanders than to most Englishmen. 
 
 The next little colony founded in New 
 Zealand dates its birth from 1850. Though it 
 was to be Otago's next-door neighbour, it was 
 neither Presbyterian nor Scottish, but English 
 and Episcopalian. This was the Canterbury 
 settlement. It owed its existence to an associ- 
 ation in which the late Lord Lyttelton was 
 prominent. As in the case of Otago, this 
 association worked in conjunction with the New 
 Zealand Company, and proposed to administer 
 its lands on the Wakefield system. Three 
 pounds an acre was to be the price of land in 
 the Canterbury Block, of which one pound was 
 to go to the church and education, two pounds 
 to be spent on the work of development. The 
 settlers landed in December, 1850, from four 
 vessels, the immigrants in which have ever 
 since had in their new home the exclusive right 
 to the name of Pilgrims. The dream of the 
 founders of Canterbury was to transport to the 
 Antipodes a complete section of English 
 society, or, more exactly, of the English Church.
 
 92 CHURCHES, AND SHEEP. 
 
 It was to be a slice of England from top to 
 bottom. At the top were to be an Earl and a 
 Bishop; at the bottom the English labourer, 
 better clothed, better fed, and contented. 
 The dream seems a little pathetic as well as 
 amusing now, but those who dreamed it were 
 very much in earnest in 1850, and they laid the 
 foundation stones of a fine settlement, though 
 not precisely of the kind they contemplated. 
 Their affairs for some years were managed by 
 John Robert Godley, a name still well remem- 
 bered in Downing Street. He had been the 
 life and soul of the Canterbury Association, 
 and made a strong administrator. Their Earl 
 and their Bishop soon fled from the hard facts 
 of pioneer life, but the pilgrims as a rule were 
 made of sterner stuff, and sticking to their 
 task, they soon spread over the yellow, grassy 
 plains and wind-swept hillsides of their province. 
 Their territory was better suited than Otago for 
 the first stages of settlement, and for thirty 
 years its progress was remarkable. 
 
 Neither in Canterbury nor Otago, however, 
 were the plough and the spade found to be the 
 instruments of speediest advance. They were 
 soon eclipsed by the stockwhip and the shears. 
 Long before the foundation of New Zealand 
 Macarthur had taught the Australians to 
 acclimatize the merino sheep. Squatters and 
 shepherds from New South Wales and Tas- 
 mania were quick to discover that the Sduth
 
 CHURCHES, AND SHEEP. 93 
 
 Island of New Zealand was a well-nigh ideal 
 land for pastoral enterprize. Coming to Canter- 
 bury, Otago and Nelson they taught the new 
 settlers to look to wool and meat rather than 
 to oats and wheat for profit and progress. 
 In a few years the whole of the 
 east and centre of the island, except a few 
 insignificant cultivated patches, was leased in 
 great "runs" of from 10,000 to 100,000 acres 
 to grazing tenants. The Australian term 
 " squatter " was applied to and accepted good- 
 humouredly by these. Socially and politically, 
 however, they were the magnates of the colony, 
 sometimes financially also, but not always. Alas ! 
 the price of sheep and wool could go down 
 by leaps and bounds, as well as up, and two or 
 three bad years would deliver over the poor 
 squatter as bond-slave to some bank or mort- 
 gage company. In the end, maybe, his 
 mortgagee stepped in ; he and his children saw 
 their homestead, with its garden and clumps 
 of planted eucalypts, willows and poplars an 
 oasis in the grassy wilderness no more. Some- 
 times a new squatter reigned in his stead, 
 sometimes for years the mortgagee left the place 
 in charge of a shepherd a new and dreary 
 form of absentee ownership. The peasant 
 cultivator, or " cockatoo " (another Australian 
 word), followed slowly in the sheep farmer's 
 wake. As late as 1857 there were not fifty 
 thousand acres of land under tillage in the South
 
 94 CHURCHES, AND SHEEP. 
 
 Island. The chief export was wool. The wool- 
 growers looked upon their industry as the back- 
 bone of the country. So, at any rate, for many 
 years it was. But then the system of huge pastoral 
 leases meant the exclusion of population from 
 the soil. A dozen shepherds and labourers were 
 enough for the largest run during most of the 
 year. Only when the sheep had to be mustered 
 and shorn were a band of wandering workmen 
 called in. The work done, they tramped off to 
 undertake the next station, or to drink their 
 wages at the nearest public-house. 
 
 The endowed churches, the great pastoral 
 leases, high-priced land, and the absence of 
 Maori troubles, were the peculiar features of 
 the southern settlement of New Zealand. 
 Naturally these new communities, while adding 
 greatly to the strength and value of the Colony 
 as a whole, brought their own special difficulties 
 to its rulers. With rare exceptions the settlers 
 came from England and Scotland, not from 
 Australia, and were therefore quite unused to 
 despotic government. Having no Maori tribes 
 in overwhelming force at their doors, they saw 
 no reason why they should not at once be 
 endowed with self-government. They there- 
 fore threw themselves heartily into the agitation 
 for a free constitution, which by this time was 
 in full swing in Wellington amongst the old 
 settlers of the New Zealand Company. More- 
 over, in this, for the first time in the history of
 
 CHURCHES, AND SHEEP. 95 
 
 the Colony, the settlers were in accord with the 
 Colonial Office. As early as 1846, Earl Grey 
 had sent out the draft of a constitution the 
 details of which need not detain us, inasmuch 
 as it never came to the birth. Sir George Grey 
 refused to proclaim it, and succeeded in post- 
 poning the coming-in of free institutions for six 
 years. For many reasons he was probably 
 right, if only because the Maoris were still in 
 a large majority; yet under Earl Grey's pro- 
 posed constitution they would have been 
 entirely governed by the white minority. War- 
 like and intelligent, and with a full share of 
 self-esteem, they were not a race likely to put 
 up with such an indignity. But Governor 
 Grey's action, though justifiable, brought him 
 into collision with the southern settlers. 
 God ley, with questionable discretion, flung 
 himself. inftr the constitutional controversy. 
 
 Grey was successful in inducing the Maoris 
 to sell a fair amount of their surplus land. 
 During the last years of his rule and the four 
 or five years after he went, some millions of 
 acres were bought in the North Island. This, 
 following on the purchase of the whole of the 
 South Island, had opened the way for real 
 progress. The huge estate thus gained by the 
 Crown brought to the front new phases of the 
 eternal land question. The question had to be 
 faced as to what were to be the terms under 
 which this land was to be sold and leased to the
 
 96 CHURCHES, AND SHEEP. 
 
 settlers. Up to 1852 the settlers everywhere, 
 except in the north, had to deal, not with the 
 Crown, but with the New Zealand Company. 
 But in 1852 the Company and its species of 
 overlordship were finally extinguished. A quarter 
 of a million was paid to it in satisfaction of its 
 claims. Thereafter, the Company, with its high 
 aims, its blunders, its grievances, and its achieve- 
 ments, vanishes from the story of New Zealand. 
 In the Church settlements of the South the 
 Wakefield system was in full operation. Three 
 pounds an acre was being charged for land. 
 One pound went to the churches and their 
 schools. This system of endowment Grey set 
 himself to stop, and he did so at the cost of 
 embittering his relations with the Southerners, 
 which already were none too pleasant. For the 
 rest, the southern settlements continued within 
 their original special areas to sell land at from 
 ;i to 2 an acre, and on the whole, at any 
 rate up to the year 1870, their system could not 
 be called a failure. A great deal of good 
 settlement went on under it, and ample funds 
 were provided for the construction of roads, 
 bridges, and other public works. Meantime, 
 Grey was called upon to devise some general 
 system of land laws for the Colony at large. 
 The result was the famous land regulations of 
 1853, a code destined to have lasting and 
 mischievous effects upon the future of the 
 country. Its main feature was the reduction of
 
 CHURCHES, AND SHEEP. 97 
 
 the price of land to ten shillings an acre. Had 
 this been accompanied by stringent limitations 
 as to the amount to be purchased by any one 
 man, the result might have been good enough. 
 But it was not ; nor did those who ruled after 
 Grey think fit to impose any such check until 
 immense areas of the country had been bought 
 up by pastoral tenants and thus permanently 
 locked up against close settlement. Grey's 
 friends vehemently maintain that it was not 
 he but those who afterwards administered his 
 regulations who were responsible for this evil. 
 They point out that it was not until after his 
 departure that the great purchases began. No 
 doubt Sir George Grey never dreamt that his 
 regulations would bring about the bad results 
 they did. More than that one can hardly say. 
 His own defence on the point, as printed in his 
 life by Rees, is virtually no defence at all. It 
 is likely enough that had he retained the control 
 of affairs after 1853 he would have imposed 
 safeguards. He is not the only statesman whose 
 laws have effects not calculated by their maker.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION AND PARLIAMENT. 
 
 Constitution under which the colonists 
 were granted the management of their 
 own affairs was mainly Grey's work. Its quality 
 may be judged from its duration. It worked 
 without alteration for twenty-two years, and in 
 the main exceedingly well. In more recent 
 days, it has been much cut about and modified. 
 Briefly described, it provided the Colony with a 
 dual system of government. Side by side with 
 the central Parliament were to exist a number 
 of provincial assemblies. The central Parlia- 
 ment was to have two Chambers, the Provincial 
 Councils one. Over the Parliament was to be 
 the Viceroy ruling through Ministers ; over 
 each Provincial Council, a Superintendent 
 elected, like the Councils, by the people of 
 his province. Each Superintendent was to 
 have a small Executive of officials, who were 
 themselves to be Councillors a sort of small 
 Cabinet. The central Parliament, called the
 
 CONSTITUTION AND PARLIAMENT. 99 
 
 General Assembly, was to have an Upper 
 House called the Legislative Council, whose 
 members were, in Grey's scheme, to be elected 
 by the Provincial Councils. But the Colonial 
 Office demurred to this, and decided that they 
 should be nominated by the Crown. Had 
 Grey's proposal been carried out, New Zealand 
 would have had a powerful Senate, eclipsing 
 altogether the Lower Chamber. The Lower 
 House was, of course, to be elected on a 
 franchise liberal though not universal. In 
 1853, the year of the land regulations, the 
 Governor was entrusted with the task of pro- 
 claiming the constitution. He took the rather 
 curious course of bringing the Provincial 
 Councils into existence, and leaving the sum- 
 moning of the central Parliament to his 
 successor. He left the Colony in December 
 of the same year, praised and regretted by the 
 Maoris, regarded by the settlers with mixed 
 feelings. Nevertheless, it would not be easy 
 now to find anyone who would refuse a very 
 high meed of praise to Governor Grey's first 
 administration. It was not merely that he 
 found the Colony on the brink of ruin, and 
 left it in a state of prosperity and progress. 
 Able subalterns, a rise in prices, the development 
 of some new industry, might have brought 
 about the improvement. Such causes have 
 often made reputation for colonial rulers and 
 statesmen. But in Grey's case no impartial
 
 100 CONSTITUTION AND PARLIAMENT. 
 
 student can fail to see that to a considerable 
 extent the change for the better was due to 
 him. Moreover, with singular foresight and 
 power of imagination, he not only grappled 
 with the difficulties of his time, but built for 
 the future, and with one marked exception 
 laid foundations deep and well. 
 
 If the Colonial Office did not see its way to 
 retain Grey in the Colony until his constitution 
 had been put into full working order, it should, 
 at least, have seen that he was replaced by a 
 capable official. This was not done. His 
 successor did not arrive for two years, and, 
 meanwhile, the Vice-regal office devolved upon 
 Colonel Wynyard, a good-natured soldier, un- 
 fitted for the position. The first Parliament of 
 New Zealand was summoned at Auckland on 
 the Queen's birthday in 1854. Many, perhaps 
 most, of its members were well-educated men 
 of character and capacity. At last, those who 
 had been agitating so long for self-government 
 had the boon apparently within their grasp. 
 In their eyes it was a great occasion the true 
 commencement of national life in the Colony. 
 Nevertheless, the irony of fate, or the perversity 
 of man, turned it into a curious anti-climax. 
 The Parliament, indeed, duly assembled. But 
 it dispersed after weeks of ineffectual wrang- 
 ling and intrigue, amid scenes which were 
 discreditable and are still ridiculous. Those 
 who had drawn up the constitution had forgotten
 
 CONSTITUTION AND PARLIAMENT. 1 01 
 
 that government through responsible Ministers, 
 forming a Cabinet, and possessing the confidence 
 of the elective Chamber, must be a necessary 
 part of their system. Not only was no provision 
 made for it in the written constitution, but the 
 Colonial Office had sent the Governor no 
 instructions on the subject. The Viceroy was 
 surrounded by Patent Officers, some of whom 
 had been administering since the first days of 
 the Colony. No place of refuge had been 
 prepared for them, and, naturally, they were not 
 going to surrender their posts without a struggle. 
 Colonel Wynyard was wax in their hands. When 
 the Parliament met, he asked three members to 
 join with his old advisers in forming a Cabinet. 
 They agreed to do so, and one of them, Mr. 
 James Edward Fitzgerald, a Canterbury settler 
 of brilliant abilities, figured as the Colony's first 
 Premier. An Irish gentleman, an orator, and a 
 wit, he was about as fitted to cope with the 
 peculiar and delicate imbroglio before him as 
 Murat would have been to conceive and direct 
 one of Napoleon's campaigns. In a few weeks 
 he and his Parliamentary colleagues came to 
 loggerheads with the old officials in the Cabinet, 
 and threw up the game. Then came proroga- 
 tion for a fortnight and another hybrid ministry, 
 known to New Zealand history as the " Clean 
 Shirt Ministry," because its leader ingenuously 
 informed Parliament that, when asked by the 
 Governor to form an administration, he had
 
 102 CONSTITUTION AND PARLIAMENT. 
 
 gone upstairs to put on a clean shirt before 
 presenting himself at Government House. The 
 Clean Shirt Ministry lived for just two days. 
 Then followed more wire-pulling, in which Mr. 
 Attorney Swainson, who had got himself made 
 Speaker of the Upper House, while retaining 
 his post as the Governor's legal adviser, and Mr. 
 Gibbon Wakefield, who was ostensibly nothing 
 but a private member of the Lower House, pulled 
 the strings behind the scenes . The Governor sent 
 a message to the House written on sheets of 
 paper, one of the leaves of which the clerk found 
 to be missing. Gibbon Wakefield thereupon 
 coolly pulled the missing portion out of his 
 pocket and proposed to hand it in a piece of 
 effrontery which the House could not stomach. 
 At last a compromise was arrived at. Colonel 
 Wynyard was to go on with his Patent Officers 
 until a Bill could be passed and assented to in 
 England establishing responsible government: 
 then the old officials were to be pensioned off 
 and shelved. At one stage in this singular 
 session the door of the House had to be 
 locked to prevent the minority running away 
 to force on a count-out, and one Honourable 
 Member assaulted another with his fists. Aus- 
 tralia laughed at the scene, which, it may here 
 be said, has never been repeated in the New 
 Zealand Legislature. 
 
 The Colonial Office snubbed Colonel Wynyard 
 and Mr. Swainson, and informed them that
 
 CONSTITUTION AND PARLIAMENT. 103 
 
 responsible government could be initiated with- 
 out an Act of Parliament. A year, however, 
 passed before the General Assembly was sum- 
 moned together, and then it merely did formal 
 work, as the Acting-Governor had taken upon 
 himself to ordain that there should be a dis- 
 solution previous to the establishment of 
 responsible Ministers. This put everything 
 off till the middle of 1856, by which time 
 Colonel Wynyard had left the Colony. To 
 his credit be it noted that he had kept out 
 of native wars. Moreover, in his time, thanks 
 to the brisk trade caused by the gold discoveries 
 in Australia and the progress of sheep-farming 
 in the South Island, the Colony was waxing 
 prosperous. 
 
 The New Zealand House of Representatives, 
 after getting fairly to work in 1856, has now 
 lived for nearly half a century a life which 
 has been laborious and not dishonourable. It 
 has exactly doubled in size since Governor 
 Wynyard's day. Old settlers say that it has 
 not doubled in ability. But old settlers, with 
 all their virtues, are incorrigible laudatores 
 tempQris acti. The industry of the members, 
 the difficulties they had to cope with in the last 
 generation, and the number and variety and 
 novelty of the questions they have essayed to 
 solve in this, are undoubted. Their work must, 
 of course, be tested by time. Much of it has 
 already borne good fruit, and any that does
 
 104 CONSTITUTION AND PARLIAMENT. 
 
 manifest harm is not likely to cumber the earth 
 long. If laws in colonies are more quickly 
 passed, they are also more easy to amend than 
 in older countries. 
 
 The Lower House of a Colonial Parliament 
 resembles, in most ways, the London County 
 Council more than the House of Commons. 
 But the New Zealand members have always 
 been paid their salary is now ^240 a year. 
 Farmers and professional men make up the 
 largest element. The Labour members have 
 never numbered more than half a dozen. In 
 the more important debates speeches are limited 
 to an hour, otherwise to half an hour. About 
 twenty per cent, of the speaking is good ; most 
 of it is made with little or no preparation. 
 Bores are never shouted or coughed down 
 the House is too small, and nearly all the 
 members are on friendly terms with each other. 
 The discussions in Committee are often ad- 
 mirably business-like, except when there is 
 obstruction, as there frequently is. The House 
 supports a strong Speaker, but is disposed to 
 bully weakness in the chair. 
 
 For the last thirty years, the Maori race has 
 returned four members to the House. They 
 usually speak through an interpreter. In spite 
 of that, when discussing native questions they 
 often show themselves fluent and even eloquent. 
 Outside local and private bills, nearly all im- 
 portant legislation is conducted by Government.
 
 CONSTITUTION AND PARLIAMENT. 105 
 
 Private members often profess to put this down 
 to the jealousy and tyranny of Ministers, but 
 the truth is that Parliament, as a whole, has 
 always been intolerant of private members' 
 bills. Of the seven or eight Ministers who 
 make up a Cabinet, four or five are usually 
 able and overworked men. There is no 
 direct personal corruption. In character, the 
 politicians have been at least equal to the 
 average of their fellow-colonists. But party ties 
 are much looser than in England. Members 
 will sometimes support Governments for what 
 they can get for their districts, or leave them 
 because they have not been given a portfolio. 
 Ministries, if not strangled at the birth as was 
 the "Clean Shirt" Cabinetusually last for 
 three years. Since August, 1884, there have 
 virtually been but two changes of the party 
 in power. Reconstructions owing to death or 
 retirement of a Premier have now and then added 
 to the number of apparently new Cabinets. The 
 stress of New Zealand public life has told on 
 many of her statesmen. Beside Governor 
 Hobson, McLean, Featherston, Crosbie Ward, 
 Atkinson and Ballance died in harness. Most 
 of the Colony's leaders have lived and died poor 
 men. Parliaments are triennial, and about one- 
 third of the constituencies are pretty certain to 
 return new members at a general election. All 
 the elections take place on one day, and if a 
 member even the leader of a party loses his
 
 106 CONSTITUTION AND PARLIAMENT. 
 
 seat, he may be cut out for years. Elections 
 are inexpensive, and there is very little of the 
 cynical blackmailing of candidates and open 
 subsidising by members which jar so unpleas- 
 antly on the observer of English constituencies. 
 Indeed, cynicism is by no means a fault of 
 New Zealand political life. The most marked 
 failing is, perhaps, an over-strained earnestness, 
 and lack of sense of proportion or humour. 
 Newspapers and speeches teem with denuncia- 
 tions which might have been in place if hurled 
 at the corruption of Walpole, the bureaucracy of 
 Prussia, the finance of the Ancien Regime, or 
 the treatment of native races by the Spanish 
 conquerors of the New World. 
 
 V
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 GOVERNOR BROWNE'S BAD BARGAIN. 
 
 OLONEL Gore Browne took the reins 
 from Colonel Wynyard. The one was 
 just such an honourable and personally estimable 
 soldier as the other. But though he did not 
 ^/'involve his Parliament in ridicule, Governor 
 Browne did much more serious mischief. In 
 ordinary matters he took the advice of the 
 Stafford Ministry, which the new Parliament 
 after making and unmaking a couple of short- 
 lived Cabinets put into office in August, 1856, 
 and kept there. But in native affairs the 
 Colonial Office had stipulated that the Governor 
 was to have an over-riding power. He was to 
 take the advice of his ministers but not neces- 
 sarily to follow it. To most politicians, as well 
 as the public, the Native Department remained 
 a secret service. On Governor Browne, there- 
 fore, rests the chief responsibility for a dis- 
 astrous series of wars which broke out in 1860, 
 and were not finally at an end for ten years.
 
 io8 GOVERNOR BROWNE'S BAD BARGAIN. 
 
 Briefly, they arose from a league formed by a 
 number of native tribes against further selling of 
 land. To weld this league together, certain 
 powerful Waikato chiefs, of whom the most 
 celebrated was Tarapipi, usually known as 
 William Thompson, determined to have a king. 
 After years of argument and speech-making they 
 came to the point by electing an old chief, Te 
 Whero Where, once a famous warrior, now 
 broken and enfeebled. They disclaimed hos- 
 tility to the Queen but would sell no land, would 
 allow no whites to settle among them except a 
 few mechanics whose skill they wished to use. 
 They even expelled from their villages white men 
 who had married Maori wives, and who now had 
 to leave their families behind. They would not 
 allow the Queen's writ to run beyond their 
 aukati or frontier, or let boats and steamers come 
 up their rivers. Amongst themselves they 
 talked of driving the Pakeha (foreigner) into the 
 sea. Space will not permit of any sketch of the 
 years of discussion and negotiation by which 
 attempts were made to deal with the King Move- 
 ment. Serious mistakes were certainly made. 
 Thompson, while still open to conciliation, 
 visited Auckland to see the Governor and ask 
 for a small loan to aid his tribe in erecting a 
 flour mill. Governor Grey would have granted 
 both the interview and the money with good 
 grace. Governor Browne refused both, and the 
 Waikato chief departed deeply incensed. A
 
 GOVERNOR BROWNE'S BAD BARGAIN. 109 
 
 much graver error was the virtual repeal of the 
 ordinance forbidding the sale of arms to the 
 natives. Because a certain amount of smuggling 
 went on in spite of it, the insane course was 
 adopted of greatly relaxing its provisions instead 
 of spending money and vigilance in enforcing 
 them. The result was a rapid increase of guns 
 and powder sold to the disaffected tribes. 
 Finally, in 1860, came the Waitara land pur- 
 chase the spark which set all ablaze. Waitara 
 is a little seaport in Taranaki, a province where, 
 as already said, feeling on the land difficulty 
 had always been acute. Enough had been pur- 
 chased to enable the settlement to expand into 
 a strip of about twenty miles along the sea- 
 shore, with an average depth of about seven 
 miles. During a visit to the district, Governor 
 Browne invited the natives to sell land. A 
 chief, Teira, and his friends at once offered to 
 part with six hundred acres which they were 
 occupying. The head of their tribe, however, 
 the chief Wiremu Kingi, vetoed the sale. The 
 Native Department and the Governor sent down 
 commissioners, who after enquiry decided 
 erroneously that Teira's party had a right to sell 
 and the head chief none to interfore. A fair 
 price was paid for the block, and as Kingi 
 threatened war an armed force was sent to 
 occupy it. Then Kingi astutely made the dis- 
 puted piece over to the King tribes, and forth- 
 with became their protg. Without openly
 
 no GOVERNOR BROWNE'S BAD BARGAIN. 
 
 making war, they sent him numbers of volunteer 
 warriors. He became the protagonist of the 
 Maori land league. Hostilities broke out early 
 in 1860. It should be mentioned that while all 
 this was going on, the Premier, Mr. Stafford, was 
 absent in England, and that his colleagues sup- 
 ported the Governor's action. Parliament did 
 not assemble until war had broken out and then 
 a majority of members conceived themselves 
 bound to stand by what had been done. Never- 
 theless, so great was the doubt about the wisdom 
 and equity of the purchase that most of the 
 North Island members even then condemned it. 
 It was not a crime, unless every purchaser who 
 takes land with a bad title which he believes to 
 be good is a criminal. But, technically wrong and 
 politically disastrous, it will always remain for 
 New Zealand the classic example of a blunder 
 worse than a crime. 
 
 In 1860 the Taranaki settlement was growing 
 what it now is a very pleasant corner of the 
 earth. Curving round the seashore under the 
 lofty, lonely, symmetrical cone of Egmont, it is 
 a green land of soft air and many streams. After 
 long delays and much hope deferred, the colonists 
 English of the south-west counties had 
 begun to prosper and to line the coast with 
 their little homesteads standing among peach 
 orchards, grassy fields, and sometimes a garden 
 gay with the flowers of old Devon. Upon this 
 quiet little realm the Maoris swept down, and
 
 GOVERNOR BROWNE'S BAD BARGAIN, in 
 
 the labour of twenty years went up in smoke. 
 The open country was abandoned ; the settlers 
 took refuge in their town, New Plymouth. 
 Their women and children were mostly shipped 
 off to the south ; the men armed and drilled as 
 a militia. Regiments of troops arrived. A 
 General was brought over from Australia. In 
 time the blockaded whites outnumbered their 
 Maori enemies by four to one. There was 
 plenty of fighting, mostly desultory. The 
 Maoris started out of the bush or the bracken 
 to plunder or to fight, and disappeared again 
 when luck was against them. Sometimes they 
 built earthworks and stockades, which the 
 English general would try to approach by long 
 and laborious sapping. So long and laborious was 
 the process occasionally that once the Maoris 
 who have a keen sense of humour sent out a 
 flag of truce and offered to finish the sap them- 
 selves if that would expedite matters. There was 
 much marching and counter-marching ; frequent 
 displays of courage more courage than co-opera- 
 tion sometimes and several rather barren 
 successes. Among the fighters, Captain Harry 
 Atkinson, in after years the Colony's Premier 
 and best debater, played the man. Month 
 followed month, and still the settlers were 
 pent up and the province infested with the 
 marauding Taranaki Maoris and sympathisers 
 from other tribes, who after planting their crops 
 had taken their guns and come over to New
 
 112 GOVERNOR BROWNE'S BAD BARGAIN. 
 
 Plymouth to enjoy the sport of shooting Pakehas. 
 Meanwhile, the farms and homes of the de- 
 vastated settlement lay a plundered wreck. As 
 the unhappy colonists looked out on the ruin, 
 one of them, at any rate, thought of the days 
 when the Athenians, pent up within their 
 city's walls, watched the Spartans carrying fire 
 and sword over Attica. 
 
 After more than a year of this dreary and 
 inglorious work, Thompson, the king-maker, 
 negotiated a truce. There seemed yet a fair 
 hope of peace. Governor Browne had indeed 
 issued a bellicose manifesto proclaiming his 
 intention of stamping out the King Movement. 
 But before this could provoke a general war, 
 Governor Browne was recalled and Sir George 
 Grey sent back to save the position. Moreover, 
 the Stafford Ministry, which headed the war 
 party amongst colonists, fell in 1862, and Sir 
 William Fox, a friend of peace, became Premier. 
 For eighteen months Grey and his Premier 
 laboured for peace. They tried to conciliate the 
 Kingite chiefs, who would not, for a long time, 
 meet the Governor. They withdrew Governor 
 Browne's manifesto. They offered the natives 
 local self-government. At length the Governor 
 even made up his mind to give back the 
 Waitara land. But a curse seemed to cling to 
 those unlucky acres. The proclamation of res- 
 titution was somehow delayed, and meanwhile 
 Grey resumed possession of another Taranaki
 
 GOVERNOR BROWNE'S BAD BARGAIN. 113 
 
 block, which fairly belonged to the settlers, but 
 on which Maoris were squatting. Under orders 
 from the King natives, the Taranakis retaliated 
 by surprising and killing a party of soldiers, 
 and the position in the province became at once 
 hopeless. In brief, the war beginning again 
 there in 1863 smouldered on for three long and 
 weary years. Then, General Chute, bringing 
 real energy to bear, took pa after /a, marched 
 round Mount Egmont and brought the New 
 Plymouth war to an end.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 TEN TO ONE. 
 
 BUT the main interest soon shifted from 
 Taranaki. In the Waikato, relations with 
 the King's tribes were drifting from bad to 
 worse. Grey had been called in too late. His 
 mana was no longer the influence it had been 
 ten years before. His diplomatic advances were 
 met with sheer sulkiness. The semi-comic 
 incident of Sir John Gorst's newspaper skirmish 
 at Te Awamutu did no good. Gorst was 
 stationed there as Commissioner by the Govern- 
 ment. In his charge was an industrial school. 
 It was in the heart of the King Country. The 
 King's advisers must needs have an organ a 
 broad-sheet called the Hokioi, a word which 
 may be paraphrased by Phoenix. With un- 
 questionable courage, Gorst, acting on Grey's 
 orders, issued a sheet in opposition, entitled Te 
 Pihoihoi Mokemoke, or The Lonely Lark. Fierce 
 was the encounter of the rival birds. The Lark 
 out-argued the Phoenix. But the truculent
 
 TEN TO ONE. 115 
 
 Kingites had their own way of dealing with 
 lese majeste. They descended on the printing- 
 house, and carried off the press and type of Te 
 Pihoikoi Mokemoke. The press they after- 
 wards sent back to Auckland. Of the type, 
 it is said, they ultimately made bullets. 
 Gorst, ordered to quit the King Country, 
 refused to budge without instructions. The 
 Maoris gave him three weeks to get them and 
 depart. Very luckily for him Grey sent them. 
 
 The Governor pushed on a military road from 
 Auckland to the Waikato frontier a doubtful 
 piece of policy, as it irritated the natives, and 
 the Waikato country could be best invaded with 
 the help of river steamers. The steamers were, 
 however, not procured at that stage. About 
 the same time as the Gorst incident in the 
 Upper Waikato, the Government tried to build 
 a police station and barracks on a plot of land 
 belonging to a friendly native lower down the 
 river. The King natives, however, forbade the 
 erection, and, when the work went on, a party of 
 them paddled down, seized the materials and 
 threw them into the stream. 
 
 It was now clear that war was coming. The 
 utmost anxiety prevailed in Auckland, which 
 was only forty miles from the frontier and 
 exposed to attack both from sea and land. 
 Moreover, some hundreds of natives, living quite 
 close to the town, had arms, and were ascertained 
 to be in communication with the Waikatos.
 
 Il6 TEN TO ONE. 
 
 The Governor attempted to disarm them, but 
 the plan was not well carried out and they 
 mostly escaped with their weapons to the King 
 Country. The choice of the Government now 
 lay between attacking and being attacked. They 
 learned, beyond a doubt, that the Waikatos 
 were planning a march on Auckland, and in a 
 letter written by Thompson about this time he 
 not only stated this, but said that in the event 
 of an assault the unarmed people would not be 
 spared. By the middle of the year 1863, how- 
 ever, a strong force was concentrated on the 
 border, just where the Waikato River, turning 
 from its long northward course, abruptly bends 
 westward towards the sea. No less than twelve 
 Imperial regiments were now in New Zealand. 
 Their commander, General Sir Duncan Cameron, 
 a Crimean veteran, had just gained a success of 
 some note in Taranaki. He was a brave 
 methodical soldier, destitute of originality, dash, 
 or knowledge of the country or of savage war- 
 fare. In July, the invasion of the Waikato was 
 ordered. On the very day before our force 
 advanced, the Maoris had begun what they 
 meant to be their march to Auckland, and the 
 two forces at once came into collision. In a 
 sharp fight at Koheroa the natives were driven 
 from their intrenchments with some loss, and any 
 forward movement on their part was effectually 
 stopped. But, thanks to what seemed to the 
 colonists infuriating slowness, the advance up
 
 TEN TO ONE. 117 
 
 the Waikato was not begun until the latter 
 part of October, and the conquest of the 
 country not completed until February. 
 
 To understand the cause of this impatience 
 on the part of the onlookers, it should be 
 mentioned that our forces were now, as 
 usual in the Maori wars, altogether over- 
 whelming. The highest estimate of the fight- 
 ing men of the King tribes is two thousand. 
 As against this, General Cameron had ulti- 
 mately rather more than ten thousand 
 Imperial troops in the Colony to draw upon. 
 In addition to that, the colonial militia and 
 volunteers were gradually recruited until 
 they numbered nearly as many. About half 
 of these were, at any rate after a short time, 
 quite as effectual as the regulars for the peculiar 
 guerilla war which was being waged. In 
 armament there was no comparison between 
 the two sides. The Pakeha had Enfield 
 rifles and a good supply of artillery. The 
 Maoris were armed with old Tower muskets and 
 shot-guns, and were badly off both for powder 
 and bullets. Happily for us they were not 
 very good marksmen. Their artillery consisted 
 of two or three old ship's guns, from which 
 salutes might have been fired without extreme 
 danger to their gunners. If the war in the 
 Waikato, and its off-shoot the fighting in the 
 Bay of Plenty, had been in thick forest and a 
 mountainous country, the disparity of numbers
 
 Il8 TEN TO ONE. 
 
 and equipment might have been counter- 
 balanced. But the Waikato country was flat 
 or undulating, clothed in fern and with only 
 patches of forest. A first-class high road the 
 river ran right through it. The sturdy resist- 
 ance of the natives was due first to their 
 splendid courage and skilful use of rifle-pits 
 and earthworks, and in the second place to 
 our want of dash and tactical resource. 
 Clever as the Maori engineers were, bravely 
 as the brown warriors defended their intrench- 
 ments, their positions ought to have been 
 nothing more than traps for them, seeing 
 how overwhelming was the white force. The 
 explanation of this lies in the Maori habit of 
 taking up their positions without either pro- 
 visions or water. A greatly superior enemy, 
 therefore, had only to surround them. They 
 then, in the course of two or three days at the 
 outside, had either to surrender at discretion 
 or try the desperate course of breaking through 
 the hostile lines. 
 
 General Cameron preferred the more slap- 
 dash course of taking intrenchments by 
 assault. A stubborn fight, took place at 
 [ Rangiriri, where the Maoris made a stand on 
 a neck of land between the lake and the 
 Waikato river. Assaulted on two sides, they 
 were quickly driven from all their pits and 
 earthworks except one large central redoubt. 
 Three times our men were sent at this, and
 
 TEN TO ONE. IIQ 
 
 three times, despite a fine display of courage, 
 they were flung back with loss. The bravest 
 soldier cannot without wings surmount a 
 bank which rises eighteen feet sheer from the 
 bottom of a broad ditch. This was seen next 
 day. The attack ceased at nightfall. During 
 the dark hours the redoubt's defenders yelled 
 defiance, but next morning they surrendered, 
 and, marching out, a hundred and eighty- 
 three laid down their arms. Our loss was 
 one hundred and thirty - two killed and 
 wounded ; the Maori loss was fifty killed, 
 wounded unknown. By January, General 
 Cameron had passed beyond Ngaruwahia, the 
 village which had been the Maori King's 
 head-quarters, and had defeated the enemy 
 twice in the plain between the Waikato and 
 the Waipa rivers. Next occurred the most 
 striking incident of the war. Some three 
 hundred Maoris were shut up in intrench- 
 ments at a place called Orakau. Without 
 food, except a few raw potatoes ; without 
 water ; pounded at by our artillery, and under 
 a hail of rifle bullets and hand grenades ; 
 unsuccessfully assaulted no less than five 
 times they held out for three days though 
 completely surrounded. General Cameron 
 humanely sent a flag of truce inviting them 
 to surrender honourably. To this they made 
 the ever-famous reply, " We fight right on, 
 for ever, for ever, for ever" (Ka whawhai
 
 120 TEN TO ONE. 
 
 tonu, ak, ake, ake). Then the General 
 offered to let the women come out, and the 
 answer was, " The women will fight as well as 
 we." At length, on the afternoon of the 
 third day, the garrison assembling in a body 
 charged at quick march right through the 
 English lines, fairly jumping (according to 
 one account) over the heads of the men of the 
 Fortieth Regiment as they lay behind a bank. 
 So unexpected and amazing was their charge 
 that they would have got away with but slight 
 loss had they not when outside the lines been 
 confronted by a force of colonial rangers and 
 cavalry. Half of them fell; the remainder, 
 including the celebrated war-chief Rewi, got 
 clear away. The earthworks and the victory 
 remained with us, but the glory of the engage- 
 ment lay with those whose message of " Ake, 
 ake, ake," will never be forgotten in New 
 Zealand. 
 
 The country round the middle and lower 
 Waikato was now in our hands, and the King 
 natives were driven to the country about its 
 upper waters. They were not followed. It 
 was decided to attack the Tauranga tribe, 
 which had been aiding them. Tauranga lies 
 on the Bay of Plenty, about forty miles to the 
 east of the Waikato. It was in the campaign 
 which now took place there that there 
 occurred the noted repulse at the Gate Pa. 
 The Maoris, intrenched on a narrow neck of
 
 TEN TO ONE. 121 
 
 land between two swamps, were invested by 
 our forces both in the front and rear. We 
 were, as usual, immensely the stronger in 
 numbers. Our officers, non-commissioned 
 officers and drummers by themselves almost 
 equalled the garrison. After a heavy though 
 not always very accurate bombardment, 
 General Cameron decided to storm the works. 
 The attacking parties of soldiers and sailors 
 charged well enough and entered the front of 
 the defences, and the Maoris, who were 
 actually endeavouring to escape, found them- 
 selves shut in by the troops in their rear. 
 Turning, however, with the courage of 
 despair they flung themselves on the assail- 
 ants of their front. These, seized with an 
 extraordinary panic, ran in confusion, sweeping 
 away their supports. The assault was utterly 
 repulsed and was not renewed. In the night 
 the defenders escaped through the swamps, 
 leaving us the empty pa. Their loss was 
 slight. Ours was one hundred and eleven, 
 and amongst the killed were ten good officers. 
 As a defeat it was worse than Ohaeawai, for 
 that had been solely due to a commander's 
 error of judgment. 
 
 The blow stung the English officers and 
 men deeply, and they speedily avenged it. 
 Hearing that the Tauranga warriors were 
 intrenching themselves at Te Rangi, Colonel 
 Greer promptly marched thither, caught them
 
 122 TEN TO ONE. 
 
 before they had completed their works, and 
 charging into the rifle-pits with the bayonet 
 completely routed the Maoris. The temper 
 of the attacking force maybe judged from the 
 fact that out of the Maori loss of one hundred 
 and forty-five no less than one hundred and 
 twenty-three were killed or died of wounds. 
 The blow was decisive, and the Tauranga 
 tribe at once submitted.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE HAU-HAUS AND THE SELF-RELIANCE POLICY. 
 
 BY the middle of 1864, it might have been 
 thought that the war was nearing its 
 end. The Waikato had been cleared, and the 
 Tauranga tribes crushed. Nevertheless, nearly 
 two years of harassing guerilla warfare were 
 in store for the Colony. Then there was to 
 be another imperfect period of peace, or rather 
 exhaustion, between the winter of 1866 and 
 the middle of 1868, when hostilities were 
 once more to blaze up and only to die out 
 finally in 1870. This persistency was due to 
 several causes, of which the first was the out- 
 break of a curious superstition, the cult of 
 the Hau-Haus. Their poctrine would be hard 
 to describe. It was a wilder, more debased, 
 and more barbaric parody of Christianity than 
 the Mormonism of Joe Smith. It was a kind 
 of savage expression of a desire to revolt from 
 the Christianity of the Pakeha and to found 
 a national religion. It certainly for years
 
 124 HAU-HAUS, AND SELF-RELIANCE. 
 
 stimulated its votaries to war and to acts 
 of grotesque and ferocious cruelty. By the 
 Hau-Haus two white missionaries were mur- 
 dered outrages unknown before in New 
 Zealand. They would work themselves up 
 into frenzy by dances and incantations, and 
 in particular by barking like dogs hence 
 their name. At first, they seem to have 
 believed that they were invulnerable to the 
 Pakeha's bullets. In this belief, a party of 
 them marched steadily up against a redoubt 
 at Sentry Hill in Taranaki, under a fire which 
 killed thirty of them before they lost heart 
 and fled. It was, however, in the country 
 round the Wanganui River to the west, and 
 on the east coast, between the Bay of Plenty 
 and Hawkes Bay, that the Hau-Haus gave 
 the most trouble. The task of coping with 
 them mostly devolved on the New Zealand 
 Militia, and the warriors of certain friendly 
 tribes, headed by the chiefs called by the 
 Europeans Ropata and Kemp. In this loose 
 and desultory but exceedingly arduous war- 
 fare, the irregulars and friendlies undoubtedly 
 proved far more efficient than the regular 
 Imperial troops. They did not think it useless 
 to follow the enemy into the bush ; far from 
 it. They went there to seek him out. They 
 could march many miles in a day, and were 
 not fastidious as to commissariat. More than 
 once they gained food and quarters for the
 
 HAU-HAUS, AND SELF-RELIANCE. 125 
 
 night by taking them from their opponents. 
 In a multitude of skirmishes in 1864, 1865, 
 and 1866, they were almost uniformly vic- 
 torious. Of the laurels gained in New Zealand 
 warfare a large share belongs to Ropata, to 
 Kemp, and to Militia officers like Tuke and 
 Frazer. 
 
 On one occasion the friendly natives saved 
 the Wanganui district from a raid by a con- 
 flict fought on an island in the Wanganui 
 River after a fashion worthy of the clansmen 
 in " The Fair Maid of Perth." For months 
 the friendlies had been guarding the passage 
 of the river against a strong Hau-Hau force. 
 At last, tired of waiting, they challenged the 
 enemy to a fair fight on the Island of Moutua. 
 It was agreed that neither side should attempt 
 to take advantage of the other by surprise or 
 ambuscade. They landed at opposite ends 
 of the islet in strong force, and, after much 
 preliminary chanting and shouting of defi- 
 ance, charged each other. At first, the 
 friendly natives gave way. Three of their 
 leaders fell. But rallying bravely they came 
 on again. Amid a clash of tomahawks and 
 clubbed rifles, the antagonists fought hand to 
 hand, and fought well. At length our allies won. 
 Fifty Hau-Haus died that day, either on the 
 island or while they endeavoured to escape 
 by swimming. The Hau-Hau leader, wounded 
 as he swam, managed to reach the further
 
 126 HAU-HAUS, AND SELF-RELIANCE. 
 
 shore. But a pursuer, mere in hand, plunged 
 in after him, struck him down as he staggered 
 up the bank, and swam back with his head. 
 The victors carried the bodies of their fallen 
 chiefs back to Wanganui, where the settlers 
 of the little town lined the road, standing 
 bareheaded as the brave dead were borne 
 past. 
 
 What, it may be asked, were the strong 
 and very expensive Imperial forces doing 
 during these years ? The answer is surpris- 
 ingly little. General Cameron did indeed 
 appear with a force upon the coast north 
 of Wanganui. But his principal feat was 
 the extraordinary one of consuming fifty- 
 seven days in a march of fifty-four miles along 
 the sea beach, to which he clung with a 
 tenacity which made the natives scornfully 
 name him the Lame Seagull. He declared 
 it was useless for the regulars to follow the 
 natives into the forest, and committed himself 
 to the statement that two hundred natives in 
 a pa could stop Colonel Warre with five 
 hundred men from joining him. He declined 
 to assault the strong Wereroa pa the key to 
 the west coast. He hinted depressingly that 
 2,000 more troops might be required from 
 England. In vain Sir George Grey urged 
 him to greater activity. The only result was 
 a long and acrid correspondence between 
 them. From this to one who reads it now
 
 HAU-HAUS, AND SELF-RELIANCE. 127 
 
 the General seems to emerge in a damaged 
 condition. In truth, he and many of his 
 officers were sick of the war, which they 
 regarded as an iniquitous job, and inglorious 
 to boot. They knew that a very strong party 
 in England, headed by the Aborigines Pro- 
 tection Society, were urging this view, and that 
 the Colonial Office, under Mr. Cardwell, had 
 veered round to the same standpoint. This 
 is probably the true explanation of General 
 Cameron's singular slackness. The impatience 
 and indignation of the colonists waxed high. 
 They had borrowed three millions of money 
 to pay for the war. They were paying ^"40 
 a year per man for ten thousand Imperial 
 soldiers. They naturally thought this too 
 much for troops which did not march a mile 
 a day. 
 
 To punish the insurgent tribes, and to 
 defray in part the cost of the war, the New 
 Zealand Government confiscated more than 
 three million acres of native land. Coming 
 as it did in the midst of hostilities, this 
 did not simplify matters. At first both the 
 Governor and the Colonial Office endorsed 
 the confiscation policy. Then, when Mr. 
 Cardwell had replaced the Duke of Newcastle, 
 the Colonial Office changed front and con- 
 demned it, and their pressure naturally 
 induced the Governor to modify his attitude. 
 But Grey, in endeavouring to quicken military
 
 128 HAU-HAUS, AND SELF-RELIANCE. 
 
 operations, had the sympathy and support 
 of the colonists. He did not confine himself 
 to exhortations. He made up his mind to 
 attack the Wereroa pa himself. General 
 Cameron let him have two hundred soldiers 
 to act as a moral support. With these, and 
 somewhat less than five hundred Militia and 
 friendly Maoris, the Governor sat down before 
 the fort, which rose on a high, steep kind of 
 plateau, above a small river. But though too 
 strong for front attack, it was itself liable to 
 be commanded from an outwork on a yet 
 higher spur of the hills. Grey skilfully 
 captured this and with it a strong reinforce- 
 ment about to join the garrison. The latter 
 fled, and the capture of Wereroa was justly 
 regarded as about the most brilliant feat of 
 the whole war. The credit fairly belonged 
 to Grey, who showed not only skill but 
 signal personal daring. After this really fine 
 feat of Grey's, the officer commanding the 
 two hundred moral supports was made a 
 C.B. But Grey, it is needless to say, by thus 
 trumping the trick of his opponent the General, 
 did not improve his own relations with 
 the Home authorities. He did, however, 
 furnish another strong reason for a self- 
 reliant policy. Ultimately, though gradually, 
 the Imperial troops were withdrawn, and the 
 colonists carried on the war with their own 
 men as well as their own money.
 
 HAU-HAUS, AND SELF-RELIANCE. 129 
 
 At the beginning of 1868, fighting had 
 entirely ceased, and with common prudence, 
 need not again have broken out. But 
 amongst the many blunders of the war, some 
 of the oddest took the form of permitting 
 the escape of Maori prisoners. Three times 
 did large bodies of these get away and rejoin 
 their tribes once from Sir George Grey's island 
 estate at Kawau, where they had been turned 
 loose on parole ; once from a hulk in Well- 
 ington Harbour ; the third time from the 
 Chatham Islands. This last escape, which 
 was in July, 1868, was fraught with grave 
 mischief. In vain the officer in charge of 
 prisoners there had protested against being left 
 with twenty men to control three hundred 
 and thirty captives. The leader of these, 
 Te Kooti, one of the ablest as well as most 
 ferocious partisans the colonists ever had to 
 face, surprised the weak guard, captured a 
 schooner lying off the Chathams, and set sail 
 for the east coast of New Zealand with about 
 one hundred and sixty fighting men and a 
 number of women and children. When a 
 head wind checked the runaways, he ordered 
 an old man, his uncle, to be bound and 
 thrown overboard as a sacrifice to the god 
 of winds and storms. The unhappy human 
 sacrifice struggled for awhile in the sea and 
 then sank. At once the wind changed, the 
 schooner lay her course, and the mana of 
 
 K
 
 130 HAU-HAUS, AND SELF-RELIANCE. 
 
 Te Kooti grew great. Reaching the east 
 coast of the North Island he made for 
 the interior, and beat off in disorder a 
 small force which tried to stop him. Thus 
 he gained time, and many joined him. In 
 November, he suddenly swooped down on a 
 settlement in Poverty Bay and massacred 
 thirty-three white men, women and children, 
 and thirty-seven natives. Fortifying himself 
 on a precipitous forest-clad hill named Ngatapa, 
 he seemed likely to rally round him the dis- 
 affected of his race. On the west coast, too, 
 a chief named Titokowaru was up in arms, 
 and beat the Militia in two sharp bush fights. 
 But Ropata, the chief of the tribe which had 
 suffered in the Poverty Bay massacre, was as 
 daring and resolute as Te Kooti. He joined 
 with Colonel Whitmore, the active commander 
 of the colonial forces, and in January, 1869, 
 the two took Ngatapa with a loss to the Hau- 
 Haus of 136 killed outright. It was about 
 the last important engagement fought in New 
 Zealand. It ended all fear of a general 
 rising. Te Kooti, wounded, escaped into the 
 fastnesses of the wild Urewera tribe, and made 
 more than one smaller but blood-stained 
 raid before he could be driven thence. After 
 that, however, he became a hunted fugitive. 
 Ropata and Kemp chased him from district 
 to district, backwards and forwards, across 
 the island, for a high price had been put on
 
 HAU-HAUS, AND SELF RELIANCE. 131 
 
 his head. Beaten three times on the Taupo 
 plateau, Te Kooti nevertheless always escaped 
 capture, and finally took refuge in the King 
 Country, where he stayed quiet and un- 
 molested. 
 
 Colonel Whitmore, crossing to the Wan- 
 ganui district after the fall of Ngatapa, set 
 off in chase of Titokowaru. He, however, 
 like Te Kooti, fled to the interior, where he 
 was wisely left alone, and, except for the 
 fruitless pursuit of Te Kooti, the year 1869 
 may be marked as the end of warfare in 
 New Zealand. 
 
 By 1870 it was possible to try and count 
 the cost of the ten years' conflict. It was 
 not so easy to do so correctly. The killed 
 and wounded amounted to about 3,000 on 
 the English side, and 9,000 on the part of the 
 beaten natives. Added to this, there had been 
 many scores of murders and heavy losses from 
 disease, exposure and hardship. The Maoris 
 were, for the most part, left without hope and 
 without self-confidence. The missionaries 
 never fully regained their old moral hold 
 upon the race, nor has it shown much zeal 
 and enthusiasm in industrial progress. On 
 the other side, the colonists had spent be- 
 tween three and four millions in fighting, and 
 for more than fifteen years after the war 
 they had to keep up an expensive force of 
 armed police. There had been destruction of
 
 132 HAU-HAUS, AND SELF-RELIANCE. 
 
 property in many parts of the North Island, and 
 an even more disastrous loss of security and 
 paralysis of settlement. Since 1865, more- 
 over, the pastoral industry in the south had 
 been depressed by bad prices. It is true that 
 some millions of acres of Maori land had 
 been gained by confiscation, but of this por- 
 tions were handed over to loyal natives. 
 Much more was ultimately given back to 
 the insurgent tribes, and the settlement of 
 the rest was naturally a tardy and difficult 
 process. Farmers do not rush upon land to 
 be the mark of revengeful raids. Altogether, 
 the opening of the year 1870 was one of New 
 Zealand's dark hours. 
 
 Nevertheless, had the colonists but known 
 it, the great native difficulty was destined to 
 melt fast away. Out of the innumerable 
 perplexities, difficulties, and errors of the 
 previous generation, a really capable Native 
 Minister had been evolved. This was Sir 
 Donald McLean, who, from the beginning of 
 1869 to the end of 1876, took the almost entire 
 direction of the native policy. A burly, 
 patient, kindly-natured Highlander, his Celtic 
 blood helped him to sympathize with the 
 proud, warlike, clannish nature of the Maori. 
 It was largely owing to his influence that the 
 friendly natives aided us so actively against 
 Te Kooti. It was not, however, as a War 
 Minister, but as the man who established
 
 HAU-HAUS, AND SELF-RELIANCE. 133 
 
 complete and lasting peace through New 
 Zealand, that his name should be remembered. 
 By liberal payment for service, by skilful land 
 purchases, by showing respect to the chiefs, 
 and tact and good humour with the people, 
 McLean acquired a permanent influence over 
 the race. The war party in the Colony might 
 sneer at his " Flour and Sugar Policy ; " but 
 even the dullest had come to see by this time 
 that peace paid. Into the interior of the 
 King Country McLean never tried to carry 
 authority. He left that and the Urewera 
 country further east discreetly alone. Else- 
 where the Queen's writ ran, and roads, rail- 
 ways, and telegraphs, coming together with a 
 great tide of settlement, made the era of war 
 seem like an evil dream. It is true that the 
 delays in redeeming promises concerning 
 reserves to be made and given back from 
 the confiscated Maori territory led, as late as 
 1880, to interference with road-making in 
 Taranaki . Swayed by the alarm and irrita- 
 tion thus aroused, the Government took the 
 extraordinary step of pouring into the village 
 of Parihaka an overwhelming armed force. 
 There, after reading the Riot Act to a passive 
 and orderly crowd of men, women and chil- 
 dren, they proceeded to make wholesale arrests, 
 and to destroy houses and crops. Public 
 opinion, which had conjured up the phantom 
 of an imminent native rising, supported the
 
 134 HAU-HAUS, AND SELF-RELIANCE. 
 
 strange proceeding. There was no such 
 danger, for the natives were virtually not 
 supplied with arms. However, as these high- 
 handed doings were at last followed up by 
 an honourable and liberal settlement of the 
 long-delayed Reserves question, it may be 
 classed as the last of the long series of native 
 alarms. There will be no more Maori wars. 
 Unfortunately, it has become a question 
 whether in a hundred years there will be 
 any more Maoris. They were, perhaps, 
 seventy thousand when the Treaty of Wai- 
 tangi was signed ; they and the half-castes 
 can scarcely muster forty-two thousand now. 
 
 Sir George Grey had been recalled in the 
 early part of 1868. He left the Colony 
 bearing with him the general esteem of the 
 colonists. True, his second term of office 
 had been far less prosperous than his first. 
 He had failed to prevent war, and had made 
 mistakes. But from amid a chaos of con- 
 fusion and recrimination, four things stand 
 out clearly: (i) he came upon the scene too 
 late ; (2) he worked earnestly for peace for 
 two years ; (3) the part that lie personally 
 took in the war was strikingly successful ; 
 (4) he was scurvily treated by the Colonial 
 Office. 
 
 He was the last Viceroy who took an active 
 and distinct share in the government of the 
 country. Since 1868, the Governors have
 
 HAU-HAUS, AND SELF-RELIANCE. 13$ 
 
 been strictly constitutional representatives of 
 a constitutional Sovereign. They have been 
 without exception honourable and courteous 
 noblemen or gentlemen. They have almost 
 always left the Colony with the good wishes of 
 all with whom they have come into contact. 
 They have occasionally by tact exercised a 
 good deal of indirect influence over some of 
 their Ministers. They have sometimes differed 
 with these about such points as nominations 
 to the Upper House, or have now and then 
 reserved bills for the consideration of the 
 Home Government. But they have not 
 governed the country, which, since 1868, has 
 enjoyed as complete self-government as the 
 constitution broadly interpreted can permit.
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 GOLD. 
 
 WHEN the Waitara war broke out the 
 white population did not number 
 more than seventy-five thousand. When 
 Te Kooti was chased into the King Country 
 it had grown to nearly four times that sum, 
 in the face of debt, doubt, and the paralyzing 
 effects of war. A great ally of settlement 
 had appeared on the scene. In 1861 profitable 
 goldfields were discovered in Otago. The 
 little Presbyterian colony, which in thirteen 
 years had scarcely increased to that number of 
 thousands, was thunderstruck at the news. 
 For years there had been rumours of gold in 
 the river beds and amongst the mountains of 
 the South Island. From 1857 to J 86o about 
 ^"150,000 had been won in Nelson, and in 
 March, 1861, there was a rush to a short- 
 lived goldfield at the Lindis in Otago. But 
 it was not until the winter of that year that 
 the prospector Gabriel Read found in a gully
 
 GOLD. 137 
 
 at Tuapeka the indubitable signs of a good 
 alluvial field. Digging with a butcher's knife 
 he collected in ten hours nearly five-and-twenty 
 pounds' worth of the metal. Then he sunk 
 hole after hole for some distance, finding gold 
 in all. Unlike most discoverers, Read made 
 no attempt to keep his fortune to himself, but 
 wrote frankly of it to Sir John Richardson, 
 the superintendent of the province. For this 
 he was ultimately paid the not extravagant 
 reward ,of ^"1,000. The good Presbyterians 
 of Dunedin hardly knew in what spirit to 
 receive the tidings. But some of thenV'did 
 not hesitate to test the field, and the result 
 solved all doubts. Half Dunedin rushed to 
 Tuapeka. At one of the country kirks the 
 congregation was reduced to the minister and 
 precentor. Indeed, for the next few years the 
 history of Otago became a series of rushes. 
 Economically, no doubt, " rush " is the proper 
 word to apply to the old stampedes to colonial 
 goldfields. But in New Zealand, at any rate, 
 the physical methods of progression thither 
 were laborious in the extreme. The would-be 
 miner tramped slowly and painfully along, 
 carrying as much in the way of provisions and 
 tools as his back would bear. Lucky was the 
 man who had a horse to ride or the rudest 
 cart to drive in. When, as time went on, 
 gold was found high up the streams amongst 
 the ice-cold rivers and bleak tussock-covered
 
 138 GOLD. 
 
 mountains of the interior, the hardships 
 endured by the gold - seekers were often 
 very great. The country was treeless and 
 wind-swept. Sheep roamed over the tussocks, 
 but of other provisions there were none. Not 
 only did fuel fetch extraordinary prices, but 
 several pounds would be paid for an old gin- 
 case or any few pieces of wood, out of which 
 a miner's " cradle " could be patched up. 
 The miners did not exactly make light of 
 these obstacles, for, of the thousands who 
 poured into the province after the first dis- 
 coveries, large numbers fled from the snow 
 and starvation of the winters. But enough 
 remained to carry on the work of prospecting, 
 and the finds were rich enough to lure new- 
 comers. In the year 1863 the export of gold 
 from Otago rose to more that two millions 
 sterling. Extraordinary patches were found 
 in the sands and drift of the mountain 
 torrents. It is recorded of one party that, 
 when crossing a river, their dog was swept 
 away by the current on to a small rocky point. 
 A digger went to rescue it, and never was 
 humanity more promptly rewarded, for from 
 the sands by the rock he unearthed more 
 than ^"1,000 worth of gold before nightfall. 
 Some of the more lucky prospectors had their 
 footsteps dogged by watchful bands bent on 
 sharing their good luck. One of them, however, 
 named Fox, managed to elude this espionage
 
 GOLD. 139 
 
 for some time, and it was the Government 
 geologist now Sir James Hector who, while 
 on a scientific journey, discovered him and 
 some forty companions quietly working in a 
 lonely valley. 
 
 The gotdfields of Otago had scarcely reached 
 the zenith of their prosperity before equally 
 rich finds were reported from the west coast 
 of the Canterbury province. From the year 
 1860 it was known that gold existed there, 
 but the difficulties of exploring a strip of 
 broken country, made up of the steepest forest- 
 clad hills and valleys covered with densest 
 jungle and seamed with swift and impassable 
 rivers, were exceptionally great. More than 
 one of the Government officers sent there to 
 explore were either swept away by some 
 torrent or came back half-crippled by hunger 
 and rheumatism. In 1864, however, a certain 
 Albert Hunt found paying gold on the Green- 
 stone creek. Hunt was afterwards denounced 
 as an impostor and had to fly for his life from 
 a mob of enraged and disappointed gold- 
 seekers, but the gold was there nevertheless. 
 In 1865 the stream which had been pouring 
 into Otago was diverted to the new fields 
 in Westland, and in parties or singly, in the 
 face of almost incredible natural difficulties, 
 adventurous men worked their way to every 
 point of the west coast. Many lost their 
 lives, drowned in the rivers or starved to
 
 140 GOLD. 
 
 death in the dripping bush. The price of 
 provisions at times went to fabulous heights, 
 as much as ^"150 being paid for a ton of 
 flour, and a shilling apiece for candles. But 
 so rich was the wash-dirt in many of the 
 valleys and the black sand on many of the sea- 
 beaches that for years ^"8 to 10 a week was 
 regarded as only a fair living wage. In 1866 
 the west coast exported gold to the value of 
 ^"2,140,000. 
 
 No sooner had the cream been skimmed off 
 the southern goldfields than yields of almost 
 equal value were reported from the north. The 
 Thames and Coromandel fields in the east of 
 the Auckland province differed from those in 
 the South Island. They were from the outset 
 not alluvial but quartz mines. So rich, how- 
 ever, were some of the Coromandel mines 
 that the excitement they caused was as great 
 as that roused by the alluvial patches of Otago 
 and Westland. The opening - up of the 
 northern fields was retarded throughout the 
 sixties by Maori wars, and the demands 
 of peaceful but hard-fisted Maori landlords. 
 As much as \ a miner had to be paid to 
 these latter for the right to prospect their 
 country. They delayed the opening of the 
 now famous Ohinemuri field until 1875. 
 When on March 3rd of that year the Gold- 
 fields' Warden declared Ohinemuri open, the 
 declaration was made to an excited crowd of
 
 GOLD. 141 
 
 hundreds of prospectors, who pushed jostling 
 and fighting round the Warden's table for 
 their licenses, and then galloped oft on horse- 
 back across country in a wild race to be first to 
 " peg out " claims. Years before this, however, 
 the shores of the Hauraki Gulf had been 
 systematically worked, and in 1871 the gold 
 export from Auckland had risen to more than 
 
 /1, 100,000. 
 
 New Zealand still remains a gold-producing 
 colony, albeit the days of the solitary ad- 
 venturer working in the wash-dirt of his claim 
 with pick, shovel, and cradle are pretty well 
 over. The nomadic digger who called no 
 man master is a steady-going wage-earner 
 now. Company management, trade unions, 
 conciliation cases, and laws against Sunday 
 labour have succeeded the rough, free-and- 
 easy days of glittering possibilities for every- 
 body. Even the alluvial fields are now 
 systematically worked by sluicing and dredg- 
 ing companies. They are no longer " poor 
 men's diggings." In quartz - mining the 
 capitalist has always been the organizing and 
 controlling power. The application of cyanide 
 and other scientific improvements has revived 
 gold-mining within the last three years, and 
 there is good reason to suppose that the 
 ^"54,000,000 which is so far the approximate 
 yield of gold from the Colony will during 
 the next decade be swelled by many millions.
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 EXEUNT THE PROVINCES ENTER DEMOS. 
 
 WHEN peace at last gave the Colonists 
 time to look round, Sir George 
 Grey's constitution was still working. Not 
 without friction, however. Under the Pro- 
 vincial system New Zealand was rather a 
 federation of small settlements than a unified 
 colony. This was in accord with natural 
 conditions, and with certain amendments 
 the system might have worked exceedingly 
 well. But no real attempt was ever made to 
 amend it. Its vices were chiefly financial. 
 The provinces were left in large measure to 
 exist on the fag-end of the revenues of the 
 Central Government, divided amongst them 
 when there was a surplus, or otherwise doled 
 out in irregular grants. To strengthen them 
 they had from the first been given the virtual 
 control and profit of the crown land within 
 their boundaries. This led to inequalities 
 and jealousies. The landed estate of the
 
 EXEUNT PROVINCES ENTER DEMOS. 143 
 
 southern provinces, sold at high or in the 
 case of Nelson, low prices, provided a large 
 though fluctuating revenue. In Nelson the 
 land was flung away at low prices to form large 
 estates. In the north such crown land as there 
 was often could not be sold because it was 
 heavily timbered or in danger of Maori raids. 
 The provinces without land revenue looked 
 with hungry eyes at those which had it. There 
 was quarrelling, too, within each little pro- 
 vincial circle. The elective superintendents 
 were wont to make large promises and 
 shadow forth policies at the hustings. Then 
 when elected they often found these views 
 by no means in accord with those of their 
 council and their executive. Yet, but for one 
 great blunder, the provinces should and 
 probably would have existed now. 
 
 1870 is usually named as the birth-year 
 of the colonial policy of borrowing and 
 public works. This is not strictly true. In 
 that year the central and provincial ex- 
 chequers already owed about seven millions 
 and a quarter between them. The provincial 
 debts, at any rate, had been largely con- 
 tracted in carrying out colonizing work. 
 What the Central Government did do in 
 1870 was to come forward boldly with a 
 large and continuous policy of public works 
 and immigration based on borrowed money. 
 The scheme was Sir Julius Vogel's. As a
 
 144 EXEUNT PROVINCES ENTER DEMOS. 
 
 politician this gentleman may not unfairly be 
 defined as an imaginative materialist of the 
 school of which Cecil Rhodes is the best- 
 known colonial exponent. His grasp of 
 finance, kindly nature, and peculiarly per- 
 suasive manner rapidly brought him to the 
 front in New Zealand, in the face of personal 
 and racial prejudice. As Treasurer in 1870 
 he proposed to borrow ten millions to be 
 expended on railways, roads, land purchase, 
 immigration, and land settlement. With 
 great wisdom he suggested that the cost of 
 the railways should be recouped from a 
 public estate created out of the crown lands 
 through which they might pass. With 
 striking unwisdom the Provincialists defeated 
 the proposal. This selfish mistake enabled 
 them to keep their land for five years longer, 
 but it spoilt the public works policy and 
 converted Vogel into the enemy of the 
 provinces, which he overthrew in 1875-6. 
 His successors handed over local affairs to a 
 multiplicity of local bodies which vary greatly 
 in effectiveness. 
 
 Meantime, Vogel's policy, minus the essen- 
 tial part relating to land settlement, was 
 accepted and actively carried out. Millions 
 were borrowed, hundreds of miles of railways 
 and roads were made, immigrants were 
 imported by the State or poured in of their 
 own accord. Moreover, the price of wool had
 
 EXEUNT PROVINCES ENTER DEMOS. 145 
 
 risen and the Colony bade fair to become rich 
 by leaps and bounds. To the new settlers 
 the Provincial Councils seemed cumbrous 
 and needless. Fresh from Great Britain and 
 with the ordinary British contempt for the 
 institutions of a small community, they 
 thought it ridiculous that a colony with less 
 than half-a-million of people should want 
 nine Governments in addition to its central 
 authority. The procedure of the Provincial 
 Councils, where Mr. Speaker took the chair 
 daily and a mace was gravely laid on the 
 table by the clerk, seemed a Lilliputian 
 burlesque of the great Mother of Parliaments 
 at Westminster. 
 
 Nevertheless, the provinces did not fall 
 without a struggle. In both the south and 
 the far north the older colonists mostly clung 
 to their local autonomy. Moreover, Sir 
 George Grey had taken up his abode in the 
 Colony, and was living quietly in an islet 
 which he owned near Auckland. Coming 
 out of his retirement, he threw himself into 
 the fight, and on the platform spoke with an 
 eloquence that took his audiences by storm. 
 Though he failed to save the iprovinces, he 
 was elected and remained the leader of the 
 New Zealand Opposition, and this had a 
 quite unexpected outcome. Untirthen^there 
 had been no clear and permanent division 
 in New Zealand between the parties of 
 
 L
 
 146 EXEUNT PROVINCES ENTER DEMOS. 
 
 conservatism and progress. Feuds between 
 centralists and provincialists, between the 
 war party and the peace party, between the 
 north and south, and between individual 
 districts, had supplied substitutes for party 
 divisions. But in 1877 Sir George Grey 
 appealed for the first time to the mass of 
 the colonists with a policy distinctly and 
 deliberately democratic. Then and subse- 
 quently he advocated triennial parliaments, 
 one man one vote, a land tax, and a land 
 policy based upon the leasing of land rather 
 than its sale, and particularly upon a restric- 
 tion of the area which any one man might 
 acquire. This policy, though he gained 
 office, he could not carry, and after a 
 premiership neither long nor brilliant, he 
 fell in 1879, and was deposed from the leader- 
 ship of his own party by his own followers. 
 Strange as this may seem to those not on the 
 scene, it was by no means so to close 
 observers. His cloudy eloquence would not 
 do for human nature's daily food. His oppo- 
 nents, Atkinson and Hall, had not a tithe of his 
 emotional power, but their facts and figures 
 riddled his fine speeches. Stout and Ballance, 
 lieutenants of talent and character, became 
 estranged from him. The leader of a colonial 
 party must have certain qualities which Sir 
 George Grey did not possess. He may dis- 
 pense with eloquence, but must be a debater ;
 
 EXEUNT PROVINCES ENTER DEMOS. 147 
 
 whether able or not able to rouse public 
 meetings he must know how to conduct 
 wearisome and complicated business by dis- 
 cussion ; he must not only have a grasp of 
 great principles, but readiness to devote him- 
 self to the mastery of uninteresting details ; 
 above all, he must be generous and considerate 
 to lieutenants who have their own views and 
 their own followers, and who expect to have 
 their full share of credit and influence. In 
 one word, he should be what Ballance was 
 and Grey was not. Nevertheless, one of 
 Grey's courage, talent, and prestige was 
 not likely to fail to leave his mark upon 
 the politics of the country ; nor did he. 
 Though he failed to pass the reforms 
 just mentioned, he had the satisfaction of 
 seeing them adopted and carried into law, 
 some by his opponents, some by his friends. 
 Only one of his pet proposals seems to have 
 been altogether lost sight of, his oft-repeated 
 demand that the Governor of the Colony 
 should be elected by the people. 
 
 The Grey Ministry committed what in a 
 Colonial Cabinet is the one unpardonable 
 crime it encountered a commercial depres- 
 sion. This overtook the Colony in 1879. The 
 good prices of wool and wheat did not prove 
 permanent. The output of gold, too, had 
 greatly gone down. There had been a 
 feverish rush for land, and much private
 
 148 EXEUNT PROVINCES ENTER DEMOS. 
 
 borrowing to buy it or to set up or extend 
 commercial enterprises. Then there happened 
 on a small scale what happened in Victoria 
 on a larger scale twelve years later. The 
 boom burst amid much suffering and repent- 
 ance. In some districts three-fourths of the 
 prominent colonists were ruined, for the 
 price of agricultural produce continued on 
 the whole to fall relentlessly year after year 
 until 1894. The men who had burdened 
 themselves with land, bought wholly or 
 largely with borrowed money, nearly all went 
 down. Some were ruined quickly, others 
 struggled on in financial agony for a decade 
 or more. Then when the individual debtors 
 had been squeezed dry the turn of their 
 mortgagees came. Some of these were left 
 with masses of unsaleable property on their 
 hands. At last, in 1894, the directors of 
 the bank which was the greatest of the mort- 
 gagees the Bank of New Zealand had to 
 come to the Government of the day to be 
 saved from instant bankruptcy. In 1895 
 an Act was passed which, while guaranteeing 
 the bank, virtually placed it under State 
 control. This was the last episode in the 
 long drama of inflation and depression which 
 was played out in New Zealand between 1870 
 and 1895. No story of the Colony can 
 pretend to be complete which does not, 
 however briefly, refer to this. The blame of
 
 EXEUNT PROVINCES ENTER DEMOS. 149 
 
 it is usually laid upon the public works 
 policy. The money borrowed and spent by 
 the Treasury is often spoken of as having been 
 wasted in political jobs, and as having led to 
 nothing except parliamentary corruption 
 and an eternal burden of indebtedness and 
 taxation. This is but true to a very limited 
 extent. It was not the public borrowing of 
 the Colony, but the private debts of the 
 colonists, which, following the extraordinary 
 fall in the prices of their raw products 
 between 1873 an( i *%9Si plunged so many 
 thousands into disaster. Nine-tenths of the 
 money publicly borrowed by the Colony has 
 been very well spent. It is true that between 
 1870 and 1898 the public debt has been 
 multiplied six times ; but the white popula- 
 tion has nearly tripled, the exports have more 
 than doubled, and the imports increased by 
 75 per cent. Moreover, of the exports at the 
 time when the public works policy was 
 initiated, about half were represented by 
 gold, which now represents but a tenth of the 
 Colony's exports. Again, the product of the 
 workshops and factories of the Colony are now 
 estimated at about ten millions annually, 
 most of which is consumed in New Zealand, 
 and therefore does not figure in the exports. 
 The income of the bread-winners in the 
 Colony, the wealth of the people per head, are 
 now nearly the highest in the world. In
 
 150 EXEUNT PROVINCES ENTER DEMOS. 
 
 1870 the colonists were without the con- 
 veniences and in many cases comforts of 
 modern civilisation. They had scarcely any 
 railways, few telegraphs, insufficient roads, 
 bridges, and harbours. Education was not 
 universal, and the want of recreation and 
 human society was so great as to lead notori- 
 ously to drunkenness and coarse debauchery. 
 New Zealand is now a pleasant and highly 
 civilised country. That she has become so 
 in the last thirty years is due chiefly to the 
 much-criticised public works policy. 
 
 Before parting with the subject of finance, 
 it should be noted that in 1870 the Treasury 
 was glad to borrow at slightly over five per 
 cent. Now it can borrow at three. The fall 
 in the rate of private loans has been even 
 more remarkable. Mortgagors can now 
 borrow at five per cent, who in 1870 might 
 have had to pay nine. This steady fall in 
 interest, coupled with the generally repro- 
 ductive nature of the public works expendi- 
 ture, should not be overlooked by those who 
 are appalled by the magnitude of the 
 colonial debts. For the rest, there is no 
 repudiation party in New Zealand, nor is 
 there likely to be any. The growth of the 
 Colony's debt is not a matter which need give 
 its creditors the slightest uneasiness, though 
 no doubt it is something which the New 
 Zealand taxpayers themselves should and will
 
 EXEUNT PROVINCES ENTER DEMOS. 151 
 
 watch with the greatest care. It is quite 
 possible that some special check will ulti- 
 mately be adopted by these to ensure peculiar 
 caution and delay in dealing with Parlia- 
 mentary Loan Bills. It may be that some 
 application of the " referendum " may, in 
 this particular instance, be found advisable, 
 inasmuch as the Upper House of the New 
 Zealand Parliament, active as it is in check- 
 ing general legislation, may not amend, and 
 in practice does not reject, loan bills.
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 LAND SETTLEMENT AND LOCAL INDUSTRIES. 
 
 TTJETWEEN 1880 and 1890 the colonists 
 fj were for the most part resolutely at 
 work adapting themselves to the new order 
 of things to lower prices and slower pro- 
 gress. They increased their output of wool 
 and coal the latter a compensation for the 
 falling-off of the gold. They found in frozen 
 meat an export larger and more profitable 
 than wheat. Later on they began to organize 
 co-operative dairy factories and send cheese 
 and butter to England. They cut down the 
 salaries of the Governor and the ministers, 
 and the size of the elected chamber. They 
 made rough and spasmodic efforts to reduce 
 the cost of the public departments. 
 
 Public affairs during the decade resolved 
 themselves chiefly into a series of expedients 
 for filling the treasury and carrying on the 
 work of land settlement. Borrowing went 
 on, but more and more slowly, and with it
 
 LAND SETTLEMENT, LOCAL INDUSTRIES. 153 
 
 the construction of railways and the buying 
 of Maori lands. More and more the land 
 laws of the Colony were altered so as to 
 favour occupation by small farmers, who 
 were not compelled to purchase their land 
 for cash, but permitted to remain State 
 tenants at low rentals, or allowed to buy the 
 freehold by gradual instalments. Even the 
 great pastoral leaseholds were to some extent 
 sub-divided as the leases fell in. In 1886, 
 John Ballance, then Minister of Lands, made 
 a courageous endeavour to place a number of 
 workmen out of employment on the soil in 
 what were known as village settlements. 
 In various parts of the Colony blocks of crown 
 land were taken and divided into allotments 
 of from twenty to fifty acres. These were 
 let to the village settlers on perpetual lease 
 at a rental equal to five per cent, on the 
 prairie value of the land. Once in a gener- 
 ation there was to be a revision of the rental. 
 The settlers, many of whom were quite 
 destitute, were helped at first not only by two 
 years' postponement of their rent, but by 
 small advances to each to enable them to buy 
 seed, tools, food, and building material. 
 Ballance was fiercely attacked in 1887 for his 
 experiment, and his opponents triumphantly 
 pointed to the collapse of certain of his settle- 
 ments. Others, however, turned out to be 
 successes, and by last accounts the village
 
 154 LAND SETTLEMENT, LOCAL INDUSTRIES. 
 
 settlers and their families now number nearly 
 five thousand human beings, occupying 
 35,000 acres in allotments of an average size 
 of twenty-four acres. Most of them divide 
 their time between tilling their land and 
 working for wages as shearers, harvesters, or 
 occasionally mechanics. Some ^"27,000 has 
 been lent them, of which they still owe about 
 ^"24,000. As against this the Government 
 has been paid ^"27,000 in rent and interest, 
 and the improvements made by the settlers 
 on their allotments are valued at about 
 ^"110,000, and form very good security for 
 their debts to the treasury. 
 
 The political battles over the land laws of 
 New Zealand during the last fifteen years 
 have not, however, centred round village 
 settlements, but round the respective advan- 
 tages of freehold and perpetual leasehold, and 
 round the compulsory repurchase of private 
 land for settlement. Roughly speaking, the 
 political party which has taken the name of 
 Liberal has urged on the adoption of the 
 perpetual lease as the main or sole tenure 
 under which State lands should in the future 
 be acquired. As a rule the party which the 
 Liberals call Conservative has advocated 
 that would-be settlers should be allowed to 
 choose their tenure for themselves, and to 
 be leaseholders or freeholders as they please. 
 Then there have arisen, too, important
 
 LAND SETTLEMENT, LOCAL INDUSTRIES. 155 
 
 questions affecting the perpetual lease itself. 
 Should the perpetual leaseholders retain the 
 right of converting at any time their lease- 
 hold into a freehold by paying down the cash 
 value of their farm, or should the State 
 always retain the fee simple ? Next, if the 
 State should retain this, ought there to be 
 periodical revisions of the rent so as to 
 reserve the unearned increment for the 
 public ? Fierce have been the debates and 
 curious the compromises arrived at concern- 
 ing these debatable points. The broad result 
 has been that the sale of the freehold of 
 crown lands, though not entirely prohibited, 
 has been much discouraged, and that the 
 usual tenure given now is a lease for 999 
 years at a rent of four per cent, on the prairie 
 value of the land at the time of leasing. As 
 this tenure virtually hands over the unearned 
 increment to the lessee, it is regarded by the 
 advanced land reformers with mixed feelings. 
 From their point of view, however, it has 
 the advantage of enabling men with small 
 capital to take up land without expending 
 their money in a cash purchase. Inasmuch, 
 too, as transfers of a lease can only be made 
 with the assent of the State Land Board for 
 the district which assent will only be given 
 in case the transfer is to a bona fide occupier 
 not already a landowner land monopoly is 
 checked and occupancy for use assured.
 
 156 LAND SETTLEMENT, LOCAL INDUSTRIES. 
 
 Meanwhile there is plenty of genuine settle- 
 ment ; every year sees fresh tracts reclaimed 
 from the wilderness. 
 
 Quite as keen has been the fighting over 
 the principle of State repurchase of private 
 lands with or without the owner's consent. 
 It was a favourite project of Sir George 
 Grey's ; but it did not become law until he 
 had left public life, when it was carried by 
 Mr. John McKenzie, that sterling Minister 
 of Lands. Under this law nearly half-a- 
 million of money has been spent in buying 
 thirty-six estates or portions of estates for 
 close settlement. A few of these have, at 
 the time of writing, not yet been thrown 
 open for settlement ; on the rest 1,051 
 human beings are already living. They pay 
 a rent equal to 5*2 per cent, on the cost of 
 the land to the Government. As a rule 
 there is no difficulty in buying by friendly 
 arrangement between Government and 
 proprietor. The latter is commonly as ready 
 to sell as the former to buy. The price is 
 usually settled by bargaining of longer or 
 shorter duration. Twice negotiations have 
 failed, and the matter laid before the Supreme 
 Court, which has statutory power to fix the 
 price when the parties fail to agree. It must 
 be remembered that as a rule large holdings 
 of land mean something quite different in 
 New Zealand from anything they signify to
 
 LAND SETTLEMENT, LOCAL INDUSTRIES. 157 
 
 the English mind. In England a great 
 estate is peopled by a more or less numerous 
 tenantry. In New Zealand it is, as a rule, 
 not peopled at all. Sheep roam over its 
 grassy leagues, cared for by a manager and a 
 few shepherds. Natural and proper as this 
 may be on the wilder hills and poorer 
 soils, it is easy to see how unnatural and 
 intolerable it appears in fertile and accessible 
 districts. 
 
 In their endeavours to raise the revenue 
 required for interest payments and an 
 inevitably growing departmental expenditure, 
 various New Zealand treasurers have turned 
 to the Customs. In raising money by duties 
 they have received support both from those 
 who wished to protect local industries and 
 from those who wished to postpone the 
 putting of heavy taxation upon land. The 
 net result of various conflicts has been a tariff 
 which is protectionist but not highly pro- 
 tectionist. The duties levied on New Zealand 
 imports represent 24 per cent, of the declared 
 value of the goods. But the highest duties, 
 those on spirits, wine, beer, sugar, tea, and 
 tobacco, are not intentionally protectionist ; 
 they are simply revenue duties, though that 
 on beer has undoubtedly helped large and 
 profitable colonial breweries to be established. 
 English freetraders accept as an axiom that 
 Customs duties cannot produce increased
 
 158 LAND SETTLEMENT, LOCAL INDUSTRIES. 
 
 revenue and at the same time stimulate 
 local manufactures. Nevertheless, under the 
 kind of compromise by which duties of fifteen, 
 twenty, and twenty-five per cent, are levied 
 on so many articles, it does come about that 
 the colonial treasurer gets his revenue while, 
 sheltered by the fiscal hedge, certain colonial 
 manufactures steadily grow up. The factories 
 of the colony now employ some 38,000 
 hands, and their annual output is estimated 
 at ten millions sterling. Much of this would, 
 of course, have come had the Colony's ports 
 been free ; but the factories engaged in the 
 woollen, printing, clothing, iron and steel, 
 tanning, boot, furniture, brewing, jam- 
 making, and brick and tile making industries 
 owe their existence in the main to the duties. 
 Nor would it be fair to regard colonial pro- 
 tection as simply a gigantic job managed by 
 the more or less debasing influence of power- 
 ful companies and firms. It was adopted 
 before such influences and interests were. 
 It could not have come about, still less could 
 it last, were there not an honest and wide- 
 spread belief that without duties the variety 
 of industries needful to make a civilised and 
 prosperous nation could not be attained in 
 young countries where nascent enterprises 
 are almost certain to be undercut and under- 
 sold by the giant capitalists and cheaper 
 labour of the old world. Such a belief may
 
 LAND SETTLEMENT, LOCAL INDUSTRIES. 159 
 
 conceivably be an economic mistake, but 
 those who hold it need not be thought mere 
 directors or tools of selfish and corrupt 
 rings.
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 THE STATE AND ITS FUNCTIONS. 
 
 IN 1890 a new force came into the political 
 field organised labour. The growth of 
 the cities and of factories in them, the decline 
 of the alluvial and more easily worked gold- 
 fields, and the occupation of the more fertile 
 and accessible lands, all gradually tended to 
 reproduce in the new country the industrial 
 conditions of the old. Even the sweating 
 system could be found at work in holes and 
 corners. There need be no surprise, there- 
 fore, that the labour problem when engaging 
 so much of the attention of the civilised world 
 demanded notice even in New Zealand. There 
 was nothing novel there in the notion of 
 extending the functions of the State in the 
 hope of benefiting the community or the less 
 fortunate classes of it. Already, in 1890, the 
 State was the largest owner and receiver of 
 rents, and the largest employer of labour. It 
 owned nearly all the railways and all the
 
 THE STATE AND ITS FUNCTIONS. l6l 
 
 telegraphs, just as it now owns and manages 
 the cheap, popular, and useful system of tele- 
 phones. It entirely controlled and supported 
 the hospitals and lunatic asylums, which it 
 managed humanely and well. It also, by 
 means of local boards and institutions, con- 
 trolled the whole charitable aid of the country 
 a system of outdoor relief in some respects 
 open to criticism. Under the Land Transfer 
 Law, Government officers did nearly all the 
 conveyancing business of the Colony. Land 
 titles were investigated, registered, and guaran- 
 teed, and sales and mortgages then became as 
 simple and almost as cheap as the transfer of 
 a parcel of shares in a company. The largest 
 life assurance business in New Zealand was 
 also a Government institution. The sum 
 assured in it now amounts roundly to ten 
 millions sterling, and by the common consent 
 of disinterested experts the office is ably and 
 prudently managed. 
 
 More interesting even than these extensions 
 of State energy was the institution of a public 
 trustee. On this officer devolves not only the 
 care of intestate estates but of estates left to 
 executors who are unwilling or unable to act, 
 or of private trust estates the administration 
 of which has become the cause of differences 
 and quarrels amongst those interested therein. 
 He takes charge of and protects the property 
 of lunatics. Anyone owning property in 
 
 M
 
 1 62 THE STATE AND ITS FUNCTIONS. 
 
 New Zealand may appoint him an executor. 
 Anyone about to leave the colony may make 
 the Public Trustee his attorney during his 
 absence. In addition to these manifold duties 
 he holds and administers very large areas of 
 land reserved for the use of certain Maori 
 tribes. These he leases to working settlers, 
 paying over the rents to the Maori benefi- 
 ciaries. Naturally the class which has the 
 most cause to be grateful to the Public Trust 
 Office is that composed of widows and orphans 
 and other unbusinesslike inheritors of small 
 properties, persons whose little inheritances 
 are so often mismanaged by private trustees 
 or wasted in law costs. 
 
 Again, the State in 1890 already educated 
 thirteen-fourteenths of the children of the 
 Colony. Now, in 1898, out of an estimated 
 population of about 775,000 all told, some 
 150,000 are at school or college. The 
 free, secular and compulsory primary school 
 system is excellent on its literary, not 
 so excellent on its technical side. Nearly 
 three-fourths of the Roman Catholic children 
 do not attend the State schools. Their 
 parents prefer to support the schools of 
 their church, though without State aid of 
 any kind. These, and a proportion of the 
 children of the wealthier, are the only excep- 
 tions to the general use made of the public 
 schools. It is not likely that any change,
 
 THE STATE AND ITS FUNCTIONS. 163 
 
 either in the direction of teaching religion in 
 these, or granting money to church schools, 
 will be made. 
 
 It will thus be seen that the large number 
 of interesting experiments sanctioned by the 
 New Zealand Parliament since 1890 involved 
 few new departures or startling changes of 
 principle. The constitution was democratic ; 
 it has simply been made more democratic. 
 The functions of the State were wide ; they 
 have been made yet wider. The uncommon 
 feature of the last seven years has been not so 
 much the nature as the number and degree of 
 the changes effected and the trials made by 
 the Liberal-Labour fusion which gained power 
 under Mr. Ballance at the close of 1890 and 
 still retains office. The precise cause of their 
 victory was the wave of socialistic, agrarian 
 and labour feeling which swept over the 
 English - speaking world at the time, and 
 which reached New Zealand just as plural 
 voting had been finally abolished by Parlia- 
 ment on the motion of Sir George Grey. 
 Of the many laws thus enacted it must suffice 
 here to indicate a few the effects of which 
 have been plain and immediate. 
 
 In 1893 the suffrage was granted to women. 
 Every adult resident is now entitled to one 
 vote, none to more. At present this most 
 venturesome of reforms has been more note- 
 worthy for what it has not brought about
 
 164 THE STATE AND ITS FUNCTIONS. 
 
 than for what it has. It has not unsexed 
 women, broken up existing political parties, or 
 brought about family discord or domestic 
 negligence. It has not stamped out the liquor 
 traffic, though it has strengthened the party of 
 prohibition. Nor has it interfered with the 
 institution of marriage, though it may pre- 
 sently bring about some amendment of the 
 divorce laws. Secular education stands as 
 strongly as ever, and ladies are not yet 
 clamouring to be admitted to Parliament. 
 Even the fashion of their dress is still English. 
 On the other hand, they use their votes 
 eagerly, are taking a real and increasing 
 interest in public affairs, and are likely to 
 influence certain branches of legislation in- 
 creasingly. One or two of them have already 
 entered the learned professions. 
 
 The direct taxation in New Zealand has 
 been made progressive, taken off all improve- 
 ments, and laid solely on the bare land values. 
 The small * peasant farmers are exempted 
 altogether. Any owner whose land value 
 amounts to .^"5,000 pays each year a 
 penny in the pound on the capital value 
 thereof. Thence the tax rises gradually, 
 culminating at the value of ^"210,000, the tax 
 upon which is threepence in the pound. The 
 farmer's livestock is, like his buildings and 
 improvements, exempted .from taxation alto- 
 gether. Local rating, however, is not levied
 
 THE STATE AND ITS FUNCTIONS. 165 
 
 on the same principle, though by an Act 
 passed in 1895 the local councils have the right 
 to place their rates on land values if they choose. 
 The income tax is also progressive. Incomes 
 below ^"300 are exempt. Those between ^"300 
 and ^"1,300 pay sixpence in the pound ; above 
 that, one shilling. Companies pay one shilling 
 in the pound on their profits. 
 
 The Upper House in New Zealand is com- 
 posed of councillors nominated by the Crown. 
 Until 1891 their nomination was for life. 
 Now it is for seven years only. The coun- 
 cillors, however, are still actively exercising 
 their right of rejecting Government; measures. 
 The councillors number forty-seven, five of 
 whom are labour members that is to say, they 
 were mechanics when appointed . The number 
 of labour members in the elective chamber 
 happens just now to be the same. By common 
 consent these gentlemen eschew fireworks and 
 do their parliamentary work well. 
 
 In 1894 an d I ^9S the criminal law was 
 codified in two Acts, the one dealing with 
 indictable, the other with minor offences. 
 The New Zealand Legislature, by the way, 
 was the first in the Empire to abolish the 
 scandal of public executions. It also honour- 
 ably distinguished itself twelve years ago by 
 passing the humane and useful First Offenders' 
 Probation Act, under which many an unlucky 
 young scapegrace has been saved from the
 
 l6b THE STATE AND ITS FUNCTIONS. 
 
 infamy of gaol. By the testimony of the 
 judges the Act is a social benefit. 
 
 The liquor law of the Colony, passed in 
 1895, embraces a complete and elaborate 
 system of local option. The licensing districts 
 are coterminous with the parliamentary elec- 
 torates. The triennial licensing poll takes 
 place on the same day as the general election, 
 thus ensuring a full vote. Every adult male 
 and female may vote : (i) to retain all ex- 
 isting licenses ; or (2) to reduce the number 
 of licenses ; and (3) to abolish all licenses 
 within the district. To carry No. 3 a 
 majority of three to two is requisite. No 
 compensation is granted to any licensed house 
 thus closed. Two local option polls have been 
 held under this law. The first resulted in the 
 closing of some seventy houses and the carry- 
 ing of total prohibition in the district of 
 Clutha. The second left the number of houses 
 unchanged. Prohibition has been the law in 
 Clutha for some four years. The accounts of 
 the results thereof conflict very sharply. 
 
 The labour laws of New Zealand are printed 
 in a medium-size volume. Most of them have 
 been passed during the last seven years. 
 Among them are laws dealing with truck, 
 employers' liability, conspiracy among trade 
 unionists, shipping and seamen, mines, and 
 the wages of workmen, especially of those in 
 the employ of contractors and sub-contractors.
 
 THE STATE AND ITS FUNCTIONS. 167 
 
 Three of the most widely and constantly 
 used relate to factories, retail shops, and 
 servants' registry offices. The Factory Act 
 applies to all workshops wherein two or more 
 persons work at any handicraft. It prohibits 
 the sub-letting of work taken home from a 
 factory, and obliges clothing made by home- 
 workers to be ticketed. The factory age is 
 fourteen ; there is no half-time ; workers 
 under fifteen must produce a school certificate 
 and those under sixteen a physical fitness 
 certificate. The work hours of males under 
 eighteen and of all females must not exceed 
 forty-eight a week, and they have a right to a 
 weekly half-holiday without deduction from 
 wages. Overtime may be worked on an 
 inspector's permit, but the minimum extra 
 wage paid for it must be sixpence an hour. 
 
 Under the Act relating to retail shops, all 
 shops, except one or two classes for the 
 sale of perishable food or refreshments, are 
 shut up in the towns and suburban districts 
 at i p.m. once a week. The hours of women 
 and young persons serving in or about shops 
 are limited to fifty-four weekly, and a carefully- 
 drawn clause insists on the provision of seats 
 for shop-girls. 
 
 The Servants' Registry Offices Act puts 
 under the complete control of a Government 
 department a class of offices through which 
 most domestic servants usually seek for
 
 1 68 THE STATE AND ITS FUNCTIONS. 
 
 employment in the Colony. The department 
 aforesaid sees that none but persons of good 
 character carry on this business, that they keep 
 proper accounts, and only charge the Govern- 
 ment scale of fees. 
 
 To certain students the most interesting and 
 novel of the New Zealand labour laws is that 
 which endeavours to settle labour disputes by 
 means of public arbitration instead of the old- 
 world methods of the strike and the lock-out. 
 Under this statute, which was passed in 1 894, the 
 trade unions of the Colony have been given the 
 right to become corporate bodies able to sue 
 and be sued. In each industrial locality a 
 Board of Conciliation is set up, composed of 
 representatives of employers and workmen. 
 Disputes between trade unions and employers 
 the Act deals with no others are referred 
 first of all to these Boards. Should the local 
 tribunals fail to settle them an appeal lies to 
 the Central Court of Arbitration, composed of 
 a judge of the Supreme Court sitting with two 
 assessors representing capital and labour re- 
 spectively. The decisions of this Court are 
 binding in law and may be enforced by pains 
 and penalties. The arbitration law has been 
 in active operation for about two years, during 
 which time some twenty-one labour disputes 
 have been successfully settled. As a rule the 
 decisions of the local Conciliation Boards 
 are not accepted. No attempt, however, has
 
 THE STATE AND ITS FUNCTIONS. 169 
 
 yet been made to disobey the final award of 
 the Arbitration Court. Some of the disputes 
 have affected local industries and interests of 
 considerable size and value. The cases have 
 nearly all been begun by the trade unions, 
 and on the whole these bodies have been 
 distinctly benefited by the awards. No strikes 
 or locks-out have occurred since the Act was 
 fairly set in motion. 
 
 Despite the Socialistic tendency of these 
 Acts and others, of the system of Govern- 
 ment advances on mortgage to farmers, and 
 of organised efforts to dispense in the case of 
 public works with sub - contractors and 
 middlemen, and to deal with unemployment 
 through a special department of labour, it 
 must not be thought that there is any strong 
 Party of deliberate State-Socialists in the 
 Colony at all corresponding to the following 
 of Bebel and Liebknecht in Germany, or even 
 the Independent Labour Party in England. 
 There is not. The reforms and experiments 
 which show themselves so many in the later 
 chapters of the story of New Zealand have 
 in all cases been examined and taken on their 
 merits, and not otherwise. They are the 
 outcome of a belief which is not now the 
 monopoly of one political party. The leaders 
 of the rival Parties, the robust Mr. Seddon 
 and the tactful Captain Russell, both 
 admit one main principle. It is that a
 
 170 THE STATE AND ITS FUNCTIONS. 
 
 young democratic country, still almost free 
 from extremes of wealth and poverty, from 
 class hatreds and fears, and the barriers these 
 create, supplies an unequalled field for safe 
 and rational experiment in the hope of pre- 
 venting ani shutting out some of the worst 
 social evils and miseries which afflict great 
 nations alike in the old world and the new.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 THE NEW ZEALANDERS. 
 
 SOME 775,000 whites, browns, and yellows 
 are now living in New Zealand. Of these 
 the browns are made up of about 37,000 Maoris 
 and 5,000 half-castes. The yellows, some 
 3,500 Chinese, are a true alien element. They 
 do not marry ; they are not met in social 
 intercourse or industrial partnership by any 
 class of colonists. They work apart as gold- 
 diggers, market gardeners and small shop- 
 keepers, and are the same inscrutable, industri- 
 ous, insanitary race of gamblers and opium- 
 smokers in New Zealand as elsewhere. Des- 
 pised, disliked, dwindling, they are, by force 
 of exclusion laws, bound soon to disappear. 
 
 Of the 730,000 whites, more than half have 
 been born in the country, and some are the 
 children of New Zealand-born parents. An 
 insular race is therefore in process of forming. 
 What are its characteristics ? As the Scotch 
 would say what like is it ? Does it give any
 
 172 THE NEW ZEALANDERS. 
 
 signs of qualities, physical or mental, tending 
 to distinguish it from Britons, Australians, or 
 North Americans? The answer is not easy. 
 Nothing is more tempting, and at the same 
 time more risky, than to thus generalise and 
 speculate too soon. As was said at the outset, 
 New Zealand has taken an almost perverse 
 delight in upsetting expectations. Nevertheless, 
 certain points are worth noting which may, 
 at any rate, help readers to draw conclusions of 
 their own. 
 
 The New Zealanders are a " British " race 
 in a sense in which the inhabitants of the 
 British Islands scarcely are. That is to say, 
 they consist of English, Scotch and Irish, 
 living together, meeting daily, intermarrying, 
 and having children whose blood with each 
 generation becomes more completely blended 
 and mingled. The Celtic element is larger 
 than in England or in the Scottish lowlands. 
 As against this there is a certain, though small, 
 infusion of Scandinavian and German blood ; 
 very little indeed of any other foreign race. 
 The Scotch muster strongest in the South and 
 the Irish in the mining districts. In proportion 
 to their numbers the Scotch are more prominent 
 than other races in politics, commerce, finance, 
 sheep farming, and the work of education. 
 The Irish do not crowd into the towns or attempt 
 to capture the municipal machinery as in 
 America, nor are they a source of political
 
 THE NEW ZEALANDERS. 173 
 
 unrest or corruption. Their church's antagon- 
 ism to the National Education system excluded 
 many able Catholics from public life. The 
 Scandinavians and Germans very seldom figure 
 there. Some 2,000 Jews live in the towns, and 
 seem more numerous and prominent in the 
 north than in the south. They belong to the 
 middle class ; many are wealthy, and are active 
 in municipal rather than in parliamentary life. 
 
 Two-thirds of the New Zealanders live in 
 the country, in villages, or in towns of less than 
 5,000 inhabitants. Even the larger towns cover, 
 taken together, about seventy square miles of 
 ground not very cramping limits for a quarter 
 of a million of people. There are very few 
 spots in the towns where trees, flower gardens, 
 and grass are not close at hand, and even 
 orchards and fields not far away. The dwelling- 
 houses, almost all of wood, seldom more than 
 two storeys high, commonly show by their shady 
 verandahs and trailing creepers that the New 
 Zealand sun is warmer than the English. 
 Bright, windy, and full of the salt of the ocean, 
 the air is perhaps the wholesomest on earth, 
 and the Island race naturally shows its influence. 
 Bronzed faces display on every side the power 
 of sun and wind. Pallor is rare ; so also is the 
 more delicate pink-and-white of certain English 
 skins. More heavily built as a rule than the 
 Australians, the New Zealanders have darker hair 
 and thicker eyebrows than is common with the
 
 174 THE NEW ZEALANDERS. 
 
 Anglo-Saxon of Northern England and Scotland. 
 Tall and robust, the men do not carry themselves 
 as straight as the nations which have been 
 through the hands of the drill-sergeant. The 
 women are as tall, but not usually as slight as 
 those of the English upper classes. In a word, 
 the New Zealand race shows no sign of beating 
 the best British, or of producing an average 
 equal to that best ; but its average is un- 
 doubtedly better than the general British 
 average. The puny myriads of the manufac- 
 turing towns have no counterpart in the Colony, 
 and, if humanitarian laws can prevent it, never 
 will. The birth-rate and death-rate are both 
 strikingly low. 
 
 The intellectual average is good. New Zea- 
 land was fortunate in the mental calibre of her 
 pioneer settlers, and in their determined efforts 
 to save their children from degenerating into 
 loutish, half -educated provincials. Looking 
 around in the Colony at the sons of these 
 pioneers, one finds them on all sides doing 
 useful and honourable work. They make 
 upright civil servants, self-sacrificing clergymen, 
 conscientious schoolmasters, honest lawyers, 
 wide-awake journalists, pushing agents, resource- 
 ful engineers, steady-going and often prosperous 
 farmers, and strong, quick, intelligent labourers. 
 Of artistic, poetic, or scientific talent, of wit, 
 originality, or inventiveness, there is yet but 
 little sign. Nor has the time yet arrived for
 
 THE NEW ZEALANDERS. 175 
 
 Young New Zealand to secure the chief prizes 
 of its own community such posts and dis- 
 tinctions as go commonly to men fairly 
 advanced in years. No native of the country 
 has yet been its Prime Minister or sat amongst 
 its supreme court judges or bishops. A few 
 colonial-born have held subordinate cabinet 
 positions, but the dozen leading members of 
 parliament are all British-born. So are the 
 leading doctors, engineers, university professors, 
 and preachers ; the leading barrister is a 
 Shetlander. Two or three, and two or three 
 only, of the first-class positions in the civil 
 service are filled by natives. On the whole, 
 Young New Zealand is, as yet, better known 
 by collective usefulness than by individual 
 distinction. 
 
 Socially, the colonists are what might be 
 expected from their environment. Without an 
 aristocracy, without anything that can be called 
 a plutocracy, without a solitary millionaire, 
 New Zealand is also without that hopeless 
 thing, the hereditary pauper and begetter of 
 paupers. It may be doubted whether she has 
 a dozen citizens with more than ; 10,000 a 
 year apiece. On the other hand, the average 
 of wealth and income is among the highest in 
 the world. 
 
 Education is universal ; the list of crimes 
 correspondingly light. With wealth so diffused, 
 and caste-barriers unknown, a New Zealander,
 
 176 THE NEW ZEALANDERS. 
 
 when meeting a stranger, does not feel called 
 upon to act as though in dread of finding in 
 the latter a sponge, toady, or swindler. Nor 
 has the colonist to consider how the making 
 of chance acquaintances may affect his own 
 social standing. In his own small world his 
 social standing is a settled thing, and cannot 
 be injured otherwise than by his own folly or 
 misconduct. Moreover, most of the Islanders 
 are, or have been, brought face to face with the 
 solitude of nature, and many, of all classes, 
 have travelled. These things make them more 
 sociable, self-confident, and unsuspicious than 
 the middle-classes of older countries. Such 
 hospitality as they can show is to them a duty, 
 a custom, and a pleasure. 
 
 The Islanders are almost as fond of horses 
 and athletics as their Australian cousins. They 
 are not nearly such good cricketers, but play 
 football better, and hold their own in rowing, 
 running, jumping, and throwing weights. They 
 are just as fond of angling and shooting as 
 the race elsewhere. As might be expected in 
 an educated people passionately fond of out- 
 door exercises, well fed and clothed, and with 
 sun and sea-air for tonics, drink is not their 
 national vice. Gambling, especially over horse- 
 races, has more claim to that bad eminence. 
 
 Of colonial art there is not much to be said. 
 Sculpture is represented by an occasional statue 
 brought from England. Architecture in its
 
 THE NEW ZEALANDERS. 177 
 
 higher form is an unknown quantity. Painting 
 is beginning to struggle towards the light, chiefly 
 in the form of water-colour drawings. Music, 
 reading and flower-gardening are the three chief 
 refining pastimes. The number and size of the 
 musical societies is worthy of note. So are the 
 booksellers' shops and free libraries. As for 
 flowers, New Zealanders promise to be as fond 
 of them as the Japanese. 
 
 The working classes are better, the others 
 more carelessly dressed than in England. The 
 workpeople are thriftier, too. Amongst the 
 middle classes, industrious as they are, unusual 
 thrift is rare. Their hospitality and kindliness 
 do not prevent them from being hard bargainers 
 in business. 
 
 Compared with the races from which they 
 have sprung, the Islanders seem less conven- 
 tional, less on their guard, and more neighbourly 
 and sympathetic in minor matters, fonder of 
 change and experiment, less extravagant for the 
 sake of display, more venturesome, more em- 
 pirical, more sober, more moral, equally averse 
 to taking advice but quicker to learn from 
 foreign example, more law-abiding but readier 
 to make and alter laws, more indifferent to 
 public opinion, yet contemptuous of eccentricity, 
 more prone to wander (especially in the case of 
 the work-people). Hypercritical and eaten up 
 by local and personal jealousies in public life, 
 they are less loyal to parties and leaders, less 
 
 N
 
 178 THE NEW ZEALANDERS. 
 
 ready to deify theories and catch-words, and 
 just as suspicious of wit and humour. They 
 are greater readers but know less of art. They 
 are less tolerant of grime, gloom, injustice and 
 public discomfort and bungling. 
 
 Though there is no division into two races 
 as in London, it would be absurd to pretend 
 that social distinctions are unknown. Each 
 town with its rural district has its own " society." 
 The best that can be said for this institution 
 is that it is not, as a rule, dictated to by mere 
 money. Ladies and gentlemen too poor to 
 entertain others will nevertheless be "asked 
 everywhere " if they have either brightness or 
 intellect, or have won creditable positions. 
 You see little social arrogance, no attempt at 
 display. The gatherings are smaller, more 
 kindly, less formal, less brilliant, copies of 
 similar affairs in the mother country. 
 
 Brilliant talkers there are none. But any 
 London visitor who might imagine that he was 
 about to find himself in a company of clownish 
 provincials would be much mistaken. A very 
 large proportion of colonists have travelled and 
 even lived in more lands than one. They have 
 encountered vicissitudes and seen much that 
 is odd and varied in nature and human nature. 
 In consequence they are- often pleasant and 
 interesting talkers, refreshingly free from 
 mannerism or self-consciousness. 
 
 They both gain and lose by being without a
 
 THE NEW ZEALANDERS. 179 
 
 leisured class ; it narrows their horizon, but 
 saves them from a vast deal of hysterical non- 
 sense, social mischief and blatant self-advertis- 
 ing. Though great readers of English news- 
 papers and magazines, their interest in English 
 and European politics is not very keen. Both 
 their geographical isolation and their constitu- 
 tion debar them from having any foreign policy. 
 In this they contentedly acquiesce. Loyal to 
 the mother country, resolved not to be 
 absorbed in Australia, they are torpid concern- 
 ing Imperial Federation. Their own local and 
 general politics absorb any interest and leisure 
 not claimed by business and pastimes. 
 
 Industrious, moral, strong, it is far too soon 
 to complain of this race because it has not in 
 half-a-century produced a genius from amongst 
 its scanty numbers. Its mission has not been 
 to do that, but to lay the foundations of a 
 true civilization in two wild and lonely though 
 beautiful islands. This has been a work calling 
 for solid rather than brilliant qualities for a 
 people morally and physically sound and whole- 
 some, and gifted with " grit " and concentration. 
 There is such a thing as collective ability. The 
 men who will carve statues, paint pictures, 
 and write books, will come, no doubt, in good 
 time. The business of the pioneer generations 
 has been to turn a bloodstained or silent 
 wilderness into a busy and interesting, a happy 
 if not yet a splendid, state.
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 As this sketch is not a statistical account of 
 New Zealand, it has not been loaded with figures. 
 Since, however, the reader may find a few 
 convenient, it may here be mentioned that the 
 area of the colony is 104,000 square miles. Its 
 population taking the mean of the current year 
 is about 775,000. Thenumberofitssheepisalittle 
 under 20,000,000; of cattle, 1,150,000; of horses, 
 250,000. The output of the factories and work- 
 shops is between ^10,000,000 and i i, 000,000 
 sterling a year ; the output of gold, about 
 ;i, 000,000 ; that of coal, about 800,000 tons. 
 The export of wool is valued at ^"4,250,000. 
 Among the exports for 1897 were: 2,700,000 
 frozen sheep and lambs ; 66,000 cwts. cheese and 
 71,000 cwts. butter; ^433,000 worth of kauri 
 gum ; ^42 7,000 worth of grain. The exports and 
 imports of the Colony for the year 1897 were a 
 little over ; 1 0,000,000 and ^8,000,000 sterling 
 respectively. It would appear that, taking a 
 series of years, about three-quarters of the 
 Colony's trade has been with the mother-country. 
 The public debt is about ^43,500,000; the 
 revenue, ^4,800,000. The State owns 2,018 
 miles of railway. 
 
 , The books in existence about New Zealand 
 are very many. Among the more valuable, 
 historically, are : " The Story of New Zealand,"
 
 POSTSCRIPT. l8l 
 
 by Surgeon-Major Thompson; "The Rulers 
 and Statesmen of New Zealand," and " The 
 Colony of New Zealand," both by William 
 Gisborne. For the War and its origin, see the 
 books by Sir William Fox, General Alexander, 
 Sir John Gorst, and Lieutenant Gudgeon. 
 Rusden's "History of New Zealand" is a 
 vehement pamphlet, in three large volumes, 
 denunciatory of the Native and Socialistic 
 policies of the colonists. Anyone interested 
 in the Maori race should read Maning's " Old 
 New Zealand," and Travers's "Life of Te 
 Rauparaha," " Cook's Voyages," and Sir George 
 Grey's "Legends and Myths," and consult 
 White's ponderous but valuable "Ancient 
 History of the Maori," General Robley's 
 handsome book on " Maori Tattooing," and 
 Hamilton's on "Maori Art." The "Transac- 
 tions of the New Zealand Institute," published 
 in Wellington by the Government printer, are 
 full of papers and addresses upon the race. So 
 also is the excellent " Journal of the Polynesian 
 Society," edited by Edward Tregear. The latter 
 gentleman's "Comparative Polynesian Dic- 
 tionary " is the standard lexicon of the language. 
 Scientific students may be referred to the 
 Works of Hooker and Dieffenbach, to Von 
 Haast's " Geology of Canterbury and Westland," 
 Kirk's "New Zealand Forest Flora," Buller's 
 " Birds of New Zealand," and Hudson's " New 
 Zealand Entomology." Of books written by
 
 1 82 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 travellers who devote more or less space to 
 New Zealand, the most noteworthy are Dilke's 
 " Greater Britain " and the volumes of Anthony 
 Trollope, Michael Davitt, and J. A. Froude. 
 Mennell's "Dictionary of Australasian Bio- 
 graphy " gives useful details concerning the 
 pioneer colonists. Mountaineers and lovers of 
 scenery should read Green's " High Alps of 
 New Zealand," and T. Mackenzie's "West 
 Coast Exploration." Mannering, Fitzgerald, and 
 Harper are writers on the same topic. Dr. 
 Hocken has written about the early days of 
 Otago, and Jerningham Wakefield's book "Ad- 
 ventures in New Zealand" sketches the founda- 
 tion of the settlements round Cook's Straits. 
 Samuel Butler's "Letters from Canterbury," 
 Lady Barker's "Station Life in Canterbury," 
 and James Edward Fitzgerald's "Letters and 
 Speeches of Godley," have the advantage of 
 literary merit. Delisle Hay's " Brighter Britain " 
 deals with life in Auckland. Domett's " Ranolf 
 and Amohia" is not only the solitary New 
 Zealand poem which has achieved any sort of 
 distinction but is also an interesting picture of 
 Maori life and character. The Official Year 
 Book contains a mass of well-arranged statistical 
 information, and the economic enquirer may be 
 further referred to Cumin's " Index of the Laws 
 of New Zealand," and to the numerous separate 
 reports of the Government offices and depart- 
 ments. For the rest, Collier's "New Zealand
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 Bibliography " (Wellington), and the library 
 catalogue of the Royal Colonial Institute, 
 London, are the best lists of the books and 
 pamphlets on New Zealand.
 
 R. O. HEARSON, LTD., 
 
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