NEW ZEALAND.

HC Deb 17 June 1845 vol 81 cc665-756

Mr. Charles Buller

If, Sir, my sole object, on the present occasion, were to bring before this House the injury which the Government has inflicted on the New Zealand Company, by the violation of an agreement on which its whole property depends, I should rely on your justice for preventing the rights of property from being violated in our persons, either by arbitrary repudiation, or disingenuous misconstruction. But even such an individual grievance is lost in the far greater case of public mismanagement which it is my duty to bring under your notice. The petitions of the merchants of London, and of the Company itself, put forward as the main topic of their complaint, that a great enterprise, wisely and boldly devised, has, after its foundations had been successfully laid, been arrested and marred, by the interference of the Government; that a Colony to which its position, its resources, and the energy of its founders promised a rapid and steady development, is now in a stagnant and perishing state; and that the fair prospects of a large number of adventurous and laborious emigrants have been cruelly, and, in too many cases, fatally blighted. Our complaint is, that a sound colonizing policy has been thwarted by feeble views and narrow jealousies; and so confident do I feel of being able to prove this, that I am content to wave all the advantage which I may derive from the mere letter of our contract, and to rest all our claims on the equity of the entire case. Look on the question before you as one involving a great issue between two conflicting systems of Colonial policy. Compare the principles and results of each; and if I succeed in proving that the policy of the New Zealand Company, was that by which the good of all classes, and all races, would have been promoted, and that the policy pursued by the Government has been detrimental to the interests of all—then, and then only, regard me as entitled to ask your consideration of the Company's claims under its agreements with the Government. I know, indeed, no so instructive lesson on colonization, as that which people in this country may derive from the short history of New Zealand. For you cannot come to a decision on the issue which you have to try between the colonizing views of the Colonial Office and those of the New Zealand Company, without passing in review the great questions which present themselves in the foundation of Colonies, and determining the principles on which European settlements are to be formed in those un peopled regions that are yet open to the enterprise of civilized men. The House must allow me to assume that it goes with me in my general views of the advantages of colonization: that it sympathizes with what I must make bold to regard as the general feeling of every intelligent person in this country out of the Colonial Office—with what repeated petitions show to be the strong and deliberate opinion of your most eminent merchants, that it is a great benefit to this country to extend the employment of our shipping and our seamen—to secure new sources of supply for the raw materials of our manufactures, and to open markets independent of the policy of other nations—to provide the destitute with a home where honest labour may ensure a subsistence—to augment the influence of the British name, and to spread over the farthest ends of the earth our language, our arts, and our institutions. These were the public ends at which the New Zealand Company aimed; they were ends which I will undertake to prove that they sought to attain, not merely with strict justice, but with far-seeing benevolence towards all; they were ends, which a wise and patriotic Government, overlooking and repairing many errors on their part, would most assuredly have assisted them in attaining, with hearty encouragement and a helpful hand. I do not believe that there ever was a field on every account so inviting to British colonization as that presented by the islands of New Zealand: none, in truth, to which necessity, as well as policy, so imperatively called us. With the one drawback of a long sea voyage, it seems to be the most available field for the capitalist and emigrant within the whole extent of our Empire; and it is the quarter of the world in which it would appear to be most distinctly the interest of Great Britain, that a large community of its people should be established. The extent of the islands comprises an area almost identical with that of the United Kingdom; and after making allowance for lake, morass, and vast chains and groups of Alpine mountains, I see that the Legislative Council of the Colony, in a formal Address to the Crown, states the total amount of available land to be not less than sixty millions of acres. It is no little advantage that this large area is not contained in a vast continent accessible only from a limited portion of coast; but that the far greater and richer portion is immediately accessible from a long line of no less than 3,000 miles of coast, abounding in safe and commodious harbours. The evidence of all the most competent witnesses before the Committee of last Session, corroborated as it is by every writer on the subject, shows that the natural resources of this country are great and varied. But I will quote only one authority on this point, because it is that of one to whose opinion Her Majesty's Government cannot refuse the respect they have always paid to it. Captain Fitzroy, in a letter written by him in September last, which you will find at page 141 of the Papers laid before this House in April, says— Your Lordship may ask, Is New Zealand, as a British Colony, worth any great expenditure of public money? My Lord, its value is far greater than the public believe, or even your Lordship, with access to every source of information, can yet be aware. There is very much more available fertile and rich land than has been supposed, I may add, that the difficulties anticipated from the expense of clearing the forest turn out to have been much overrated, and that it is now considered that the settler may calculate on repaying that expense by the first year's crop. Inquiry too has made known the existence of a vast extent of open country, admirably adapted for pasture. Governor Fitzroy goes on to say— The climate favours every kind of production, animal as well as vegetable, in an extraordinary manner. It is singularly congenial to English Constitutions. I may add," says the Governor, "that mineral riches abound; their extent and variety becoming more known and better ascertained every month. Since I last wrote to your Lordship, and mentioned this subject, tin has been found in this neighbourhood close to the sea. Copper, sulphur, iron, and coal had been previously known to be most abundant. It has been found," he says, "that the flax hitherto sent home bears no comparison with a peculiar kind, called by the settlers 'silky flax.' This is now being cultivated (though perennial, it is comparatively scarce), and promises to be a really valuable export. In fact, the improvements already made justify us in believing that New Zealand flax will ere long be a cheap and valuable substitute for Russian hemp. Whales," he says, "are again frequenting these coasts in numbers, after having for a time almost deserted them. And here I must beg particularly to remind the House of the great importance of the South Sea whale fishery, on which the world now almost entirely depends for its supply of oil and whalebone, the North Sea whale fishery being almost destroyed. Of this, New Zealand is the natural emporium. Captain Fitzroy then goes on to comment on "the valuable qualities and abundance of the timber;" and it is now well known that New Zealand produces the greatest possible variety of beautiful furniture wood, and timber for all domestic purposes. The natives," he adds, "are well inclined to labour for very small remuneration, and are anxiously seeking for employment. There are all the means for prosperity, except capital; but that, with our mineral wealth, is sure to be found, if good feeling is kept up between the Natives and Europeans, and the security of property as well as life fully maintained. Captain Fitzroy then goes on to say— I have here referred only to the commercial bearings of this grave question; the political aspect will be before your Lordship's eye in England. Considerations of the greatest moment do, indeed, give great political importance to the possession of New Zealand. Our trade with the Pacific is daily increasing in extent. Our relations with other Powers in that ocean are getting to be very delicate. France has possession of the Friendly Islands and the Marquesas. The United States have virtual possession of the Sandwich Islands. The American coast of this great ocean presents the important dominions of Chili, Peru, Mexico, with the possible, the very probable, communication across the Isthmus of Darien, and our valuable territory of the Oregon. On the Asiatic side, you have the far greater commerce of China, the Philippine Islands, and the Indian Archipelago. A British Colony in New Zealand would be the natural master of this ocean, the irresistible arbiter of all its complicated relations, and important interests. Its position would command the Pacific; its numerous harbours would supply shelter, its vast forests materials, for the greatest Navy in the world. You might make it, in truth, the Britain of the southern hemisphere: there you might concentrate the trade of the Pacific; and from that new seat of your dominion you might give laws and manners to a new world, upholding subject races, and imposing your will on the strong. But, in truth, there was another inducement for the colonization of New Zealand, which was more urgent than even these great motives of national policy. New Zealand was getting filled with English settlers, without the restraint of English laws. Whalers and sawyers formed the basis of a society, which was completed by Sydney dealers and runaway convicts. Then there got up a notion that British rule and British settlement must ultimately be established there; and then immediately followed a desire of acquiring lands, which of course would gain an immense value on that contingency. The missionaries commenced the practice, and carried it to the greatest extent. I have no wish to cast any discredit on those whose pure Christian feeling established the missions to the South Seas. The zeal that prompts men to expose their lives in some obscure corner of the earth, in the hope of bringing the heathen into the way of salvation, is undoubtedly one of the noblest feelings that can animate man; nor do I rate low the more moderated form of the same spirit that induces our countrymen to foster missionary exertions, by the contributions of their hard earnings. But, undoubtedly, this is a feeling which in all times and in all countries has been turned to a bad account by worldly men. Nor can anything but the most stringent church discipline prevent unworthy members of the priesthood from abusing their sacred influence for the purposes of worldly gain. Now, it is a curious and instructive fact, as showing the necessity of a rigid adherence to the ecclesiastical system of every Church, that in New Zealand, while the missionaries of the Church of Rome, under the control of a resident bishop, are free from a single charge of making a profit of their sacred influence—while the Wesleyan missionaries have exhibited but one instance of land-jobbing, which has been immediately visited with exclusion from their body — the missionaries of the Church of England, under the imperfect control of an irregular Association, have, not in one or two instances, but for the greater part, made worldly gain their object. They have got large tracts of land for themselves, and become the agents for others in similar transactions. The result is, that these men, most of them of the humblest origin, contrived to get such amounts of land before the establishment of British authority in New Zealand, that of thirty-five persons mentioned as being in the employ of the Church Missionary Society, in 1838, no less than twenty-three have sent in claims for land amounting in the whole to no less than 186,000 acres. This fact was asserted in the Company's petition which I had the honour of presenting several weeks ago; and Mr. Dandeson Coates, the Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, has noticed it in a printed letter to my hon. Friend the Member for the University of Oxford. In that letter I do not find that he attempts to controvert the assertion. He boldly defends these acquisitions of land, on some general rule, by which the Society authorizes its missionaries so to accumulate the good things of this world. He explains that the Rev. Henry Williams, in getting out of the natives 11,000 acres, did what every good missionary with a large family ought to do. The enormous acquisition of 50,000 acres by the Rev. Mr. Taylor, and of 40,000 by Mr. Fairburn, he defends on the bold hypothesis, that these gentlemen had taken all the trouble of establishing their titles in the Commissioner's Court, with the secret intention of giving back to the natives all they thus got. I have thought it necessary to touch upon these melancholy proofs of missionary misconduct, in order to show the House what was the extent to which this system of land-sharking was carried by individuals, and how it was encouraged by the most powerful influence that existed in New Zealand. Whatever little effect the intercourse with the missionaries undoubtedly had in softening the natives, was far more than counterbalanced by the evils incident to intercourse with Europeans. It was in 1825 that a chief of the name of Hongi, who had resided in England for some time under the care of the missionaries, returned to his country, in possession of a considerable store of the first fire-arms which the natives ever wielded. He used his irresistible superiority to expel from their ancient seats an old race of enemies. These, in the course of the struggle, learned the arts by which they had been worsted, and, having acquired some fire-arms, fell with equal advantage on the more southerly tribes, who were in turn driven back still further south. Nor did the wave of conquest and extermination cease, until it reached the very farthest extremity of the islands, the larger of which it almost absolutely depopulated, after greatly thinning the population of the other. The accounts of New Zealand speak of the fearful traces of these exterminating wars as everywhere presenting themselves in ruined villages and deserted cultivations. The most frightful devastation was that produced by the conquests of Rauperaha, of whom we have lately heard so much. A hideous tale was told by a most respectable merchant of this city, whom chance made an eye-witness of an ambuscade, wherein the nefarious complicity of an English trader enabled this savage chief to inveigle into his power a tribe resident at Otago. He massacred almost the whole tribe, men, women, and children, to the amount of 1,500 persons, carried back the captive chief hung up to the roof of the cabin by a hook through his chin, till he reached his own fastness then tortured him to death, and hung his entrails as an ornament to be worn round the neck of his wife. Nor were fire-arms the sole European commodity that contributed to depopulate New Zealand. The natives, it is true, at first showed a great repugnance to ardent spirits. I suspect, however, that it has always required some time to impart this taste to the wild man; and I fear that as it is quite certain that it has made some progress, we cannot but anticipate the possibility of its becoming in the long-run as fatal to the New Zealander as to the Indian of North America, unless checked by elevating the desires and character of the natives. But the mischief done by the introduction of apparently the most innocent commodities has been more fatal still, if we are to rely on the various witnesses before the Committee, who agreed in ascribing the sudden prevalence of consumption and fevers to the simple substitution of the blanket instead of their own mat for the dress of the natives. Be the causes, however, what they may, the effect seemed to be one that menaced the absolute extinction of the native race. The decline of their numbers was so large as to be visible to superficial observation. Some districts formerly peopled, are now absolutely uninhabited. A tribe of 2,000 in one place is reduced to fifty, another of equal numbers to twelve survivors. Mr. Busby, the resident says, in 1837— The depopulation of the country has been going on till district after district has become void of its inhabitants, and the population is even now but a remnant of what it was in the memory of some European residents. In yielding, therefore, to the considerations of policy and necessity, which rendered it imperative on Great Britain to form New Zealand into a Colony, it became a matter of primary importance to determine the principles to be adopted in dealing with the native race. There has been a monstrous deal of finessing about the proper word to describe the social state of the Aborigines of New Zealand. Lord Stanley says, in a recent despatch, that they are not savages. My gallant Friend the Member for Westminster, on the strength of having, as King William said, "been there," utterly pooh-poohs the opinions which Sir George Gipps and my noble Friend the Member for Sunderland (Lord Howick) have formed on an extensive study of the subject, because they don't square with his own hurry-scurry impressions. But I will say for him that even his loose impressions are entitled to more weight in my eyes than the preposterous exaggerations to which my esteemed Friend the Member for the University of Oxford has lent his graver sanction, on the authority of Mr. George Clarke. In spite of the official position of that gentleman, as Chief Protector of Aborigines, I must own that I cannot regard him as a competent judge of such a question as the present and past history of any race of men. Mr. Clarke was a gunsmith, who had passed ten years in New Zealand, in the mixed occupation of converting the natives and jobbing in land. If a French gunsmith were to turn friar, and, after passing a similar period in a similar manner in this country, should offer his theory of the social condition of Great Britain from the period of the Heptarchy to the present time, I should certainly pay no attention to his speculations. And when, on such authority, I am gravely asked to believe that the New Zealanders, without either written language, or hieroglyphic, or any single device for preserving a record of past events, by means of nothing but oral tradition, transmitted amid wars that have over and over again shifted the possessions of every tribe in the islands, have preserved an accurate knowledge of the boundaries and succession of every portion of the soil for the space of thirty generations, or eight or nine hundred years—when, on the same authority, I am asked to believe that the tribes of New Zealand, clothed in mats, ignorant of the use of any metal, feeding on rats and fern-roots, till Captain Cook gave them the potato, and scattered in filthy huts, present an aspect of equal civilization with our Saxon ancestors when they had laid the foundation of half our present towns and cities, covered the land with those churches of which some still remain to excite the admitration of our architects, and divided the country into our present division of shires, and hundreds, and parishes—who possessed the foundations of our Parliamentary Government, of our common law, and of our jury trial—for whom Alfred and the Confessor had legislated, Bede written history, and Dunstan reared an ecclesiastical polity—when such propositions as these are gravely offered to the judgment of the House of Commons, I can but admire the simplicity of my hon. Friend in affording us so decisive a test of the credulity that could swallow all these monstrous fictions, which missionaries have invented for the sordid purpose of making out that the natives possessed and could convey to them a freehold tenure in their land. It can be of no advantage to the native race of New Zealand that we should compliment them by misunderstanding their social state. It seems to me rather a capricious squeamishness to begin to hesitate about applying the old name of savages to the first people of whom we are very certain that they are extensively, habitually, and rather obstinately addicted to cannibalism. But instead of disputing about the precise propriety of terms, which after all, are very vague, the best way to form an estimate of the condition of the New Zealanders is to compare them with other nations of whom we know more. No doubt they are in every respect very superior to some of the puny aboriginal races of New Holland. There is as little doubt that, except in so far as they have been affected by their contact with us, they are inferior to the Caffres, and to all the Indian tribes who peopled the West Indies, and the American Continent from the equator to Labrador. They were inferior to them in actual knowledge of the arts of life—inferior in numbers—inferior in warlike prowess. Their notions of religion were so vague that travellers can hardly ascertain their obscure and capricious creed; and in all the arts of government they were deplorably deficient. You cannot for a moment compare their virtues with those of the North American Indian, while they possess in a greater degree all the vices of a savage. I speak of their condition as we found them. On the other hand, no doubt, they possessed qualities which rendered it far more easy to raise them in the scale of civilization, and reconcile their existence and well-being with European colonization. In place of that distinctive unsociability and indomitable aversion to change, which keep the Red Man in perpetual isolation from his white neighbour, the New Zealander combined with his native ferocity a docility more like that of the negro. Ready to adopt new ideas and new habits, it was easy to make him submit to new laws and engage in new occupations. It has been found easy to imbue him with a taste for European comforts—to teach him to employ his time either in raising those productions which the European demanded in exchange, or even to induce him to renounce his savage indolence, and become a fellow labourer or fellow sailor. The very deficiencies of his former condition removed all difficulty in defining his rights and modifying his habits. For as the forest afforded hardly any resource from the chase, the New Zealander, in truth, mainly subsisted on the produce of a rude agriculture; and though he was, no doubt, an idle labourer, still he was used to agricultural labour. Add to this that the physical distinctions of race produce no disgust on either side, and are so slight that the produce of a mixed union is hardly to be distinguished from the European. There certainly never was a case in which the right to occupy the vacant soil was attended with such perfect immunity from any necessity for interference with the savage, and none in which the facility of elevating the weaker race by amalgamation with the stronger, was so favoured by nature, so counselled by policy. And we were bound to take possession of New Zealand as the only means of elevating this race, and saving them from the destruction from which, as Europeans had got access to them, no means could be taken for rescuing them without the establishment of British authority in the islands. But it is said that it was their country, and that we had no business to take possession of any part of it. Of the race which I have thus described, there appear not to exist in the whole extent of New Zealand, more, if so many as 100,000 individuals. There is one little island which may be regarded as uninhabited. The Middle Island, far the largest of the three, we may call uninhabited also, as its inhabitants are supposed not to amount to 1,500, in an extent as large as England and the Lowlands of Scotland. In the southern half of the Northern island there are not 10,000 inhabitants. Almost the entire native population is to be found in the northern half of the Northern island. It is preposterous to expect that the existence of such a population, on portions of the soil of a vast country, ought to exclude the rest of mankind from turning the unoccupied soil to account. God gave the earth to man to use—not to particular races, to prevent all other men from using. He planted the principle of increase in us; he limited our existence in no particular soil or climate, but gave us the power of ranging over the wide earth; and I know no principle of reason, no precept of revelation, that gives the inhabitants of one valley in New Zealand a right to appropriate a neighbouring unoccupied valley, in preference to the Englishman, who cannot find the means of subsistence at home. I apply to the savage no principle which I should not apply to the most civilized people of the world. If by any unimaginable calamity the population of France, for instance, were reduced from the 35,000,000 which it now maintains, to 200,000, which is about the proportion of the population of New Zealand, and if these 200,000 were almost limited to Brittany and Normandy, and cultivated, as the New Zealanders do, no more than one acre in a thousand, do you think we should allow this handful of men to devote that fine country to perpetual barrenness? Do you think that every neighbouring nation would not deem itself justified in pouring out its destitute myriads to obtain their food from the soil on which weeds and wolves would otherwise subsist alone? It seems to me wicked to dispute the right of man to cultivate the wilderness. Justice demands, no doubt, that if civilized man, when thus seeking new fields for his labour, be brought in contact with a rude and weaker race, he is bound to treat his new neighbour with the utmost fairness and kindness. Not merely are we bound not to deprive him of any actual possession which he enjoys, but justice requires that we should do our best to prevent his being thrown into a position of relative inferiority, and to ensure an improvement in his condition corresponding with the general improvement of his country. I know not how, in this respect, we can lay down any better principles than those always recognised, and almost always acted on by our ancestors. They never pretended to assert a right of depriving the Indian of his possessions. The principle of our law, in conformity with the general law of nations, was, that in settling among savages, it was not our duty to recognise in them any rights of which they themselves had no conception, or to create for them some fiction of right analogous to the proprietary rights of modern Europe. The rule laid down by Vattel, by all writers on the law of nations, and by our own lawyers, is, that in dealing with the savage, who possesses no notion of individual property in land, or of a power of alienating it, it is sufficient to recognise his right to that which he actually uses, and no more. The same writers have always maintained that the civilized man had a right to limit the Indian in his wasteful use of large tracts for the chase. In New Zealand no such difficulty occurred: the savage did not hunt; his occupations of land were as definite as any European fields; they consisted of the ground which he had actually cleared. If you left him this, what injury did you do him by occupying the remainder? You took from him nothing which any lawyer or moralist ever regarded as his property. The payments which were made to him were not the price of land; they were payments to secure his consent to our settling quietly in his neighbourhood. The real evil which you have to guard against, when you introduce a large body of European settlers into the immediate neighbourhood of an uncivilized race, is not the taking the soil which the latter did not use, but the change which you effect by bringing them into contact with a stronger race. Against the ill consequences of such a change we were no doubt bound to provide the savage with most sufficient guarantees and ample compensation. But compensation for what? Not for land, which was not his; but for the position of inferiority to which your very vicinity of itself tends to reduce him. And what species of compensation can you give him? Is it money? Translate money into the articles which money will enable the savage to acquire—into rum and tobacco, muskets and gunpowder—and I think that every man of real philanthropy will agree that the greater the amount which you confer, the greater the injury which you inflict on the object of your mistaken bounty. Be as lavish," said the New Zealand Company, in one of their letters to Lord Stanley, "be as lavish as you please of the ordinary materials of European barter; give clothing, arms, ammunition, tools, and tobacco, and what beyond the consumption of the day can you really give of value to the man whom you do not find possessed, and cannot at once endow, with a gift of foresight? Give more, and you only waste the surplus. And when the blanket is worn out, the second-rate finery turned to rags, the gun burst, the ammunition expended, the tool broken, and the drug has produced its hour of intoxication, at the end of a year or two, or even ten, what better is the wild man for your gift? At the end of the short period of enjoyment he and his race are beggars, amid the wealth that has grown out of their possessions; doomed, after a brief period of toil for the intruder, and of humiliation in his presence, to disappear from the land over which they once reigned undisputed masters. I go on to read from the same letter the description of the provision which the New Zealand Company made for the natives:— It was to guard, as much as human care can guard, against such a result, that the New Zealand Company invented the plan of native reserves. To recompense at the moment, and comply with the exigencies of opinion, they paid down what, according to received notions, was a sufficient price. But the real worth of the land they thought they gave only when they reserved, as a perpetual possession for the native, a portion equal to one-tenth of the lands which they had purchased from him. This was a price which he could not squander away at the moment, but of which, as time passed on, the inalienable value must continually and immensely increase for his benefit and that of his children. Heir of a patrimony so large, the native chief, instead of contemplating European neighbours with jealous apprehension, as a race destined to degrade and oust him, would learn to view with delight the presence, the industry, and the prosperity of those who, in labouring for themselves, could not but create an estate to be enjoyed by him without toil or risk. Nor was this design confined to barren speculation. In every settlement which we have formed, a portion equal to one-tenth of town, as well as rural allotments, has always been reserved for the natives; in the lottery by which the right of selection was determined, the natives had their fair chance, and obtained their proportion of the best numbers; and in the plans of Wellington, Nelson, and New Plymouth, your Lordship may see the due number of sections, including some of the very best in each, marked out as native reserves. Nor is this, even now, a valueless or contingent estate. At the most moderate average, according to the present rate of prices, the hundred acres of native reserves in the town of Wellington alone would fetch no less than 20,000l. This is my answer to all the calumnies that have been thrown out against the New Zealand Company, as being desirous of cheating and ill using the natives. They devised, and, while permitted, faithfully carried into effect, a plan evincing more forethought and real humanity than ever had been adopted before. The Select Committee of last Session honoured it with their approbation; and I rely upon finding their decision ratified by the judgment of all men whose philanthropy is not an idle cant. Malign us—destroy us if you will—you cannot deprive us of this undeniable claim to the merit of having devised the best and wisest plan ever yet conceived for the benefit of the aboriginal races among which our colonization is established. This value given to land which produced nothing before—this permanent property secured to them for ever, secured by British law against all the ruinous vicissitudes of their own barbarous condition—this was the real compensation we made the natives for permission to settle in their country. You may talk of our payments for land having been no adequate price for the land which we claimed. I do not see that you can say that it was not a fair price for that which was bringing no one any return—for mere leave to give a value to that which without us had no chance of possessing any value. As far as we can make out, it was probably more than what Penn has been so much praised for giving for all Pennsylvania. It was as high a rate of price as our Government has got for the greater part of the land in its Colonies, which we used, in fact, to give away—as much as until the last fifteen years we thought that the mere permission to occupy the waste was worth. But recollect that the New Zealand Company never pretended to regard these payments as the real compensation for the assent of the natives to their settling in New Zealand. That was to be found in the native reserves: in our taking the land which was worth absolutely nothing, and returning every tenth acre, after our labour had given it a far greater value than 1,000 acres possessed before. If these reserves had been turned fairly to account, while you have been keeping the whole country uncultivated for your petty squabble about, at the outside, some 5,000l. or 6,000l., to be divided among some half dozen tribes, they might undoubtedly have by this time fetched three or four times that amount in the market. The truth, which the Colonial Office seems never to have been able to understand, is, that it is a very difficult thing, requiring much judgment, temper, and care, to preserve the savage from extermination and annihilation by the mere contact with a civilized race. Their notions of forbearance and justice seem to have been comprised in indulging his lawless habits, and enabling him to extort large prices for land. But if you leave the savage in the neighbourhood of the civilized, you leave him exposed to certain destruction, unless you excite a real sympathy between him and his neighbour. No laws, no care, no power of Government can save him, without the potent and constant action of such a sympathy. It was to produce such a feeling that, from the first, our policy was that of bringing about an amalgamation of the races. For this reason we did not form those native reserves, like the Indian reserves of North America, into large districts in which the natives were to reside, fenced off from the white population; but we interspersed them, section by section, among the settlements of the colonists. Our hope was, that we should convert the chiefs into proprietors. Our purpose was not with barbarous recklessness to obliterate the existing distinctions of the social state of the New Zealanders; and, on the plan of the missionaries, reduce all to an equality. We deemed it just and also politic to endeavour, when we deprived the New Zealand chief of his preeminence and authority as a chief, to give him, in an English state of society, the position of a landed proprietor. We meant the reserves to be the hereditary property of the chiefs. The mass of the population, we hoped, would be engaged in the same occupations as our own labourers. We looked to the facilities of union between the two races, and we hoped that in the course of two or three generations, the two might become blended into one. Go through the history of the world, and I believe you will find no instance of an inferior race being ever elevated in the scale of civilization, except by such actual intermixture producing an entire amalgamation. Wretched, indeed, is the condition of every subject race which remains isolated amid superior neighbours. If numerous, it becomes a people of hewers of wood and drawers of water. In other cases the scanty and dwindling tribes of the Aboriginal race are preserved as a kind of show. I have seen the wretched relics of the great tribes that once ranged over North America, preserved under the care of missionaries in Canada, bereft of independence and all that gave them a kind of greatness in their savage freedom, and imbued them with nothing of civilization save the power of mimicking some of our forms. When I think of the Indians of Lorette and St. Regis, I cannot but feel that if a word of mine could influence the destinies of my own race, I would pray that they might cease to propagate their wretched line, rather than that any bearing the name of my countrymen should ever drag on an existence so useless and degraded. The project of amalgamating the two races was a large and benevolent, and I feel assured the only feasible scheme for saving the natives of New Zealand from degradation and annihilation. It has been thwarted by the prevalence of a narrow and unsound policy, of exactly the opposite kind, which had begun to prevail some time before. The policy of the Church Missionaries, as avowed by their Secretary, Mr. Dandeson Coates, in his evidence before the Committee of the House of Lords in 1838, was to prevent European colonization, to keep the natives from intermixture with settlers, and to govern them, he suggested, through the medium of the missionaries. Unfortunately, the most narrow and impracticable policy for some time influenced the measures of the Colonial Office. The right of Great Britain to New Zealand was indisputable. The islands had been discovered and formally taken possession of by Captain Cook in 1769. Since 1787, they had always been included in the Commissions of the Governors of New South Wales. These Governors had exercised their authority by appointing magistrates in New Zealand. From 1814, however, a series of measures had been adopted for the purpose, as it would appear, of tacitly waving the rights of the Crown, by classing New Zealand among foreign countries. This policy was brought to a climax in 1837, when our Government could no longer postpone establishing some kind of authority there. Instead of taking the rational course, by asserting the undoubted right of Great Britain over New Zealand, the Government determined, for the first time, formally to set up the monstrous fiction of treating New Zealand as a Foreign Power under a regular Government, and accordingly sent out Mr. Busby to be Consul or Resident. He was directed to acknowledge the flag of New Zealand, and in order that New Zealand might have a flag to be acknowledged, Sir George Gipps tells us that various flags were sent out to the chiefs of the Bay of Islands, out of which they probably selected that which consisted of the gaudiest colours. As if for the purpose of caricaturing all the rest, by attributing to these poor savages the power that marks the utmost refinement of commerce and international law, the chiefs were to grant ships' registers. Mr. Busby's next feat was to get some thirteen chiefs of some small tribes in the northern extremity of New Zealand, to form themselves into a body under the style and title of the "Confederated Chiefs of the United Tribes of New Zealand." He got them to issue a "Declaration of Independence," wherein, following out the American model, they declared themselves to be a Congress, with the power of making laws; and then, oddly enough, wound up their declaration of independence by placing themselves under the protection of the British Crown. Why, now, all these proceedings—what are they, but what Mr. Carlyle, in his emphatic language, calls "lies" and "shams?" Mr. Busby tells us, he was in truth accredited to the missionaries: his diplomatic character to the native chiefs was a "sham." The flag was "a sham;" the ships' registers were "shams;" the Confederation of chiefs, who, as Lord Normanby says, "were incompetent to act, or even to deliberate in concert," was a "sham;" the Congress composed of these men, whose only notion of settling a difference was, not by counting votes in a division, but by killing and eating one another, was a "sham;" and the Declaration of Independence was a "sham" document, written by Mr. Busby and the missionaries, and signed by a set of persons whom no earthly credulity can imagine to have understood one word of that to which they affixed their marks. And now, Sir, may I ask the right hon. Baronet, who one evening came down on us with a strongly worded passage from one of our own letters, in order to represent the New Zealand Company as regardless of the faith of treaties; was it, after all, so very indecent, when speaking of such acts as these, to designate them as "devices to amuse savages," rather than as grave acts of State, indicating the resolves and regulating the relations of rational men and high contracting powers? Truth, Sir, is after all, the safest thing in public business; and even where solemn grimace and fiction appear most harmless, these are too apt to cause some unforeseen entanglement, which leads to serious mischief. So was it in this case. There came a time when all this foolery had to give way to reality. In the year 1839, the New Zealand Company, after long negotiations with the Colonial Office, found itself disappointed in its hopes of forming a Colony under the sanction of the Imperial Government. A large body of emigrants of the most respectable class had sold their property, given up their professions, and, in fact, broken up their connexions in this country, with the intention of making New Zealand their future home. As these people had been brought into this position by no fault of their own, the Company determined that it was its duty to aid them in carrying out the purpose, which was now, indeed, no longer matter of choice to them. As Her Majesty's Government had declared New Zealand to be an independent State, and allowed all others of its subjects to establish themselves there under the native authority, they deemed that they, too, might purchase land of the native chiefs, and establish settlers there. They accordingly despatched a preliminary expedition for the purpose of surveying the country, and sold land to the intending colonists. At the same time an even graver cause acted on the indecisions of our Government. It came to their knowledge, that in consequence of the public parade of repudiation of our sovereignty over New Zealand, the French Government, in open defiance of the New Zealand flag, without the fear of the Congress of the confederated chiefs of the united tribes before their eyes, were going to do what a similar adoption by us of the missionary policy actually has enabled them to do in Tahiti, and were preparing an expedition for the purpose of planting a Penal Colony in New Zealand. Luckily my noble Friend the Member for Tiverton was then the guardian of British interests at the Foreign Office. He demanded explanations of the Colonial Office; and Mr. Stephen wrote him a long and ingenious letter to make out a case that the rights of the British Crown had been effectually compromised by the words which the Colonial Office had slipped into Acts of Parliament, and by the ruinous absurdities which it had enacted through the medium of Mr. Busby. My noble Friend was not a man, if I may use a familiar phrase, to stand any such nonsense, or abandon to France the most important of Her Majesty's possessions in the Pacific. The result was, that, almost at the same time as the first expedition of the New Zealand Company's colonists, Captain Hobson was despatched as Consul to New Zealand, with instructions to get possession of the country, and a contingent Commission as Governor in his pocket. His instructions were to procure the cession of the Northern island from the chiefs; and the result of his compliance with his instructions was the Treaty of Waitangi. The spirit of moderation and conciliation which dictated this desire to secure the goodwill of the natives, while asserting our undoubted rights, is most commendable; and I certainly should say nothing against the Treaty of Waitangi, had it been estimated at its proper worth, as an arrangment between Governor Hobson and the native chiefs, whose goodwill it was necessary to secure. But when an attempt is made to elevate this Treaty to an equality with the Treaties of Westphalia and of Vienna, to make it the basis of a system of law, and to rest on it our title to the possession of New Zealand, I must pray the House to pause a little, and inquire into the intrinsic worth of this document, before we abandon the sound title of discovery, and rest our rights on the cession which was thus procured. Captain Hobson first proceeded to deal with Mr. Busby's Congress, and having got them to meet at Waitangi, he got some of them to sign the Treaty. Subsequently he got the signatures of some other chiefs in the same part of the island, and sent off Major Bunbury in the frigate to procure the signatures of the chiefs of Cook's Strait, and the Middle and Southern islands. At the same time he despatched Mr. Henry Williams, a missionary, who had evinced much skill in getting land for himself from the natives, to procure signatures in other parts. On the east coast another missionary was entrusted with the task, and he, not having leisure to get through it by himself, entrusted the paper to a young skipper, who appears from his name to be a Swede, and begged him to get as many signatures as he could. In all those cases the one uniform consideration for the transfer of allegiance was a blanket per signature. No one got the blanket who would not sign; everybody got one after signing. In some cases our diplomatists were obliged to throw in a little tobacco. I am not sure, but I think I read somewhere of one case, that of a chief who was found fishing, and got up to sign the Treaty in the ship's cabin, in which it was necessary to give him a glass of rum in addition before he would sign. But the gravest objection to these proceedings was the studious avoidance of that perfect publicity which alone could have satisfied the world that the transaction was effected in good faith, and understood by the natives. At Port Nicholson, where there was a considerable number of our settlers, Mr. Williams carried on his negotiations in such secrecy that none of the white people knew what he was about, till he had got from one chief in one hole, and another in another corner, their adhesion on the part of their nation to the abdication of their national independence. Such was the mode, such the inducements, by which the chiefs were got to enter into what Lord Stanley calls a "solemn engagement of the British Crown." The getting the acquiescence of the chiefs to our settling in their neighbourhood, and even the purchasing that acquiescence with some hundreds of pounds' worth of blankets and tobacco, was all perfectly right in substance. In fact, it was just what the Puritans, and Lord Baltimore, and Penn had done, only with none of this fuss and humbug. But what I do greatly object to is, the attempting to give all these shams of independence, and confederation, and treaty, an air of reality, and to build on them consequences affecting the future government of an important Colony. All the fictions in the world won't alter the character of the New Zealander, won't create institutions which neither existed, nor were consonant with the character of the people, and won't give any real value to a Treaty which wants the first requisite of all contracts, that of being understood by both parties to it. It is utter nonsense to pretend that the New Zealand chiefs understood what it was they did when they acknowledged the Queen of a country of which they knew nothing, as their Sovereign, or what they obtained in return when Her Majesty imparted to them all the rights and privileges of British subjects. Look at the last despatches, and you will find abundant evidence that the natives generally repudiate the Treaty, and declare they did not understand it. By such a Treaty you could in truth acquire no rights you had not got before, and you would not be justified in enforcing or executing any stipulation incompatible with the well-understood interests of the people with whom you made it. This Treaty makes no change in the far more solemn duties which the morality of civilization and humanity imposed on you before. Civilized nations you hold to the strict letter of treaties. But you have no right thus to get rid of the obligations which your immeasurable superiority imposes on you with regard to those children. You could not be justified in enforcing on these people their part of a bargain which they did not understand. They became subjects of Her Majesty. Could you equitably avail yourself of the Treaty to apply the penalties of treason to a refractory chief? No one believes your right to New Zealand to be founded on cession. You have the most righteous of all titles, that of discovery, that of planting yourselves first on an unoccupied soil. But if you hadn't that, who would attach any value to this cession by chiefs who did not know what they were doing when they ceded—who had no authority to cede—whom, in fact, you would appear to have recognised as independent and sovereign, merely to give a colour to their cession of that independence and sovereignty to yourselves? But the assertion that our right to New Zealand is founded on the Treaty of Waitangi is simply an untruth, which a mere reference to dates and formal documents will correct. The first signatures of the Treaty were got some time in February, 1840, but none had been got anywhere except in about one-half of the Northern island by the 21st of May, when Captain Hobson took final possession of the whole island in virtue of this partial cession. No human being had ever pretended that the chiefs who signed were in any way the representatives of those who did not sign, or had any power to bind them by their acts; and therefore a cession by the former could give no right over the latter. To say that the Treaty gave us right to more than half even of one island is, therefore, palpably inconsistent with fact. But with regard to the Middle and Southern islands, there is not a pretence of taking possession of them under the Treaty. Only two chiefs in those islands ever signed the Treaty, and none had signed it when Captain Hobson asserted Her Majesty's sovereignty over them, in a different proclamation from that by which he assumed possession of the Northern island in virtue of the cession. In fact, as Sir George Gipps has stated, the Crown took possession of the Southern and Middle islands in virtue of discovery. When Lord Stanley alleged the Treaty of Waitangi as his plea for not giving us our land, we have always replied that that Treaty did not in fact apply to that part to which our claims in the Northern island were limited; that no one had ever pretended that it had any force in the Middle island; and that therefore the Treaty could not prevent his fulfilling his engagements. To this argument we never could get any answer. But, in truth, it is not as interfering with the Company's claims that I object to the Treaty of Waitangi. Its provisions have, I know, been quoted against us; but I think I shall be able to show that if the Treaty had been rationally, fairly, and consistently interpreted, it would not, in the slightest degree, have interfered with us; and I should be as loth as Lord Stanley can possibly be, to fail in performing what we had really promised the natives. The Second Article of the Treaty of Waitangi— Confirms and guarantees to the chiefs and tribes of New Zealand, and to the respective families and individuals thereof, the full, exclusive, and undisturbed possession of their lands and estates, forests, fisheries, and other properties, which they may collectively or individually possess," &c. This is the common provision, on taking possession of any country, for guaranteeing to the inhabitants the peaceable enjoyment of their property. The question arises, What is that property so guaranteed? It is not rights of sovereignty; it is private property. We had, then, to look to the state of New Zealand. We found it inhabited by a race certainly in the condition of what we always call savages. Nothing is more clear than that individuals never possessed property in the soil. The chief allotted to each member of his tribe the portion which he deemed it right for him to have to cultivate; but the individual had no right in the spot after his crop was out of ground, much less could he alienate it. Even the tribe had no idea of the peaceful alienation of land, until it was suggested to them by Europeans. It is true the chiefs said, as our opponents argue, the country is ours from the coast to the mountain, from this headland to that, from this river to the other. In this way, the whole of New Zealand, as the missionaries tell us, was claimed by one tribe or another. Mr. Dandeson Coates gives as a proof of this, that a missionary was told by a native that when Dr. Dieffenbach wanted to ascend the snowy volcano of Tongariro, he was prohibited by a taboo having been laid on it; and it is a pretty sample of the way in which the public is gulled, that he adds, on the same authority, that the natives said that Dr. Dieffenbach had offered money to go up; that they refused his gold, but would have permitted him to gratify his curiosity had he offered them Bibles. Now Dr. Dieffenbach had published his account of the matter in his "Travels," at least two years before the date of Mr. Coates's pamphlet. He says nothing of this fine story of the Bibles; but simply tells us that the natives would have let him go up for four sovereigns, but as he had not the gold with him, would not take goods of the value. He says the reason of the refusal was, that the chief kept up a tradition that this mountain was the backbone of his ancestor; and had therefore tabooed it from human foot. Why is this a claim of property? It is a superstitious consecration of a sacred spot. And all these alleged claims of the chiefs are not of property which the Treaty guaranteed, but of sovereignty, which the Treaty did not guarantee. What, then, were the rights of property which the Treaty guaranteed? Construe the Treaty by the rules of our law, fertile in precedents on the subject, and we find that that law recognises occupancy as the sole property which savages could possess. But we are not in want of a formal expression of the intentions of the Government which had accepted the Treaty of Waitangi, and formed New Zealand into a Colony. Look not, as Lord Stanley directed the New Zealand Company to do, to certain vague expressions, in which Lord Normanby had loosely intimated his future intentions, but to the interpretation which Lord John Russell put on the stipulations of the Treaty when he had it before him, and was acting on it, in documents of more than usual formality and precision. In the Charter erecting New Zealand into a Colony, and in the instructions given under the Sign Manual to its first Governor, we find the formal exposition of what was to be regarded as the property of the natives; and this was in exact conformity with the general principle of our law. After giving the Governor a power to grant the waste lands of the Crown, the Charter goes on to say— Provided always that nothing in these our letters patent contained shall affect, or be construed to affect, the rights of any aboriginal natives of the said Colony of New Zealand to the actual occupation or enjoyment, in their own persons, or in the persons of their descendants, of any lands in the said Colony now actually occupied or enjoyed by such natives. This is the provision for the native rights guaranteed by the Treaty; and these rights are limited to "actual occupation or enjoyment," which, as enjoyment is an even narrower word than occupation, and is synonymous with use, shows that Lord John Russell limited the rights guaranteed by the Treaty to the lands occupied by the natives. The same words are repeated in the formal instructions. From all this evidence, there can be no doubt that Lord John Russell, at the time, interpreted the Treaty of Waitangi as leaving the Crown a right to all land not occupied by the natives. With their occupations nobody ever wished to interfere; and with regard to all the rest of the land, am I not justified in regarding the Treaty of Waitangi as not being, in the slightest degree, inconsistent with the common-law right of the Crown to the waste lands of the Colony? But I am not going to press against the just rights and welfare of the natives of New Zealand the rules of our law, and the meaning attached by us to the Treaty, coincident as they are with those which great moralists and writers on international law have laid down as applicable to our dealings with savages. Was it for the real well-understood interest of the natives to put them in possession of a property which they had not before—to place this large extent of land at their disposal? Why, suppose the effect to be, that at first, they were to get, in one or two cases, large prices for some land. I say, that every such large price given to the savage, to be spent in the gratification of his passions, is so much poison administered to him. But the evil would not stop there. The speculators would soon find that such bargains did not answer, and the sales would cease. The settlers would find the rights of the natives interfere with the one great necessity of their existence, namely, the extension of their cultivation; they would learn to regard them with hatred; and you would produce a feeling on the part of the stronger race, for the existence of which no money could compensate the weaker. The white people would become unscrupulous in their mode of acquiring land; as they would be less eager to buy than the savage to sell, they would easily beat down the price; they would tempt him by the means of instant gratification; rum and gunpowder would become the direct instruments of exchange; and, as the extermination of the native would be the interest of the settler, every art of superior intelligence would be directed to that horrible end. I am not representing human nature in too black colours, as the experience of America too well proves, when I assert this to be the certain result of calling such motives into action by such a policy. Investing the savage with a property in land, is merely giving him that which, in truth, is a lure for the despoiler. It is as if you should set a value on his skin, to tempt the white man to murder him for its acquisition. Compare this with our scheme of native reserves, and tell me which was conceived in the wisest spirit of kindness to the native—the plan which assured him for ever a property ten times as large as he had ever occupied, with a value given to it by the labour of Europeans, and a peaceful amalgamation with these Europeans—or that which, by nominally investing him with the brief possession of an useless property, brought him into fatal collision with the race which must be the master of New Zealand? I say the latter was the device of bad friends—false friends, I think, would not be too harsh to say, as applied to the Church missionaries, to whose practices of land-sharking it was necessary that the native should be put into a position in which he might dispose of his land to his advisers. The erroneous interpretation was, however, given to the Treaty. Every claim set up by the natives throughout the island was admitted, till they were, in fact, acknowledged to be the proprietors of almost the whole soil. I find, that in the address, of which I spoke before, the Legislative Council states, that inquiry had shown that the Crown could not, at the outside, claim more than 1,700,000 of the 60,000,000 acres of available land in New Zealand; and that the other 58,000,000 of acres were the private property of 100,000 natives, who had never cultivated 100,000 acres. The Crown, being under engagements as to about 1,500,000 acres, has, in fact, about 200,000 for its whole demesne. All the rest is to be the property of the natives; and, in their hands, is to be the prize of land-sharks, and the cause of their own ruin. There was one safeguard against the fatal evils which I have described. By the Treaty of Waitangi, the natives conceded to Her Majesty the pre-emptive right over all their lands. At the foundation of the Colony, it had been most peremptorily forbidden to Europeans to purchase from the natives; and the Crown had asserted its undoubted right that the native should sell to none but itself. This, at least, secured the Crown the disposal of the lands of the Colony among the settlers; and it guarded against the mischief of which I have spoken as certain to result from any direct dealing for land between the native and the white man. Accordingly, those whose interest it was to revive the land-sharking, set on the natives to complain of this Article in the Treaty, which was the one especially beneficial to them; and so the latter began to repudiate the Treaty. The Government bought some land from a tribe at Mongonui; another chief said the land was his, and attacked the settlers. The upshot was a battle between the two tribes, in which fifty were killed. Instead of conciliating the natives, this unhappy attempt to make them proprietors of the whole soil produced nothing but dissension among themselves, and dissatisfaction with the Government. Mr. Busby, in a recent letter to Lord Stanley, of January, 1845, attributes all the distrust and all the resistance of the natives to this cause. This led to an act which entirely subverted the whole policy laid down by the Government since the foundation of the Colony. But I will give you Captain Fitzroy's own account of the circumstances which impelled him to the course which he took. On the 15th of April, 1844, he writes— Meanwhile the natives have been clamorous to sell their lands. They called on the Government to buy, or let others buy; and great discontent has been caused among them by the inability of the Government to do either. But while they called on the Government to buy from them, it was at a price wholly out of the question. They said, 'Let the Government give us as much as it receives from others, or let them buy from us. By the Treaty of Waitangi, we agreed to let the Queen have the first choice (the refusal) of our lands; but we never thought that we should be prevented from selling to others if the Queen would not buy. Is it just to us that you will neither buy at a fair price, nor let others buy, who will give us as large a price as they give to you, after you have bought from us for a trifle?' In this state of affairs, unable to buy land for two most cogent reasons—one, the exorbitant demands of the natives, and the other, having neither money nor credit; beset daily by the importunate demands of powerful tribes, seeing that no sales of land for money could be expected, under the existing circumstances already described (referring to the Company's lands, and those of the old settlers, to be brought into the market), I determined to take that step which I proposed in a letter to your Lordship, dated 16th May, 1843, on which a qualified opinion was given in your Lordship's answer, dated June 26th ultimo. That is, he determined to allow individuals, under certain regulations, to buy land direct from the natives on payment of 10s. an acre to the Crown, and issued a proclamation to that effect. This was approved by Lord Stanley, who had himself, two years before, carried through this House the Land Sales Act, whereby the Crown engaged to sell no land in the Australian Colonies for less than 1l. an acre. [Mr. Hope: The Act included New Zealand.] Yes, the Act expressly included New Zealand. I do not see how waving the pre-emptive right differs from selling lands. I think it would be difficult to make out that land sold by a native to an European does not, by the sale, vest in the Crown; and how its sale, on payment of 10s. an acre, can be anything but a violation of that Act. But it is clearly an infraction of the equity and policy of that Act—it is a clear fraud on those who had purchased land from the Crown at 1l., on a distinct Parliamentary guarantee that it would never sell for less. However, this did not satisfy the natives; and, in September, Captain Fitzroy issued another proclamation, whereby he lowered the payment to the Crown from 10s. to 1d. an acre. There is something about the Government approving the transaction with the native; but we may estimate as absolutely worthless the control of the Government over the transaction, of which the completion is desired by the native, whom you have authorized to drive what bargain he chooses. Here, then, is the result. After the assertion of the preemptive right in the Treaty of Waitangi—after annulling all purchases prior to the establishment of sovereignty, except to the extent of an acre for 5s.—after passing a Land Sales Act, fixing the price at a minimum of 1l.—and after selling land at that price, your Governor, with one stroke of his pen, allows any person to buy from the natives the whole soil of New Zealand for 1d. per acre. And I cannot blame the Governor. I shall hardly be suspected of undue favour to Captain Fitzroy; and I declare that his penny-an-acre proclamation seems to me to be the legitimate logical result of the interpretation which he and Lord Stanley put on the Treaty of Waitangi, and the proprietary rights of the natives. On that basis, I do not see how he could act otherwise. It is not him, but the Minister who directed that interpretation, that I blame for the mischief of this last step, which has deprived the Crown of all control over the disposal of land in New Zealand, cut off the resources of colonization, and left the unhappy native a prey to all the evils of land-sharking, in its most extravagant and unchecked extent. Lord Stanley, who, through his whole correspondence, seems never to have imagined that there was any object in fixing a price on Colonial lands, except to bring money into the Exchequer, has become sensible of the awkward position in which the Crown must be, in a Colony in which it has no land; and he suggests a device for getting land from the natives, which would be repugnant, I should think, to the morality of those whom I am addressing. He has taunted the New Zealand Company with a wish to set aside the obligations of the Treaty of Waitangi. Had they done so, it would have been very wrong; but it would not have been half so bad as parading a sense of those obligations, and, at the same time, endeavouring to chouse the other party out of the benefit of them. In the letter of August the 13th, in which he announces to Captain Fitzroy the Report of the Committee of last Session, and tells him not to mind its main recommendations, there is, however, one suggestion which he treats quite differently, and that is the suggestion of a tax of 2d. an acre on all land. The Committee had proposed that lands actually occupied and enjoyed by the natives should be exempted from this tax. Lord Stanley then goes on to say— It is, of course, intended that the tax should apply to all lands claimed as the property of native tribes, and not in actual cultivation; and I presume it is contemplated that non-payment of the tax shall be followed by confiscation of a portion of the lands equivalent to the amount of the tax unpaid. Now, the Committee clearly meant no such thing; for, as they had just before said, that all lands in New Zealand not granted, and not actually occupied or enjoyed by the natives, were Crown lands, they never could have intended anything so absurd as that the Crown should tax its own waste lands, and confiscate them for its own non-payment to itself. But we might fairly suppose that Lord Stanley, after three pages of assertion of the native rights to the whole soil of New Zealand, would have remarked that the Committee, who had limited those rights to actual occupation, might naturally think, that by exempting these occupations, they met the whole justice of the case; but that that single exemption would leave subject to tax and confiscation that infinitely greater extent of un-cleared land, which he and the Captain regarded as being just as much the property of the natives as the land which they occupied. We might have expected him to add, that however acknowledged the justice and policy of a tax on land, granted by the Crown on a well-understood liability thereto, no Government had ever ventured on the monstrosity of putting a tax on unoccupied land, which never had been granted by the Crown; and that to confiscate, on this pretext, the land which a Treaty had guaranteed to the original proprietors, would have all the injustice of Pennsylvanian repudiation, without its openness. But Lord Stanley says no such thing. He tells Captain Fitzroy, that he may have some difficulty in dealing with the tribes only partially subject to his authority, and that with all he will have to go gingerly to work. He adds— Though, if it can be peacefully effected, it would appear to suggest an easy mode of obtaining a large amount of disposable land. As easy as robbery always is to the stronger party! And this is the end of all Lord Stanley's respect for Treaties and native rights! He loudly declares that the whole land is the native's, and that he will protect him in it against all attempts to take it from him; and he tips his Governor the wink, and says slyly, "clap on a land tax, and you'll get the whole in a few years." Such, Sir, is the position into which the policy of the Government has brought the great question of the disposal of the lands, so vital to the future interests, not only of colonization, but still more of the native race. But the misgovernment of the Colony has been of too varied a kind to admit of charity attributing it to a mere error of judgment with respect to the interpretation of a Treaty, or a single question of proprietary rights. This is but one part of a policy systematically hostile to the colonization of New Zealand—for that, in truth, has been at the bottom of the whole mischief—the hostility felt by the Colonial Office to the colonization of New Zealand. The means employed have always been the setting up the interests of the natives as opposed to those of the Europeans. The Colonial Office originally endeavoured to prevent the occupation of New Zealand, by the fiction of treating it as an independent country, unavailable for European settlement. The force of circumstances, and especially the proceedings of our Company, forced them to make it a British Colony. But they did so against the grain; they conceived an implacable resentment against those who had had a share in producing this result; and, with the single exception of what was done here during my noble Friend's administration of the Department, every act and every word of themselves and their subordinates marks a determination to bring to a disastrous issue an experiment which had been forced on them, and to punish those who had had any share in inflicting that mortification on them. The system of the Colonial Office is one which invests their functionaries with a degree of arbitrary and irresponsible power unknown in any other Department of our Administration. Their pride was shocked by the existence of a voluntary association of gentlemen of rank and influence, who employed themselves in founding Colonies, and had an interest in regarding their interests; and any one in their place would have required some little magnanimity and wisdom to regard our Company as an ally and instrument rather than as a rival. We have been blamed by the Committee for forming our first settlements in defiance of the Government; and it has been said by others, that all subsequent difficulties have sprung out of this false step. I have already explained the causes, which, in a manner, forced this step on the Company. If there were any justice in the accusations of irregularity and temerity, which are sometimes thrown out against the Company, I would beg to remind you that we have it distinctly avowed by M. Guizot in the tribune of the French Chamber, that it was the circumstance of our expedition going exactly as early as it did, that alone prevented France from planting a Penal Settlement in New Zealand; and I think I might ask you to excuse, and even to approve, the happy temerity which saved New Zealand from the grasp of France, and prevented the possibility of its becoming the cause of a European war. Besides which, if there were any real culpability in our act, it was one of which the Government could have repaired all the consequences by a faithful fulfilment of the agreement which Lord John Russell afterwards made with us. By that agreement the Government, in fact, adopted our past acts, and bound itself to prevent any evil consequences which were likely to result from the irregularity of proceedings which it thus adopted and rewarded. Nothing, indeed, could have been conceived in a wiser and more generous spirit than the course which Lord John Russell adopted, on receiving the news that New Zealand had become a British Colony. He adopted instant measures to put an end to past disputes, and give a security to all the interests that had sprung into existence before the establishment of British authority in New Zealand. With this view he made the agreement of November, 1840, with the New Zealand Company, and incorporated it by Charter. We certainly hoped, that by this arrangement all past differences were for ever settled. Unluckily, however, the spirit which animated Lord John Russell, did not extend itself to Captain Hobson and his staff, who had gone out imbued with the notion, that the first duty of a Governor of New Zealand, was to thwart the New Zealand Company. Our settlers, on leaving England, to live in a country in which no law prevailed, had formed an engagement to live under a voluntarily constituted authority, of their own selection, from among themselves. Undoubtedly, it was unseemly to publish this in England; but when the settlers got out to New Zealand, I know nothing more natural and necessary, nothing more innocent, in the way of fiction, than their combining thus to supply the want of regular government, by enforcing English law under the nominal authority or Epuni and Warepori. Captain Hobson, whose own paramount idea appears, from his despatches, to have been a feverish anxiety to keep up his dignity—took great umbrage at this as an encroachment on the said dignity, declared it to be high treason, and sent his Colonial Secretary, with thirty soldiers, to suppress 1,500 insurgents, who received him, and submitted to his authority with all possible delight at once again being under British rule. This was the Governor's first introduction to the bulk of those placed under his authority. But it would have been well if this ridiculous animosity had gone no further than such pettish exhibitions. Unfortunately, Captain Hobson was entrusted with the important duty of determining where the seat of his Government should be; and the mode in which he exercised this power is the origin of much of the mischief that has occurred in New Zealand. He planted the seat of Government at the end of the island most distant from the Company's settlements, and the consequence has been a systematic hostility between the local Government and those settlements, and a practical denial to the latter of all the benefits of government. The Colonial Office has had a great many very wise authorities to prove that Auckland is the very best possible site for a capital. It seems to me that the primary error of the Government was the ever imagining that this was a matter in which they had any but a very limited discretion. If they had undertaken and discharged the duty of colonizing New Zealand — if Captain Hobson had gone out at the head of the great body of colonists, it would have been for him and his followers to determine where they would fix themselves. But, as Captain Hobson went out to govern people who had settled themselves before he arrived, it seems to me that his business was to plant the Government where it should be most convenient to them. The Government possessed no means of colonizing New Zealand. It had not, then, taken any emigrants there, and never did take more than 800, besides some convicts from Parkhurst. The only body likely to do anything for the colonization of New Zealand—the body which, in fact, has planted there 10,000 out of its present number of 14,000 white inhabitants, was the New Zealand Company, of which all the properly was on the two sides of Cook's Strait. To fix the future metropolis of these islands was not within the power of man. A hundred accidents may influence the ultimate determination of the spot; the first seat of a Colony has hardly ever been its capital in the end; and in the meantime it is the business of a Government to wait the result of events, and govern the people wherever it finds them. Captain Hobson should have established himself in the district to which population had directed itself, or was tending; and even if his judgment pointed out to him objections to the choice of the settlers, the only difference which this would have made to a wise man, would have been inclining him to be very cautious of taking any step that should commit him permanently to that spot. But apart from this consideration, it seems to me there was a reason which, if there had been no New Zealand Company, and no emigrants already planted in New Zealand, should have determined Captain Hobson to exercise whatever influence he had, to direct the stream of settlement to any quarter but that in which he fixed the seat of Government. The Governor was wanted for the colonists—not for the natives. The less he interfered with the latter at first, the further he kept himself and the European population apart from them for a while, the less the chance of jealousy and collision, and the greater the extent of unoccupied land. Desirable as amalgamation was, the approaches to it required to be gradually made. The bulk of the natives were about Auckland. The missionaries were already there, and might have been relied on for exercising all the influence which it was necessary for Englishmen to exercise. The true policy surely was to get the bulk of the settlers as far as possible away to the southward, where the natives are most scanty, and the largest amount of untouched land lies open to the settler. Captain Hobson planted his capital in the midst of the most populous and warlike tribes. It is just the part of New Zealand in which his interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi rendered it most difficult to get any considerable amount of land; and just that in which the authority of the Crown would most immediately be brought into collision with the lawless savage. The necessary evils of this selection of the seat of Government, at a distance from the great body of the people to be governed, were aggravated by a policy in the sale of lands which led to the wildest speculation. The Government sold their lands by auction—puffed them off by advertisements enhancing their prospective value, as the site of the metropolis of New Zealand; and by thus encouraging competition, succeeded in running up the price so high that they got 38,000l. altogether as the produce of the land-sales in the first year, and actually got 21,000l. for twenty-six acres of land. They got it once; but they exhausted the capital of the speculators, destroyed their land revenue at the very outset, and doomed Auckland to the beggary and stagnation in which it has ever since floundered on. But, in this scramble, interests were raised, which have fatally influenced the policy of the local Government towards the distant settlements. By a reprehensible favouritism, the whole body of Government officers were allowed to get possession of all the best spots in the new town, so much so that the part of the beach which fronted the best part of the harbour, received the nickname of Official Bay. Of course the whole body of officials had thenceforth the most direct interest in raising the value of their own property, by counteracting the progress of what they regarded as rival settlements. They acted on this feeling most unscrupulously. Poor Captain Hobson, who, I believe, was a man of honour, and had possessed some little ability, was enfeebled in body and mind by a paralytic stroke, and completely a tool in the hands of those who surrounded him. They got him to write home despatches, depreciating our settlements, which he had never seen, and bearing all the characteristics of emanating rather from a country shopkeeper elevating his own concern by running down his rival, than from a Governor exhibiting an equal regard for the well-being of all who had been placed under his charge. The practical results of this animosity were exhibited in denying the Company's settlements all the advantages of government, while they were made to contribute far the greater proportion of the taxation of the Colony. Two magistrates were appointed to our settlements, who, after doing all possible mischief, were obliged to leave for the most scandalous misconduct. The office of Chief Protector of Aborigines, requiring the utmost temper and judgment, and what we call the feelings and demeanour of a gentleman, was conferred on Mr. Clarke, the gunsmith catechist, who had the further qualification of having got 5,000 acres in the neighbourhood of Auckland. He appointed to the delicate office of sub-Protector at Wellington, his son, a raw lad of eighteen, whose only qualification was talking the native language, and whose meddling has been the cause of half the subsequent mischief. Captain Hobson got so involved in this hostility to the Company's settlements, that he was actually induced to employ the Government vessel, at the public expense, in crimping for Auckland the labourers whom the Company had been at great expense in sending out to Wellington. But the distance is the irremediable evil. There is no land communication; that by sea is long, rough, and uncertain. There is no regular trade between Auckland and Cook's Strait, and, when you want to go or send from one place to the other, you have to charter a vessel expressly for the purpose. It is really impossible to conceive an arrangement by which the great bulk of the colonists could be more thoroughly deprived of the protection of the Executive and the laws. Nevertheless, Sir, in spite of all this mismanagement, the Company's settlements went on, and new settlements were formed at New Plymouth and Nelson. And here, as not having been then a member of the Company, or in any way a party to the measures which I praise, I may, without any reserve, express my admiration for its system of colonization. By expending in emigration 15s. out of the 20s. or 30s. paid for every acre sold by it, it secured a large supply of labour to its settlements. By this means capitalists were induced to embark in the new Colony. The settlers were not left to chance or their own efforts for the construction of roads and public works. The Company, without being under any obligation of the kind, opened a large extent of roads into the interior, at Wellington and New Plymouth. At Nelson, it augmented the price of its land, in order to have a fund to devote to public works. It went further. It sought to provide, not merely the means of material comfort and progress to new settlements, but to give them, from their very origin, those institutions whereby the higher objects of civilized and Christian men are furthered. It devoted a portion of the purchase money to the foundation of educational institutions, and another to the endowment of the bishopric which had been established through the exertions of the founders of the Company. So impressed were the public with the value of such institutions, that we found them ready to embark larger sums for settlements in which these advantages were secured, than in those where we had undertaken to provide merely a supply of labour. In the same space of time we sold more acres for 30s. a piece at Nelson, than we had sold for 20s. at Wellington. And the result of our system was such a commencement of colonization as had not been seen for two centuries. We got men of property to invest it in New Zealand, with the intention, not of making a rapid fortune by speculation in land, but of making their home and that of their descendants in that distant country. We got men of the first rank and family to become settlers, and we thus contrived to join, with the simplicity and enterprise of a new society, the refinement of English manners, and the control of a public opinion congenial with our own. On one point of paramount importance in our dealings with the public, we have the most satisfactory evidence in our favour from the Government itself—I speak of our treatment of the emigrants who were carried out to New Zealand. To this you will find the most handsome and unequivocal testimony borne by the Land and Emigration Commissioners in their Reports, and by a gentleman in their department who was examined before the Committee. And here, too, let me notice a misapprehension respecting the Company, natural enough to those who, without knowing its history, suppose that, like other joint-stock companies, it must have been formed with a view to pecuniary profit. It was not the wish of those who originally associated together with the intention of carrying out their views of colonization in New Zealand, to make their enterprise in any way a source of profit to themselves. You will see by the Company's Petition, that not only did its founders contemplate no joint-stock speculation in their original plans, or in Mr. Francis Baring's Bill of 1838, but that their repugnance to such a speculation induced them to reject Lord Glenelg's offer of a Proprietary Charter; and that it was only after the failure of all attempts to effect the colonization of New Zealand through the agency of the Government, that they undertook to form settlements, and for that purpose to become a joint-stock company. That the enterprise has been anything but lucrative is well known. It may be said, that that was a result which the Company did not contemplate. But a few facts will show that it never contemplated the making large gains. The price at which we have sold our land is incompatible with any large gains. We have sold rather more than 140,000 acres at 20s. an acre, and somewhat less than 90,000 at 30s.; of the 20s. we have devoted more than 15s. to emigration, and of the 30s., 25s. to emigration and public purposes in the Colony; leaving, in all cases, only 5s. per acre to defray the expenses of our establishments, to replace our original expenditure, and to furnish a yearly dividend. We have been reproached with having made a dividend of 10 per cent. The simple truth about our dividends is, that for the first year the proprietors had no dividend. To make up for this, for the next year, or year and a half, the Directors declared (as the actual sales justified them in doing) a dividend of 10 per cent. Since then, there has never been a dividend of more than 5 per cent. You will see how perfectly insufficient this dividend must be, when I remind you that, as it resulted from the absolute alienation of our capital, the dividend would have to replace that capital of 300,000l. as well as to provide a yearly profit. I do not say that if the Company were now in possession of the property to which it is entitled, and allowed to continue its operations without hindrance, it might not make a good profit; but I say that to do so its operations would have to be conducted with more regard to its own gains, and less regard to the progress of colonization, than has hitherto been our system. I may add that the shares of the Company have never, even in its most flourishing days, been matter of speculation; and that its members have derived no profits from speculations in land. I may say of the Directors and Proprietors of this Company, that, having unwillingly been induced to assume a mercantile character, they have never made subordinate to any other object the great public objects for which they originally associated, but have always administered their property as a public trust, with no personal object except, at the outside, that of not being out of pocket by the duties which they had undertaken. A Company formed and acting in such a spirit as this, and producing such results as I have described, surely might have looked for the favour and aid of an honest Government, instead of official discouragement and opposition. Whatever the petty jealousies and interested animosities of a knot of vulgar officials in a Colony, such spirit should surely not have extended itself to a Gentleman entrusted with the destinies of our Colonial Empire. I grant that the New Zealand Company was not prudent in its first relations with Lord Stanley. Its remonstrances were rough, and its letters long and peremptory in tone. But a statesman would not have allowed his temper to be ruffled by such provocations: Lord Stanley might have safely considered his dignity as out of danger; and, at any rate, he cannot be excused for having allowed his personal piques to make him the antagonist of the meritorious policy of a public body. Putting the Company aside, however, the poor settlers in Cook's Strait had committed no offence. Some of them, men of the highest classes, had quitted fair prospects in England, hoping that, in a new country, a yet fairer future was open to their energies. Others were labourers, whom, humble as their position was, we must praise for the unusual spirit of enterprise which induced them to submit to that long voyage, and live in a strange country. Such men as these, thus combating, thus gallantly surmounting the opposition of the wilderness, thus bettering their own lot without trenching on any other man's comfort, would surely have excited the sympathy of any just and kindly man. I have been reading lately a book, by Mr. Jerningham Wakefield, one of the first settlers in Cook's Strait, giving a plain, unpretending, and therefore all the more interesting, narrative of the first events of these settlements. I know nothing more affecting than the accounts which he gives of the improvements which he saw, whenever, after an absence of a few months, he visited Wellington, or New Plymouth, or Nelson. Incidents of the pettiest character, and every-day familiarity in our lives, are the great epochs in his chronicle of a new society. Now he describes to you the landing of a body of emigrants, their first rude shifts, their cheerful and unselfish community in labour; then he describes the same spot with log-houses and incipient gardens; and then with pride he contemplates brick dwellings, gardens, and the flowers, fruits, vegetables, and harvests of England. Every step in the progress is duly chronicled. It would be impossible for me, by collecting these images together, to raise in your minds that impression which the book, without labouring to do so, creates by these incidental touches. It is an impression of great industry, great comfort, above all, of rapid, steady, secure progress. You feel that here, at least, all the first discomforts and perils of a Colony are got over. There is no appearence of external hostility. The savages are turned into labourers and domestic servants, attached to the various families of the colonists, and accustoming themselves to European habits and European comforts. It seems certain that the Colony will very soon be independent of external supplies of food; nay, that before long it will be able to purchase luxuries by exports of food, and wool, and oil, and flax, and timber. All that these people needed, or asked, was to continue unmolested in their honest toil. I think a wise ruler could have had no mixture of feeling in contemplating such a scene. He must have seen with pleasure the destitute, enabled by honest industry to raise the food which he wanted, and the untouched forest made subservient to the good of man. He would have said—"Go on, and God's blessing on your labours, and count on me for being ever ready and willing to aid and encourage you, and turn out of your path any harm that evil mischance may bring across it." I cannot doubt that if some good angel had taken Lord Stanley to the spot, and showed him this fair scene, or had thought, and inquiry brought the image of things as they were before his eyes, that, as he is not a bad man when he thinks, he would not have allowed himself to be led away by official jealousies and the animosities of interested subordinates; that he never would have wreaked on those poor colonists the pique which the uncourtly letters of the New Zealand Company had provoked; that he never would have marred this fair prospect by bringing the dull delays of an anomalous litigation to arrest this industry, and by stimulating the savage and the settler into fearful and needless collision. I now come to the particulars of the matters at issue between Lord Stanley and the New Zealand Company. When Lord John Russell received intelligence of Captain Hobson's having taken possession of New Zealand in Her Majesty's name, and organized its future Government as a British Colony, the first question which it was important to determine was the light in which previous purchases of land from the natives should be regarded. As you recognise in savages no right but that of occupancy, it would be absurd to acknowledge any other right as derived from them by Europeans. With respect to the primeval forest or waste, which the hand of man has never touched to improve or render available to man, in that you recognise no property in any man. And if the European who has preceded his laws—and attempted to enrich himself by introducing among the savages forms to which they attach no meaning—if he comes forward and claims large tracts, which he professes to have purchased from the savages, your answer is, that the savage could not transfer a property which he neither had nor conceived himself to have, and that you will not respect these unreal purchases. This utter repudiation of all purchases from savages was always the principle of our law, and was peremptorily and universally applied by Lord John Russell in the case of New Zealand. But he modified its rigours by the usual equity which is applied to all actual expenditure in reclaiming the land and promoting European settlement. This he treated as constituting a most meritorious consideration; and while he called upon the Company and all other purchasers to renounce their worthless native titles, he promised us a grant from the Crown, at the rate of an acre for every 5s. which we could show that we had expended, in the acquisition or improvement of the land, or in any of the acts of colonization which might lead to its ultimate improvement. He applied the same rule to all alike; he did not in the slightest degree favour the Company; the only difference which he made was in the machinery by which our rights were to be ascertained. The terms on which our grant was to be made to us are contained in the agreement of November, 1840, which has been the subject of long and angry controversy between the Company and Lord Stanley. After all that controversy, I feel the most perfect confidence that no rational and fair-minded man can take up that agreement and understand it as anything but a distinct engagement to make the Company a grant from the Crown, on its proving before an accountant in London the amount of its expenditure on the objects which I have just specified. In the first place, these objects are enumerated as objects on which the Company is understood to have expended money; and it is agreed that an estimate of such expenditure shall be made by Mr. Pennington here, and, if necessary, by another accountant to be named in the Colony. This is the only preliminary inquiry mentioned, and none but accountants are referred to for the purpose of carrying it into full effect. The agreement then goes on to say— When the amount of the above-mentioned expenditure shall have been ascertained, the Company shall be secured by a grant from the Crown to them, under the public seal of the Colony, of as many acres of land as shall be equal to four times the number of pounds sterling which they shall be found to have expended in the manner and for the purposes above mentioned. In return— The Company forego and disclaim all title, or pretence of title, to any lands purchased or acquired by them in New Zealand, other than the lands so to be granted to them as aforesaid. The only direct mention of the title by purchase from the natives is this absolute disclaimer of it. And where in one place it is necessary to allude to our purchases, as marking the locality within which we are to receive our grant, the agreement, as if for the very purpose of guarding against anything depending on the validity of our alleged purchases, instead of speaking of the lands which we have purchased, speaks of them as those to which we have laid claim. The title is disclaimed for the future, and mentioned only as matter of claim on our part; and the operative part of the agreement stipulates, without any conditions, that, the Company shall have a Crown grant of land, of which the amount is to depend on a previous inquiry into the single point of past expenditure. No one who reads the document, without a bias previously instilled into him, and with common intelligence, will, I feel perfectly confident, conceive its meaning to be other than this. Lord John Russell's conduct shows him to have so understood it. Mr. Pennington having made a first award in May, 1841, on the 28th of that month Mr. Vernon Smith writes to the Company that instructions had been sent to the Governor to make a grant of land to the extent awarded. It appears that on the 20th Lord John Russell had actually written to the Governor of New Zealand in the following terms:— The result of Mr. Pennington's investigation, you will perceive to be, that under such arrangement (that is, the agreement) the Company are entitled to receive 531,929 acres at present, and that they may hereafter be entitled to a further portion of between 4,000 and 5,000 acres. You will therefore make the necessary assignments of land to the agents of the Company, in pursuance of the terms of the agreement. Here is a plain agreement to make a grant of land on proving certain payments; the payments are proved, and the order is sent out to make the grants forthwith. Is it not monstrous afterwards to contend that, before the grant could be made, other preliminary conditions had to be complied with? We understood the agreement to be unconditional, and in the confidence of being able, as we were, to prove a sufficient amount of expenditure before Mr. Pennington, the Company entered into undertakings imposing heavy liabilities on themselves, and grave responsibilities towards the public. It trebled its capital, extending it by 200,000l. of fresh subscriptions; and the main inducement which it held out to the public, to take part in this operation, was the agreement which recognised its right to a large and valuable property. The Colonial Office required this augmentation of capital, and was cognizant of the means of its being procured. This gave a stimulus to our operations. The Company proceeded to dispose of a considerable amount of the lands awarded to it, and in the spring of 1841 offered for sale 150,000 acres of land in New Zealand for the formation of its second settlement of Nelson. The terms of sale were laid before the Colonial Office, and approved by them. In the course of the spring near 2,000 emigrants were sent out to settle on these lands, and sent out under the direct superintendence of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners. Now, what could be a more distinct adoption by that Office of the view that the agreement and Mr. Pennington's award perfected our title; a more distinct assurance to the public that they might safely act on that view? If, all this time, the Colonial Office knew that the agreement was dependent for its value on the fulfilment of another condition; that the Company was raising capital from new shareholders, on the strength of possessing a right to that to which, in fact it had only a precarious claim; and that it was actually selling a large extent of land which was not, and might never be its own—of what a culpable and extraordinary fraud were they guilty in allowing, in actually encouraging all these people to embark their money—in actually superintending the embarkation: of these poor emigrants, without a word of warning as to the delusion under which they were acting! We have no right to accuse them of any such misconduct: we have a right to assume these acts as proofs of their understanding the agreement in our sense; and to regard those acts as a public guarantee of the completeness of our contract. Nor was there anything in the intentions expressed by the Colonial Office, with respect to the investigation of titles in New Zealand, which could, in the slightest degree, apprize the Company that that investigation was to extend to the Company's lands, or that even in the case of others it was to partake in any degree of the character of an inquiry into the validity of the original titles acquired by the natives. Mr. Vernon Smith's letter of the 2nd December, 1840, which contained the first mention of the intention to appoint a Commissioner to investigate titles, especially confined his inquiries to lands under any other title than that of grants from the Crown, and, therefore, plainly exempted the Company's lands, because their claim was settled, and their title could only be under a grant promised on behalf of Her Majesty. With respect to all other claimants, it was absolutely necessary that some machinery should be established in New Zealand for making those inquiries which, with respect to the New Zealand Company, were to be made in London by Mr. Pennington. There must be some referee, who should ascertain the extent of each purchase, and the extent of expenditure on the objects which were to be reckoned as constituting a ground for a Crown grant. But there was nothing to prepare any one for the preposterous extravagance of a grave judicial inquiry into native titles to land, and the invalidating purchases peaceably effected for a consideration which was deemed satisfactory at the time, because the Commissioner might decide that the native vendor was not entitled to convey under the real property law of New Zealand. When we received the first intelligence of the Commissioner intending to make some inquiries about our lands, we attached so little importance to the matter, particularly as there did at the moment exist some hope of a better feeling on the part of the local Government, that we returned an answer empowering our agent to expend a small amount in quieting native claims. This I see the Colonial Office has used as evidence of our abandoning our rights; but I think the House will rather be inclined to regard it as a proof of our disposition to sacrifice something in order to avoid a controversy. When, in the autumn of 1842, we received news of Mr. Spain's first proceedings, we also heard what convinced us that the feelings of the local Government were as hostile as ever. We found that all the titles to all the lands in our settlements were required to be proved in the Commissioner's Court; that the natives, at the instigation of Mr. Clarke, were brought forward to repudiate the contracts they had made, or to set up adverse titles; and that the Commissioner appeared to make it a rule in all cases to believe the lowest native who repudiated the sale, in preference to Englishmen, or to chiefs who stood by their bargains. Making allowance for some exaggeration on the part of our informants, we could not but conclude that the investigation was entered on in no fair or friendly spirit; and that, even if ultimately we were to secure justice, it would be after a delay and litigation which would excite the most deplorable feelings, and throw back the progress of the settlements. We determined, therefore, at once to stand on our right in virtue of our agreement, and we accordingly wrote to Lord Stanley, pointing out that, by that agreement, our grant was not to be dependent on any decision of Mr. Spain's; describing in the clearest and strongest terms the mischief which was being done to the settlers by an inquiry which necessarily shook the title to every estate in our settlements, and paralysed the entire industry of the community; and requesting that he would put an end to this evil, by directing the Governor at once to fulfil Lord John Russell's instructions, and make us the grant which he had been directed to make eighteen months before. And I must say, that I think if Lord Stanley could for once have laid aside that unhappy spirit of pugnacity which has been throughout his life the bane of every public interest with which he has been brought into connexion—if he could have looked out rather for good to do than for an antagonist to crush—if he could have surveyed the interests of New Zealand with the spirit of a statesman, and the anxieties of true benevolence, there can be little doubt that he would have seen that, whatever were the strict legal rights of the case, this was no occasion to be splitting hairs and bandying subtleties, but that he would have complied with our request, for the one simple laudable object of saving a Colony from dissension and ruin. For no rational man can, I think, believe that the inquiry, as conducted in Mr. Spain's court, could possibly further one single end of substantial justice and good policy. Suppose that it had been really advisable to effect some further payments to the natives, of as much as 6,000l., which is the whole additional amount that has been got out of the Company — was it worth while, for this, to keep every title in our settlements and the cultivation of the land in abeyance for four years, and to stir up lasting animosity between the two races for this trumpery sum? After all, the settling these questions with a native tribe was a matter, not of law, but rather, if I may apply so fine-sounding a term to a negotiation with savages, of diplomacy; and should have been quietly settled, instead of resorting to the forms of judicial proceedings. I know not what was got by such forms, except infinite confusion and perjury. Put the savage into the witness box, and give him to understand that if he denies his bargain, or swears that he misunderstood it, he shall have a fresh lot of muskets and tobacco, or dollars to purchase them, and you may depend upon man in his natural state being such an unbounded liar, that there is no amount of falsehood at which he will stick. The evidence of the natives, with the exception of a chief or two, simply served to confuse a very plain transaction; and the very nature of the rights to be determined, rendered any satisfactory result impossible, even on the best evidence. One tribe was on the land, and occupation gave it a right. Another said it had formerly conquered the occupants, and only permitted them to reside on its land; which gave it a right to go on the land when it chose, and, therefore, to a compensation for that right. A third tribe would then start up, and say that it had, in former times, migrated voluntarily from the spot in question, had aright to return, and therefore must be paid. This was called the law of New Zealand. Why, what in truth were these, but circumstances proving the utter absence of all definite notions of right to the soil, and of the utter precariousness even of occupancy in that horrible state of barbarism? Yet you have called these "rights," and spun a New Zealand law of real property out of savage customs, which common sense and ordinary care for improving the morality of the native race should have made you wholly repudiate. Take, for instance, the claim of Rauperaha to the valley of Wairao, which led to the deplorable catastrophe of the massacre. This has been represented as resulting from an unprovoked aggression on the poor New Zealanders, who were peacefully occupying their hereditary lands; and great has been the indignation felt at the rapacity that could seek to strip the unoffending native of his little possession. The truth of the case is this. Rauperaha is a chief originally from the interior of the Northern island, who succeeded in getting a footing on the northern shore of Cook's Strait, and ultimately planted himself in a small island in the middle of that channel. Watching his opportunity, he stole over with his band to the opposite coast of the Middle Island, and after some fighting, succeeded in destroying man, woman, and child, of the tribe which he found at Wairao. He had never dwelt there, nor any where else in the Middle island: he and his people had no habitation there. Literally, the whole of the witnesses before the Committee agree in saying that the whole amount of native cultivation in this whole district of 60,000 acres did not exceed one potato field of one acre. Our agent had bought all Rauperaha's claims in this part of the island, and got his signature to the deed of sale. And yet all access to this fine valley was to be denied to a set of industrious Europeans seeking to cultivate it, until the Commissioners should have ascertained whether Rauperaha had been paid enough for having some years before murdered the ancient occupants, that being, in fact, the sole right he had to the land. Is it not horrible to think that the lives of gallant and excellent men, of as kind friends as the natives ever had, were sacrificed because our Government chose to claim a sanctity for such rights as these? Is it not melancholy to think, that if Lord Stanley had listened to our first remonstrances, and kept the agreement with us, this calamity never could have occurred? Unhappily, in reply to our request for the execution of Lord John Russell's order to Governor Hobson to make us a grant, Lord Stanley resorted to not the best arts of controversy, in order to make out that the agreement was based on a condition, that the grant to the New Zealand Company was to depend on its proving the validity of its purchases from the natives. I look upon this pitiable ground to have been long abandoned. The full force of our agreement is admitted: but it is alleged that it is impossible to fulfil it, because it is incompatible with the Treaty of Waitangi. If it were so—if the Government had no right to the land which it sold us, this is no answer to our claim that the Government shall get us the land somewhere. If it sold us land which did not belong to it, the loss must not fall on the innocent purchaser. But there is no force in the plea. I trust I have shown that a reasonable interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi is no wise incompatible with the very letter of the agreement; and from the evidence which I have adduced of Lord John Russell's interpretation of that Treaty, it is still more clear that, at the time of the agreement, the Company could have no reason for fancying that the Treaty would be interpreted in any sense that would necessarily incapacitate the Government from fulfilling its stipulations. We found it in vain, however, to urge these arguments to Lord Stanley. We did everything that reasonable complainants could do. We urged that this was a question involving nice points of law, and suggested that it should be referred to some legal tribunal for its opinion. Lord Stanley chose to understand this as a threat of going to law, and told us to go to law, well knowing, of course, that, without a grant, we could have no locus standi in any court. We explained our request to mean a simple reference to some tribunal, for the purpose of advising the Crown on the equity of the case; and this he refused. Finding that the interests of the colonists were dependent on any settlement of the immediate dispute, we then accepted a proposal which he had made of a grant, which should give us possession, leaving us in the position of holders under a primâ facie title to defend our possession against the adverse claims of natives or others. By this, which we have called the agreement of May, 1843, we waved an extreme right for the sake of peace; and we were content to abide by this arrangement, in full reliance on the assurance of the Government, that they would, in addition, give us every aid in effecting a peaceable and reasonable extinction of native claims. Talk as you like of the interpretation which the natives put on the Treaty of Waitangi, the obvious truth is, that the natives interpret that Treaty according to the suggestions which they receive from the protectors and other persons whom they suppose to be in the confidence of the Government. We felt sure that as soon as Mr. Clarke and his fellow labourers receive an intimation that it was really the intention of the Government to remove the obstacles to the fulfilment of the agreement, the natives would be speedily brought to reason. We were prepared to abide by that agreement, until, in February, 1844, we were for the first time made aware of the secret correspondence between Lord Stanley and Governor Fitzroy, which convinced us that, far from being able to rely on the sincere co-operation of the Government for the adjustment of our claims, we could not even hope that the strict letter of the new agreement would be acted on. Under that impression we brought the matter before the House; first referring to my noble Friend to know the interpretation of his own agreement, and his answer was to the effect that he regarded it as an absolute grant. We then proposed to refer the matter to a Committee, on which we placed the names of five opponents and ten supporters of the present Ministry. Of the last ten names some were objected to by the hon. Gentleman opposite, not, as would be clear, from my mentioning their names, from any doubt of the perfect honour of the Gentlemen; and we substituted the names of three others, whom the hon. Gentleman proposed, and who, in the Committee, voted pretty steadily on his side. Nevertheless, to such a Committee Lord Stanley referred the question; and the Resolutions adopted by that Committee were in every respect so satisfactory, that if the House consents to my present Motion I shall move those identical Resolutions for its adoption. I think I may fairly say that the names of the majority, who voted all the most important of those Resolutions, ought to have great weight on all points of public policy to which they have devoted their attention. On the Post Office question, the Government recently demanded an unhesitating adoption of the decision of a Committee. It is, no doubt, impossible for a man of honour, however unpleasant may be the collision into which he is brought, by refusing what others believe a just claim, to volunteer concession while his own judgment remains unaltered; but I think that, in every case in which a man has to decide on a matter in which he has been involved in personal controversy, he cannot be too ready to submit his judgment to that of calm and honourable men. Having done so, there can, I think, be no doubt that Lord Stanley ought to have acquiesced at once in the decision of those to whom he had himself referred a matter of dispute on a subject of individual right. But Lord Stanley, even on the question between himself and the Company, treats the decision of the Committee as worthless. Consistent to the last in obstinately setting down his own opinion against justice, after refusing for a long time to accept of any reference, he refuses to abide by the decision of those whom he has deliberately accepted as arbitrators in a question of personal right; and, to back him in this course, he relies on the strength of his Colleagues, and the force of party spirit in this House. The Select Committee has decided that we are entitled to the full benefit of our interpretation of the agreement with Lord John Russell. Lord Stanley distinctly refuses to concede this; and declares that he will do nothing but fulfil the agreement of May, 1843. Well, then, has he done that? The whole essence of that agreement was, that we were to have a conditional title to the land, that we should have a primâ facie title to it, and that all who disputed such title should regularly proceed against us, and not we against them. Were we right, or were we wrong, in treating the correspondence between Lord Stanley and Governor Fitzroy, which came to light in the beginning of last year, as in effect a nullification of that agreement? Let the event be the answer. Captain Fitzroy arrived in the Colony in December, 1843. To execute that agreement, by making us a conditional grant of the lands selected by our agents, was what he was bound to do, and bound to do forthwith, on ascertaining what the districts were of which we desired a grant. By the last advices, he had been thirteen months in the Colony without offering to do so. A wretched quibble has been raised about no demand having been made on him to make the conditional grant. Is there one word in the agreement that implies the necessity of any such fresh demand on the Government to do what it had promised to do? The Government was to grant us the lands selected by our agents. Our agent has, I suppose, at least a dozen times entreated Captain Fitzroy to grant the settlers the land at Wellington. He has, in compliance with the Governor's wish, lodged in his hands money for additional payments to the chiefs. Nevertheless, the Governor has refused to make any such grant; and, in answer to an application from the resident settlers, he made them the scandalous proposal of putting them in possession of the lands of absentee owners, 15s. of every 20s. of whose purchase-money had actually supplied the residents with the labourers whom they employed. He has made us no grant there. At New Plymouth the Commissioner had made us an award of 60,000 acres, after payment in addition to our original purchase-money had been made, at the requisition of Captain Hobson, to a second set of claimants. Captain Fitzroy refused to ratify this absolute award until we had paid a third set of claimants, whose interests he conceived to have been overlooked. At any rate, if he did not deem it right to make us an absolute grant of these 60,000 acres, it was his duty, under the agreement of May, 1843, to make us a conditional grant. He did not do so. At Nelson we got a distinct award, from the Commissioner, of the greater part of the land claimed by us. Not an acre has been granted. Thus, after repeated demands, Captain Fitzroy, for more than a year, has refused to give the slightest effect to the agreement of May, 1843; of which the essence was, that it should be fully executed immediately. What, then, has this agreement of May, 1843, been? A delusion, an injury to the New Zealand Company; a clear promise, publicly made, but so obscured by private comment, that the agent who had to carry it out has never once thought of giving it any effect whatever. Thus stands the matter between the Colonial Office and the Company. We made an agreement, by which we were to receive a large grant, of which the Minister, who was the other party to it, acknowledged the full effect; but another Minister had come into power, who repudiated our claim, though a claim which a Committee of this House decided ought to have put us three years before in possession of a vast amount of property. We then made a second agreement with the Minister who refused to execute the first, whereby we ought to have got possession of that property eighteen months ago. That Minister gives no more effect to his own agreement than to that which he has repudiated; and at the end of four and a half years from the first contract, after we have spent 300,000l. of our own capital, and 300,000l. more we have received from the public, we remain without an acre of the property guaranteed to us by the faith of the Crown. This is shameful usage of a Company, against the conduct of which the Government has never brought a charge, and the public spirit of which is evidenced by every act of its existence. You have arbitrarily deprived it of its property, and by that withholding of its rights, exhausted its means of continuing its laudable enterprise. Its losses have been the consequence of its confidence in your good faith. But however great our disappointment, however heavy the blow on some of our poorer shareholders more particularly, what is this compared to the injury you have inflicted on the emigrants, the greater part of whom went out under your superintendence, to settle on the land guaranteed to the Company by your faith, and who have since been deprived of access to those lands, and of all means of employment, by your refusal to abide by your repeated engagements? These poor people at least merited your sympathy, alike by the courage of their original enterprise, and by the patient heroism with which they have borne the privations to which they have been exposed. Whatever the demerits of the Company were, Lord Stanley might have imposed on the local Government some little cost, some little trouble, to put his countrymen in Cook's Strait in possession of the petty districts which were necessary for the purposes of their enterprise. Yet, in spite of numerous expressions of his regard for them, they have been the chief sufferers by his repudiation of the arrangements made by others, and his violation of his own. They have been denied access to the lands which they had bought and paid for. They have found themselves exposed to the aggressive intrusion of tribes who have come from a distance and occupied their lands, in the hopes of extorting payment, with the sanction of the Government. Their houses have been pulled down, their crops set on fire, and their lives menaced. In every case of such outrage to the Company's settlers, all redress, all protection, has been refused by the Government. Our settlers have been publicly informed, that wherever any native makes any claim to land they occupy, however preposterous, their duty is to acquiesce, and give it up. They have seen the natives, instigated by hostile suggestions, and encouraged by the Government, cherish a constantly deepening feeling of causeless resentment, and aggressive violence. They see all the menacing indications of a general outbreak on the part of savages, whose warlike excesses are peculiarly indiscriminate and revolting. Their attempts to put themselves in a state of defence have been peremptorily checked by the authorities, who suppressed their volunteer force, and offered them the inefficient protection of fifty soldiers for a district of 200 miles in length, and a population of 10,000. By stopping the New Zealand Company's operations, a useful expenditure on roads and public works has been arrested, and a vast number of labourers have been thrown out of employ. The last intelligence that we have received is, that Captain Fitzroy, impelled by the pecuniary necessities brought on his Government by his unparalleled financial mismanagement, has, in direct contradiction of the views which be promulgated before leaving this country, gone, with his usual violence, into what he calls the policy of concentrating settlements. Having refused to give the people of New Plymouth and Wellington a title to the lands which the Commissioner had awarded them, he has offered to give them land in the neighbourhood of Auckland, where it was well known that he had none to give. On their refusal to accept these terms, he threatened the inhabitants of Wellington to remove them bodily to Auckland. [Mr. Hope: When did you receive this intelligence?] Oh, quite recently; much more recently than anything the Colonial Office has heard. You know we are always two months a-head of you with our intelligence. Well, will any one wonder that the result of these things has been to produce ruin and despair? From all our settlements we hear of constant emigration to the Australian Colonies, and even to South America. And not a ship comes to this country but it brings home some labourer or emigrant of a higher class, who, having exhausted his resources in New Zealand, comes back to the precarious chance of regaining employment in the country where he had abandoned his connexions. And for these poor natives, the professed objects of your sympathy, what have you in effect done? I will not now comment on what is a shameful feature in the conduct of the Government, and that is the utter absence of any measures exhibiting a real care for the improvement of the race. All the money nominally spent on them has been, in fact, jobbed away in pernicious appointments of Protectors and Sub-Protectors. The native reserves in our settlements have been taken out of our hands, and kept unproductive; while those of the Government in its own settlements turn out to be non-existent. Nothing has been done by the Government for the education of the natives, nothing for their religious instruction. The New Zealand estimates exhibit a vote of just 90l. a year for these purposes. The policy of the Government towards them may be described in a few words. Afraid of their physical force, it has had no object in view, with reference to them, but that of pacifying them with the immediate concession of their demands, without a thought of the effect on their welfare. Nothing can be so absurd as the fear of their physical force, which the officers of the Government have thought it creditable to parade. Their internal dissensions, as Mr. Busby said long ago, would render it utterly impossible for us to have the united hostility of the various tribes to encounter. They possess a great quantity of fire-arms, but are miserably deficient in the use of them. From accounts which I have had from emigrants conversant with both races, I take it that a body of them would be able to make no head at all against a tenth of the number of North American Indians. On the other hand, they are to be very easily managed by a union of common firmness with kindness. In fact, no one ever found it difficult to get on with them except our Government. Scattered handfuls of whalers lived for years all along their coasts, among them, making use of them as servants, intermarrying with them, maintaining ascendancy over them, and holding their own in almost unbroken security. For five months before the establishment of British authority in New Zealand, our settlers at Wellington, 1,500 in number, lived quite peaceably with 400 savages in the midst of them, and their various tribes all around. Mr. Jerningham Wakefield mentions, in the book to which I referred before, that during the first years of the Wellington settlement, there was hardly a respectable family that had not a couple of Maori labourers attached to it. One or two very clever natives made fortunes in European occupations. Mr. Wakefield himself employed a large number in what he hoped to make for their benefit a very increasing flax trade. Your Government came, and set them quarrelling for an additional price for land; and has raised up an animosity, which a sense of injury will not speedily allow to subside in the stronger race. You encouraged their aggressive spirit by refusing to check the first petty outrages; and you have gone on until you have raised a feud of blood between the two races. You have filled the native with an overwhelming idea of his own strength; you have altered the kindly feelings of the settler into those of resentment and alarm. What could you gain to compensate for this? It is not more certain that the sun is in the heavens, than that this animosity must ultimately end in the degradation and extermination of the native race, all the experience of the world proving that the savage must ultimately perish when he enters into conflict with a race, in comparison with which he is as powerless as the child in the hands of the full-grown man. But you will try to make out that these unhappy consequences are the result of the Company's precipitation. Begin by answering one argument. If that be the case, how happens it that all these evils which afflict the Company's settlements are exhibited in tenfold force in the north of the island, where the Company has never shown itself, and where the Government has had everything its own way. You have there had the opportunity of disposing of land, and colonizing on your own system. You tried your auction system, as you thought, most successfully. The result is perfect beggary and want of enterprise. The seat of Government, with really a considerable Government expenditure, has contributed to the Property Tax only half what our settlement of Wellington has, and hardly more than our smallest settlement of New Plymouth. You have had the fullest scope there for trying your system of concession to the natives. Johnny Hackey, a petty native chief, after constantly robbing the people at Russell, and insulting the women, cut down the flagstaff. Captain Fitzroy, after waiting to get force enough to enforce submission, accepted a frivolous note of apology from Hackey; but for his offence, fined some other chiefs ten muskets, which he went through the farce of having laid at his feet, and immediately returning! Before he ventured to do this, however, he had rewarded Hackey's outrages by abolishing the customs' duties, which he thought gave him umbrage, and then, considering that it would not do to keep the other custom-houses when he had abolished that particular establishment, he abolished the custom duties altogether. Another marauding chief robs an Englishman of eight beasts. A missionary is allowed by the Government to negotiate with the robber, and gets back seven, leaving a black mail of one. The natives complain of the Crown preventing the settlers from buying direct from them; and its pre-emptive rights are given up to please them. Lord Stanley sends out instructions to the Governor to organize a militia; the Governor refuses obedience, because the sight of a militia might displease the natives. But, at last, Johnny Hackey and his brethren ride this willing horse too hard. Three chiefs commit outrageous robberies; and Johnny Hackey, who before found cutting down the flagstaff turn to such capital account, cuts it down twice in the sight of thirty unresisting soldiers, and gives the Government officer notice that in four months he will cut down the flagstaff at Auckland. These things even Captain Fitzroy could not stand. He has taken the warlike line, declared he will act with vigour, sent off to Sydney for 200 soldiers and great guns, and issued proclamations offering 50l. a piece for the heads of three chiefs, and 100l. for Hackey's. Hackey says this is treating him like a pig, and has retaliated by offering 1,000 acres of land for the Governor's head. All this sounds ludicrous, from the imbecility which it displays; but the commencement of a war of races is no joking matter. Such a war is always a barbarizing, demoralizing war of extermination. Confusion and alarm are spreading over the island. Our last intelligences apprize us that the settlers at Nelson, being determined not to have their throats cut and their property destroyed to please Captain Fitzroy, have, in spite of the prohibition of the paid magistrates, formed themselves into a volunteer force, under unpaid magistrates, and checked a turbulent chief. At Wellington, the inhabitants have formed themselves into a volunteer force, and commenced training under the sanction of the unpaid magistrates; and, despairing of anything good from Captain Fitzroy, have sent a memorial to Sir George Gipps, at Sydney, imploring his intervention and protection. Everything indicates the commencement of the war which we have so long predicted as the inevitable result of your incredible tampering with the natives. Depend upon it that if once begun, it will not end without our getting some news that will make you shudder at the mismanagement which you have allowed to reach such a pitch. After topics such as these, pecuniary questions seem almost trivial; and yet I cannot close my description of the present state of New Zealand without referring to the financial condition into which you have brought the Colony. Deserting the sound principles of our Constitution, which provided every English Colony, from its very foundation, with the representative institutions which are their birthright here, you have handed over New Zealand to the most unenlightened despotism of an incompetent Governor, and a Council of his own subordinates and nominees; and subjected the people to tax and corveé at their mercy. The consequence is that lavish expenditure for bad government, which forms the first subject of remonstrance in the Company's petition. In opposition to the custom of this and all other free countries, not a single office is unpaid; but every department is overstocked with a host of paid functionaries, who, after all, from the defects of the system, are incompetent for their work. Estimates are formed without reference to the means of the Colony. New Zealand ought, from the first, to have supported itself. Cook's Strait never produced altogether less than 12,000l. of revenue. For 12,000l. a year you might have governed these settlements perfectly. But the local Government could not carry on its functions for less than three times that amount. Each year a heavy burden of taxation has been imposed on the people. As even that would not suffice, New Zealand has been allowed to draw 7,500l. a year from the Imperial Treasury; and in addition, each year has added to the debts of the Colony. The consequence is, that New Zealand has, during five years of its colonial existence, cost Great Britain more than 60,000l.; besides which, it has a large debt. Captain Fitzroy, when he arrived there, found his predecessor's dishonoured bills in the market, and the creditors of Government clamorous for payment, which the Government had no means of furnishing. He then began that extraordinary series of financial vagaries which have excited the wonder of mankind. He provided for the immediate difficulty by those 2s. assignats, which his experience in Chili and Brazil had convinced him were the best currency in the world, and which he persists in holding forth as the grand panacea, the thing which alone will immortalize his name in connexion with New Zealand. He then endeavours to recruit his revenue by putting taxes on the building of good houses and the importation of stock into a new Colony. These he was forced to abandon in a few days; and then, to improve his finances, he established what he calls free trade, by abolishing all customs' duties, to please the savages, and clapped on an income tax. The result has answered every reasonable man's expectations of the results of such a measure in a Colony. He calculated on 8,000l., he will probably get less than 4,000l. a year, in exchange for customs' duties of the amount of at least 12,000l. The last news is, that he has turned his Spanish experience to fresh account, and actually put on a duty on every sale of property—the old Spanish alcabala, which I thought every human being had agreed to be the very worst tax ever devised by the wit of man. He has swept away the whole Emigration Fund, and given up all the lands which might have supplied a revenue for the purposes of colonization. He has, in fact, brought down his total revenue to about 7,000l. a year in place of 20,000l., which he found it; and he has an income of 7,000l., with an estimated expenditure of 36,000l. a year; leaving a balance of 29,000l. in the present year, which he coolly says that the Government at home must and will defray. Thus you have contrived with a Colony, which, with decent management, could have been thoroughly well governed, without any debt or any aid from the mother country, to load it with debt, after making it a burden to us; and then, to bring the confusion to a pitch, you have swept away almost the entire revenue of the Colony. The answer to all this is, that Captain Fitzroy has acted with an absurdity that no one could anticipate; that the Government have been grievously disappointed in him, and have done all they could do, by recalling him; as if that exonerated you from the responsibilities, the heavy, the awful responsibilities you have incurred by appointing him. You try to get off by saying that the New Zealand Company expressed a high opinion of him. Not so exactly; we had no share in the apppointment; any objection from us would certainly have made the Colonial Office more bent on making it: our taking your report of him, and trying to make the best of a bargain about which we had no option, and going beyond what we were justified in saying in his favour for the purpose of producing harmony between him and the settlers—all this is no excuse for your not ascertaining his real qualities, and blundering in a choice of which you had the undivided control, and shall bear the undivided blame. Lord Stanley is responsible for all Captain Fitzroy's extravagances. And in justice to Captain Fitzroy, to whom, though I think him the worst of governors, I would do nothing unfair, I must say I think the Colonial Office have no right to make him a scapegoat, because I see no ground for believing that they disapproved of his most signal errors; while we know that Lord Stanley gave his formal approval of the 10s. Proclamation, and some other of his worst acts. There certainly never was a Governor to whom Lord Stanley gave a more full and entire confidence, none with whose feelings and policy there seemed to be on his part a more entire congeniality; and he must not now get rid of responsibility for the instrument which he used as long as it was possible, and has laid aside only when it has been discredited by its application to his purposes. You could not even recall Captain Fitzroy without mingling some mischief even with so beneficial an act. For with warning of the great likelihood of such a step being forced on you, you had taken no steps to provide a new Governor, and have allowed six weeks to elapse between the news of his recall and the name of his successor reaching New Zealand. I have no objection to make against Captain Grey, who is said to be nominated to the post. He has the character of an able, zealous, and conscientious gentleman, and has acquired credit in the government of South Australia. At the same time I should better have liked, in the present difficult state of New Zealand, to see sent there from this country some one of higher station and greater weight; and so infinitely important is the choice of a Governor, that for this special occasion it would have been a wise economy to employ such a man as Sir Henry Pottinger, at a salary worth his acceptance, in setting this distracted community to rights. Here, Sir, ends my history of the grievances of New Zealand, and of the founders of the Colony. It is, in truth, the history of the war which the Colonial Office has carried on against the Colony of New Zealand. Is this an exaggerated expression? What enemy of the British name and race could — what civilized enemy would have brought such ruin on a British Colony? Yet this is the work of your Colonial Office, animated by unrelenting animosity to a colonization begun in opposition to its narrow views, and effecting its purpose by a Commissioner of Land Claims, a rival seat of Government, and a reckless tampering with the wild passions of a savage race. Thus has Lord Stanley contrived to mar the progress of the most promising Colony ever founded by this country; and it is conduct to be expected from one who never speaks on the subject of colonization without expressing hostility to it. This is the conduct which I call on the House of Commons to condemn. I cannot, of course, submit for your approval the actual measures which should restore prosperity to New Zealand; for, in the first place, suggestions for the reparation of all Lord Stanley's errors will be a laborious task, which I cannot now go through, or expect you to follow me in; and, because, moreover, the real reparation for the past must commence with an intimation from you that there must be a thorough change in the spirit by which New Zealand is governed. I do not, however, mean to avoid testing your opinion on some of the great points at issue. The Committee of last Session, under the auspices of my noble Friend the Member for Sunderland (Lord Howick), presented a Report indicating the most patient investigation and thorough mastery of the condition and recent history of New Zealand, and laying down the soundest views with respect to the treatment of the natives, the disposal of lands, and the questions individually concerning the New Zealand Company. The substance of those views is contained in the Resolutions which are appended to it. If my Motion for a Committee of the House succeeds, I shall, as I have given notice, propose to that Committee all those Resolutions, with the exception of the first, which condemns a particular act of the Company, and which, of course, it would be absurd and insincere in me to propose. I have thought it right to give these Resolutions in the exact words of the Committee; but I am sensible that altered circumstances would render it advisable to modify some of them before you could be expected to adopt them. Such modifications I should be ready to entertain. I feel, also, that if these Resolutions are adopted, they will be incomplete, unless accompanied by others—especially by one which shall indicate your opinion that New Zealand never can be secure of good government until its English settlers are put in possession of their birthright of representative self-government. But about particular Resolutions we need not now trouble ourselves. The question is, will you go into Committee? Will you inquire into the past? Will you begin the work of reparation, by condemning the mischief that has been done? In spite of all personal affections and party passions, I call on you, as just and conscientious men, to relieve yourselves from the responsibility of the grievous misdeeds that have been done in New Zealand. A great Colonial wrong is before you; and, indifferent as in general you naturally are to the fortunes of colonists of which you see nothing, now that such a matter is brought to your attention, show the Colonial Office that it is not wholly uncontrolled, and will not always be allowed to sport with the interests of our countrymen in the Colonies; and show the Colonies that there is a protective power which, when appealed to, will interfere to guard them. I will add no words to enforce the appeal, of which I have been obliged at this great length to explain the grounds; none even to regret my want of eloquence that might inflame you to action; for those whom the simple tale of wrong does not move, the tongue of angels would be powerless to persuade. The hon. and learned Member concluded by moving— That this House will resolve itself into a Committee, to consider the state of the Colony of New Zealand, and the case of the New Zealand Company.

Mr. Monckton Milnes

, in seconding the Motion, would say only a few words in addition to the admirable speech of the hon. Member. He rose to second the Motion, because it was his duty to stand by the Resolutions of that Committee which he had in some degree contributed to lay upon the Table; and he hoped that, by that Motion being seconded by a Member on that side of the House, he might induce hon. Gentlemen to consider it, as in some degree, divested of a party character. He thought, too, that as he was judging of his own political friends, he might be permitted to deal more indulgently, and to be more ready to make excuses than the hon. Gentleman opposite. He looked at this as a question of great national importance, not affecting so much the Minister or the particular Governor, as the progress and power of England throughout the world. He became a member of that Committee knowing little more of the subject than other Members of the House, and he did not go into it with any preconceived notions; he had never received an intimation from any friend in favour of the New Zealand Company, and the conclusion he had come to was, after the fullest and fairest consideration, the best judgment he could give. He had no prejudice in favour of the New Zealand Company, but he did feel the great importance of the question of colonization; and yet, when he saw that men practised in official life regarded the matter with total indifference, he almost doubted the truth of his own convictions. Amidst all the economical questions which had been lately brought before the House, he could not keep out of sight our surplus population. The Corn Laws and other matters of debate might be ultimately settled, and he had little dread for the country if we could dispose of our surplus population; but, being haunted with this fear, he regarded the progress of colonization as a matter of the most vital importance to the interests of this country. In looking at the colonization of New Zealand, it gave him great satisfaction to see that the old spirit of English colonization had been then and there awakened; and that it was advancing, not under the auspices of an Official Emigration Board, or under the direction or at the will of a powerful Minister, but impelled by the national energies of the English people. It was an enterprise in which all ranks of society were engaged, and all actuated by the same feeling. It was a colonization, to the advancement and maintenance of which, the young man gave his health, the rich man his wealth, and the labouring population their energies, leaving their homes and familiar associations in England, confiding in the wise superintendence under which it was to be conducted. During the period which he spent on the Continent for the last few years, he had invariably heard the New Zealand system of emigration spoken of with the greatest interest; and he would recommend hon. Members to read a valuable tract upon the subject written by Professor Ritter, one of the greatest geographers of the day, and the confidential friend of the King of Prussia. In that tract the emigration to New Zealand was described as a union of men of high station and wealth, without the assistance of the Government, animated with a desire to aid their fellow countrymen and improve the condition of the aborigines. The interest which was taken in this subject on the Continent was a proof of the importance which was attached to it; and he should say that he fully concurred in looking upon it as a question deserving of all the interest which it excited. He believed that the whole of those proceedings, which had been complained of in the history of New Zealand colonization, arose rather from a misunderstanding on the part of those whose duty it was thoroughly to comprehend the subject, than from any wilful desire on the part of the Colonial authorities to interfere unnecessarily; and he was the more strengthened in this idea by the fact, that the suspicions which appeared to be entertained of this colonization did not appear to be confined to any particular party, but were indicated by the conduct of Lord Glenelg, as well as by that of Lord Stanley. He was sure that his hon. Friend opposite (Mr. Buller) would agree with him in believing that there was not a man at either side of the House, who suspected that any Englishman could be guilty of a desire to perpetrate systematic cruelty and injustice upon the aborigines of New Zealand, or that even any of those engaged in colonization from this country, at the present day, would be disposed to adopt towards the savages in New Zealand such treatment as the Pilgrim Fathers, to whom the hon. Baronet near him (Sir Robert Inglis) was so much attached, would have entertained very little scruple in adopting. No one would rejoice more than he (Mr. Milnes), to see that spirit of humanity, which he believed existed in this country, exhibited in all our dealings with the aborigines. At the same time, he had no reason to believe that those who could form the best judgment, would allow any feelings of morbid sentiment so far to prevail, as to see with satisfaction the sacrifice of a large English population for the preservation of any tribe of natives. He must recall to the attention of the House the remarks made last year by the right hon. Baronet at the head of the Government with respect to the Ameers of Scinde; words of the soundest wisdom, and which could be misinterpreted only by folly and ignorance. That right hon. Gentleman then said, that there was, in the intercourse of the higher and lower civilization, an uncontrollable power which the lower civilization could not ultimately resist, and that, whatever policy was adopted, the weaker race must ultimately give way. If this were the case with respect to the intercourse between Europeans and the natives of Scinde, how much more would the remark apply to the intercourse between Europeans and the savages of New Zealand. It was in vain to look upon the natives of New Zealand in any other light than as savages; and in proof of that fact, he would refer hon. Members to the Report of the Committee of last year which inquired into the subject, from which it appeared that the New Zealanders had scarcely as yet abandoned the abominable habit of cannibalism. And now, what had just passed in New Zealand? Mr. Spain, the Commissioner, said (in a letter dated 12th April, 1844)— The fear of punishment which Rauperaha and Rangihaeata felt for some time after the Wairao (and which naturally greatly influenced their followers), has now ceased, and rendered those men more difficult of management than they were before that event. In the following letter (dated 2nd July, 1844,) there was a passage strongly corroborative of this view. He said— In the execution of my official duties, as Commissioner in the settlements of the New Zealand Company, in investigating the claims to land of that body, I have had occasion to decide in favour generally of the natives. This circumstance would fairly lead to the inference that this race at least would now place confidence in my decisions, and show a disposition to abide by and obey them; but it is with regret that I am compelled to admit that the fact is precisely the reverse of this. In cases where they have only sought for compensation, and never denied a partial sale, the moment the amount to be paid them was decided upon, they began to object to accept it, and to propose terms that could not be entertained. In fact, it appears to me that they have determined totally to disregard British law and authority, and that they have come to the conclusion that we are not strong enough to enforce the one, or maintain the other. This sentence was the only commentary it was necessary to make on the conduct which had been pursued, and which had at length driven the Governor to the very measure of force, to avoid which so many degrading concessions had been made. It was difficult to understand how any man, who was aware of the peculiarities of different nations, or who was acquainted with the history of the world, could suppose that, on the subject of the possession of land, all nations, civilized and savage, would entertain the same views. They all knew among different nations what different notions were held with respect to land. In illustration of this he need only refer to the Roman law and customs, and how the recent labours of German philologists had shown the agrarian law to have been totally misunderstood by the misapplication of modern analogies. The whole matter with respect to New Zealand could not be more ably stated than in the excellent work of young Mr. Wakefield. He said— Colonel Wakefield was obliged to buy of the natives not certain lands within certain boundaries, but the rights, claims, and interests of the contracting chieftains, whatever they might be, to any land whatever within certain boundaries. And when he went out to purchase, he took red blankets and red nightcaps, slate pencils, looking glasses, razors, pocket-knives, umbrellas, Jews' harps and sealing-wax. Now, did we in this country transact sales of land in this way? Can we imagine an action of law in which the purchase was thus transacted? Fancy his hon. Friend the Solicitor General disputing the value received in these articles; and yet such must be the procedure of the Court of Land Claims in New Zealand. Complaints had been made against the absentee proprietors; but in addition to their loss of property they had to endure their fears and anxieties for their friends and their families in New Zealand. He might mention one case of a gentleman coming from his own part of the world, and of his own station in society, who left Wakefield and went to New Zealand with all the appliances which became a man setting out on a great undertaking. He had built a good house, and had cultivated the ground. His house was burnt down, and his crops were destroyed; whilst he and his family were obliged to take refuge in a miserable outhouse, where they were in daily terror of their lives from the threats of the natives around them. This was only one instance among many; he hoped they would not be lost on the Government, and he implored hon. Gentlemen to forgive what they considered their past wrongs, and the Government to forget that they had ever been accused of those wrongs. He trusted they would now set to work to remove the present difficulties, and to do all they could to provide for the better condition and improvement of this Colony; and he must say, that whatever might be the dispositions of the persons appointed to the administration of affairs in the Colonies, there would be danger of failing in obtaining improvement if the whole administration of the Colony emanated from authorities at home: no matter how judicious the person might be who should be sent as Governor to the Colony. He did not refer to the ability of those whose duty it might be to send out instructions for the government of a Colony; but he adverted to the distance of the Colony from the mother country, and to all the difficulties which must necessarily result from it; and he would here beg to recall to the recollection of hon. Gentlemen Mr. Burke's speech on the government of America. He could not help feeling that England had always been more successful in those establishments which were carried out by the exertion—the voluntary exertion of skill and enterprise—rather than by the authority and strength of the Government; as, for example, when our Empire in the East was rapidly rising in extent and importance, our Colonies in America were being wrested from our possession. This should be a lesson to all Governments, to all successive Administrations, to trust more to the unfettered energy of the English people, and to believe that we might safely entrust the interests of a Colony to a Company which was under the direction of men whom we should each of us deem every way worthy to be entrusted with our private property, and the management of our private affairs. It was his deliberate opinion that it was perfectly safe to entrust such men with very considerable legislative powers. If all the authority to be exercised in New Zealand were to emanate from the Colonial Office, then he should say that that power must be exercised by agents; and he knew well that the appointment of Colonial agents was the most difficult description of appointment which the Colonial Office could be called upon to make. Persons were often appointed to such offices who had no experience in authority, and who often came into a description of society for which they were totally unfit, who had power over persons frequently of better education than themselves, such persons being in these cases obliged to live under as degrading a despotism as it was possible for Englishmen to submit to. And in a matter of this sort the House was not only bound to take into account the considerations to which he had just been adverting, but they were also bound to exclude from their view every matter of a small or petty kind; they should not allow themselves to be influenced by legal subtleties; they should generously confide in the honesty of their fellow countrymen—of men so worthy of public confidence as the Directors of the New Zealand Company — men on whose co-operation they might fully rely in establishing in the Southern Seas an Antarctic India.

Mr. G. W. Hope

was understood to say, that he felt no small embarrassment, not only because upon him had devolved the defence of one who, if he had a seat in that House, was so eminently qualified to defend himself, but because he was very deeply sensible of his own inability to undertake the advocacy of a cause in all respects so important, and the task of dealing with which was in every point of view so arduous. There had been many strong observations made upon the noble Lord at the head of the Colonial Department, and many aspersions were sought to be cast upon him; but he felt he should not be consulting the wishes of the House if he occupied their time in retorting those attacks upon their authors; on the contrary, he should rather seek to defend the noble Lord by going through facts and reasonings, for they constituted the true ground on which his vindication rested. Lord Stanley had been accused of being an enemy to colonization. He denied the charge. The noble Lord had always shown that he looked upon colonization as one of the great resources of the country; he never took it up inconsiderately as a remedy for pauperism; he never admitted that it was a remedy for all the evils under which the country laboured; but it was too much to assert that he was, therefore, an enemy to colonization. He believed, in fact, that his views were essentially the same as those of the hon. Member for Liskeard (Mr. C. Buller); but he would not occupy the time of the House on general questions, and would proceed at once to that immediately before them. When the present Colonial Secretary succeeded the Member for London (Lord John Russell), he found that discussions had then been going on between the New Zealand Company and the Department to the head of which he had just been appointed. He entered upon the continuance of those discussions with perfect calmness; and, so far from pressing views adverse to those of the Company, he had, by a contrary course, entitled himself to their thanks. Those thanks were conveyed in the following passage from a letter from Mr. Somes to Lord Stanley, dated 10th June, 1842, to be found in the Parliamentary Papers of that year:— The Directors cannot conclude this letter without offering to your Lordship their acknowledgments of the generous spirit in which you have done justice to the objects of the Company, and to the manner in which they have been hitherto pursued; as well as their cordial thanks for the tenor of the instructions which your Lordship proposes to issue to the Governor of New Zealand, in relation to the interests of the Company, and of the parties who have settled in that Colony in connexion with it. Whatever concession the noble Lord was able to make he had made, and far from insisting on, he relaxed the strict terms by which the Company had before been bound down. But when a demand was made which involved the interest of the natives of New Zealand, the noble Lord found that he was no longer dealing between two parties only, the Crown and the Company, but that the interests of that third party had also to be consulted. Not until then had the discussion between the noble Lord and the Company arisen. The course he then took was the only one he could have taken; for the Company made a demand which involved the rights of the inhabitants of New Zealand to the lands they held in that country. And the question was, whether the noble Lord who had preceded the present Colonial Secretary had not guaranteed those rights to the natives of New Zealand. The hon. and learned Member had alluded to the case of the chief Rauperaha, in order to prejudice the House, but he must give a denial to that charge. The observations commented upon with such severity by the hon. and learned Member, as to the imposition of a wild land tax, had not originated with Lord Stanley, but were merely the application of the principle advocated by the hon. Member himself in Canada, according to the proposals of the Select Committee, and they resulted from the acknowledgment of extensive proprietary titles in the natives. The hon. and learned Member for Liskeard had found it necessary for his argument to debase the character of the New Zealanders to as low a point as possible, and had stated that the bulk of them were cannibals. But the hon. and learned Member might have stated that although cannibalism had existed, it was fast disappearing; that 40,000 of the natives had become Christians; and that evidence had been given before the Committee which the hon. and learned Member had quoted, to show the intelligence and advance in civilization of many of the natives. The hon. and learned Gentleman stated that, in his opinion, the Caffres were far superior to the Aborigines. He thought that, in this comparison, the hon. Gentleman was greatly mistaken; for if they looked at the statements of some of the hon. Gentleman's most important witnesses, it seems that there were natives of New Zealand who owned vessels, who engaged in trade, who had adopted the habits and practices, and carried on the trades and professions of Europeans. Why, then, did the hon. and learned Gentleman describe them as being in such a state of debased civilization? Because it was necessary for his purpose to show that they could have no rights, or at least that those rights were not to be respected. He now came to that which was undoubtedly the main question—the effect of the Treaty of Waitangi, made under the direction of Lord Normanby, and confirmed by the noble Lord the Member for the city of London (Lord John Russell), the predecessor of Lord Stanley. In order to shake the weight of that Treaty, the hon. and learned Gentleman commenced, with those powers of keen sarcasm which he possessed, by throwing ridicule upon all the proceedings with reference to New Zealand. The hon. Gentleman declared that it was now time there should be an end of solemn grimace—that a stop should be put to tomfoolery; and he said, "The whole thing is a farce; you enacted that farce for your own benefit; it is not now convenient to carry it on, and you are at liberty to abandon it." [Mr. C. Buller had not said so.] The hon. Gentleman denied that that was the tenor of his argument; but he would at least admit, his argument was, that the New Zealanders were a people who were not competent to become parties to a Treaty, and that it should be considered as not made. The hon. and learned Member had stated that our right to New Zealand was founded on our discovery of the country; that no steps had been taken which could be considered to have invalidated that right; and that, if we meant to maintain the sovereignty of New Zealand, we must stand upon our original right of discovery. On referring to the proceedings which took place with reference to New Zealand in 1840, he found in the Parliamentary Papers of that year, page 68, a Memorandum (dated March, 1840), in which the recognition of New Zealand as an independent country was distinctly sworn to have been made, not only by the Executive Government, but by successive Acts of Parliament. The independence of New Zealand was recognised by a succession of Acts commencing in 1814; it was expressly recognised by King William IV.; and he found that a Bill introduced into that House with reference to New Zealand had been rejected, he believed with the consent of the noble Member for Sunderland (Lord Howick), on the ground that Parliament could not legislate for a territory not within the dominions of the Sovereign. He believed the objection to that measure was, that New Zealand was not a part of His Majesty's dominons, and the Bill was withdrawn. How could they, then, after so solemnly recognising the independence of New Zealand, turn round and deny that independence? In the instructions issued by Lord Normanby, at the time he was Colonial Secretary, New Zealand was treated as a perfectly independent country, which we could only obtain by cession; and directions were given to obtain such cession from the New Zealanders as from an independent people. This was the ground they had taken with reference to other countries, and it was the ground upon which alone, in common honesty and honour, they could stand. But, as if to perfect the evidence on this point, it appeared, according to Colonel Wakefield's Journal, that on his arrival in New Zealand with the Company's preliminary expedition, instead of hoisting the flag of Great Britain, he hoisted that of New Zealand. Much had been said as to the concessions made by the natives by the Treaty of Waitangi, and as to the construction which ought to be put upon that Treaty. Now, the provisions of that Treaty were twofold. In the first place, the natives agreed to cede the sovereignty of New Zealand to Her Majesty; and, secondly, Her Majesty undertook to guarantee to the chiefs and tribes of New Zealand, and their respective families, the full and undisturbed possession of their estates, lands, forests, fisheries, and other property which they might individually or collectively possess. It was now said, that they could not recognise in the natives the right to waste lands. But what were the facts? As early as 1836, there were 2,000 British settlers in New Zealand, who had obtained their lands entirely by purchase from the natives. So far, therefore, from the natives not having been in the habit of making sales of land, the number of settlers he had mentioned had established themselves by purchase. It appeared by the Papers before the House that from 750 to 1,000 claims were made by such settlers, extending to many thousand acres of land; and it was a very remarkable fact, that, out of that large number of claimants whose cases were inquired into by a properly constituted tribunal, the claims of only seven or eight were disputed. Yet the hon. and learned Member for Liskeard had asserted, that such was the state of titles to land in New Zealand that no safe titles could be obtained; and, that, in consequence of the practices and habits of the people, you could not recognise in them the claim to waste lands. He had seen scarcely any individual from New Zealand who did not admit that the natives well knew the boundaries of their respective districts, that they could point them out with the greatest precision, and that with proper precautions they might—as in the 750 cases he had mentioned—effect good and valid purchases, which were not likely to occasion any dispute. Such having been the condition of New Zealand when the late Government sent out a Consul to treat for the sovereignty, what was the course taken by the New Zealand Company in sending out their expedition? Did they proceed on the assumption that no land was to be acquired by purchase from the natives? On the contrary, their whole proceedings were founded on the assumption that the natives were competent to dispose of land; and the instructions they issued to their agent, Colonel Wakefield, as they appear in the Parliamentary Papers of 1840, were to acquire land by purchase. Colonel Wakefield actually did purchase land; and if any question had existed as to the right of the natives to dispose of their lands, the proceedings of Colonel Wakefield could leave no doubt in their minds on the subject. Colonel Wakefield asked the natives to sell him not small but large tracts of land; he proceeded upon the assumption that they had the power of disposing of waste lands, and in the purchase-deeds executed between him and the natives the boundaries of the lands are described, by reference to mountains and rivers: and the New Zealand Company, on the faith of his proceedings, sent out thousands of settlers before they obtained the sanction and concurrence of the Government. It could not be expected, under these circumstances, that the natives would submit to Colonel Wakefield's afterwards turning round upon them and saying, "The land was not yours to sell." Nor was theirs the only case of a company buying lands. There was a case of a French Company, who proceeded on precisely the same principle upon which the New Zealand Company originally acted, that the natives had a right to sell waste lands, but with a very different result; for they were able to prove that their purchases had been validly and properly conducted; those purchases would be confirmed, and no difficulty whatever had arisen out of the transaction. Why had not the New Zealand Company adopted a similar course? They now alleged that the natives had no power to sell tracts of waste land. He would not enter into the question as to the general rights of savages in land; but he would remind the House that when the Company went to New Zealand, a practice of purchase and sale of waste land had been established by long custom and by habits of intercourse with Europeans, and that that practice was confirmed by the proceedings of the Company. Such being the practice before the assumption of sovereignty, he would show the House, that if it were possible by distinct words to recognise the right now disputed, of the natives to dispose of waste land, that recognition was given in the instructions under which the Treaty was made. These were the words used in the instructions by Lord Normanby to Captain Hobson, dated 14th August, 1839. After stating that the Government were not insensible of the importance of New Zealand to British interests in Australia— On the other hand, the Ministers of the Crown have been restrained by still higher motives from engaging in such an enterprise. They have deferred to the advice of the Committee appointed by the House of Commons in the year 1836, to inquire into the state of the aborigines residing in the vicinity of our Colonial settlements, and have concurred with that Committee in thinking that the increase of national wealth and power, promised by the acquisition of New Zealand, would be a most inadequate compensation for the injury which must be inflicted on this kingdom itself, by embarking in a measure essentially unjust, and but too certainly fraught with calamity to a numerous and inoffensive people, whose title to the soil and to the sovereignty of New Zealand is indisputable, and has been solemnly recognised by the British Government. Those were not the instructions of his noble Friend Lord Stanley, but of the Marquess of Normanby. But, on the face of these instructions, it did not clearly appear what was intended by the rights of land. It might have been supposed that they referred only to territorial rights, which was the construction put upon them by the hon. and learned Member for Liskeard, and not to possessory rights. [Mr. C. Buller: To rights of sovereignty.] Now, in order to put that question to rest, the subject of possessory rights was distinctly alluded to. It was foreseen that it would be necessary to provide for the colonists, and the question presented itself by what means that land should be procured. The hon. and learned Member for Liskeard roundly and boldly said, "we should have taken the waste land, have told the aborigines that they had a right only to the land they occupied, and that we would take the rest;" but the hon. and learned Gentleman left out of consideration the engagement under which we assumed the sovereignty of the country. But what was the opinion of Lord Normanby on that head? He quoted from the same instructions:— Having by these methods obviated the dangers of the acquisition of large tracts of country by mere land-jobbers, it will be your duty to obtain, by fair and equal contracts with the natives, the cession to the Crown of such waste lands as may be progressively required for the occupation of settlers resorting to New Zealand. Then was the House to be told that we could now assume the whole, without purchase, and declare that the New Zealanders had no right to any waste land whatever? Such being the instructions under which Captain Hobson proceeded to treat, be came to the Treaty made under them; it guaranteed not only to tribes, but to individuals, their lands, forests, and fisheries; that Treaty was made on the 6th of February, 1840. This passage occurred in the statement by Captain Hobson of the previous discussions; objections had been made; one of the chiefs came forward in favour of the Treaty, but he made this stipulation—"You must not allow us to become slaves; you must preserve our customs, and never permit our lands to be wrested from us." It would be observed they had been in the habit of selling their waste lands; and how was it possible to say that in making this stipulation they looked only to some wretched spots which they had never been in the habit of parting with, or that we did otherwise than guarantee to them that upon which they set a value? But there was also the statement of almost every party concerned in the making of that Treaty. There was the statement of the Colonial Secretary and of the missionaries, though it was easy to throw imputations upon the missionaries in order to weaken their authority: the testimony of every one was unanimous on the question, and the natives relied fully on the faith of the Government being maintained. But it was said that the noble Member for London (Lord J. Russell) took a different view. Now, it fell to that noble Lord to approve the Treaty. Having before him the instructions upon which it was made, and Captain Hobson's statement that the stipulation was made by the natives to have their lands preserved to them, the noble Lord, in answer to the despatch transmitted to him by Sir George Gipps, wrote on the 17th July, 1840— Her Majesty's Government entirely approve of the measures which you adopted, and of the manner in which they were carried into effect by Captain Hobson. This would be found in the Parliamentary Papers for 1841, No. 311, p. 10. But it was said, the noble Lord did away with this ratification by issuing a Charter, limiting what the natives were to have to what was "occupied or enjoyed"—a phrase which, by mistake, was stated in the Report of the Committee as "occupied and enjoyed," which certainly had a less extended signification. Now, after the noble Lord had made a Treaty and agreement, could any construction put by him upon that Treaty alter the nature of it? Could the rights of the natives under that Treaty be cut down to the limit of the lands they occupied, by a Charter made here without their knowledge, and by the noble Lord alone? But the statement, if good for any thing, was this—that the noble Lord departed from the erroneous principles adopted by Lord Normanby; for though the hon. and learned Member wished to concentrate all the blame upon Lord Stanley, it was difficult even for him, with all his ingenuity, not to throw some blame upon Lord Normanby, in praising the noble Member for London for having at last adopted a sounder system, and cut from these natives the rights intended to be given them by Lord Normanby. But, besides that Charter in November, with the words "occupied or enjoyed," there were given by the noble Member for London precise and definite instructions to Captain Hobson; and did he there repudiate the views of Lord Normanby? He said, in a letter dated 28th January, 1841— Her Majesty, in the Royal Instructions under the Sign Manual, has distinctly established the general principle, that the territorial rights of the natives, as owners of the soil, must be recognised and respected; and that no purchases hereafter to be made from them shall be valid, unless such purchases be effected by the Governor of the Colony on Her Majesty's behalf;"— the very instructions given by Lord Normanby to acquire the waste lands by purchase. Nor is this all. In a subsequent part of the letter, the noble Member for London proceeded to direct the carrying out of those instructions, in all their fulness, on the very question of purchasing waste lands from the natives. And yet the House was to be told that he, with his greater light, departed from them, and saw that the waste lands belonged to the Crown, of right, and not to the natives. But the noble Lord, in the same despatch, recognised a still more definite title on the part of the natives than Lord Normanby had recognised; because he stated that— It would appear to be the custom or understanding of the natives, that the lands of each tribe are a species of common property, which can be alienated on behalf of the tribe at large only by the concurrent acts of its various chiefs. But this statement of so obscure a fact may be inaccurate; and it may possibly be the prevalent opinion amongst some of the tribes, that an individual has a valid title to a particular tract of it"—not a particular spot, but a particular tract;—"or, at least, has the power of disposing of it for his own benefit. Whatever may be the custom or prevailing notion amongst them regarding the right of property in land, and the right of alienation, a law should be enacted declaring the absolute invalidity of any conveyance, or contract, or will, for the disposal of land by any native chief or chiefs, or by any individual native, when the object of that contract, or conveyance, or will, is to transfer to any person of European birth or descent the land itself, except as thereinafter excepted. Now, such being the proceedings previous to and at the making of the Treaty, it was still said that the natives would have signed any other Treaty, giving up the sovereignty without any stipulation from the Crown, guaranteeing their right to their lands. In support of this, the Committee referred to particular evidence; but what was the true effect of that evidence? Not that the natives had no definite idea of what was meant by rights to land, but by cession of sovereignty. There was no question, and every inquiry confirmed the view, that they had a most distinct idea of what was the value of their land, and their right to it; and that they gave up the sovereignty on condition that their rights to the land were guaranteed to them by the honour of the Crown. With regard to the Middle Island, the hon. and learned Member treated everything done by the Government as a farce, and he need scarcely have taken the trouble to attempt to prove the Middle Island not affected by the Treaty; but the noble Lord would remember that, having received a proclamation stating the Middle Island to be ceded, he approved of it; and the very settlement in the south, which was occupied by the French, was obtained by cession from the native chiefs in that district. Such having been the original transactions, Lord Stanley, in assuming the seals of office, found discussions going on; and, as he had before stated, Lord Stanley had made every concession in his power until, in November 1842, new difficulties arose, and it was found that concessions could be carried no further, as this Treaty stood in the way. As to the incompatibility of the Treaty with the alleged agreement by the noble Member for London, or rather with Mr. Buller's construction of that agreement, there could be no doubt, after the line of argument adopted by the hon. and learned Member; but he (Mr. Hope) might, at the same time, take the written construction he had himself put upon it in a letter lately laid on the Table, dated 5th May, 1845:— It is impossible to reconcile the missionary system with that of the Company. In every respect they go on opposite principles. The avowed object of the missionaries has been to prevent colonization, to preserve the nationality of the New Zealanders, to keep them apart from European contact; the Treaty at Waitangi went on what is called the missionary principle; Lord John Russell went on what is called the colonizing principle in his agreement and other proceedings with the Company. The noble Lord (Lord Stanley) found, therefore, according to this view, two inconsistent systems; and the first proceeding of the Company was, to call upon him to consider the Treaty as a mere device, and at once to be abandoned. They stated in a letter of January 24th, 1843— We did not believe that even the Royal power of making Treaties could establish, in the eye of our courts, such a fiction as a native law of real property in New Zealand. We always have had very serious doubts whether the Treaty of Waitangi, made with naked savages by a Consul invested with no plenipotentiary powers, without ratification by the Crown, could be treated by lawyers as anything but a praiseworthy device for amusing and pacifying savages for the moment. But we thought it most probable, that whenever possession of New Zealand should be actually obtained by Her Majesty, the view hastily adopted by Lord Normanby would be found impracticable, and abandoned. The advocates of the Company who appeared before the New Zealand Committee, stated that there was but one course to be taken. One of them was asked—"Then you will blot out the rights of the natives?" The answer was, "Yes;" that their rights were so complicated, that it was so difficult to understand them. We found the rights there—we guaranteed them—we undertook to maintain them; and yet, when we found it inconvenient, they were to be blotted out. Was that doctrine to be maintained? The construction which had been put upon the Treaty of Waitangi had been objected to. He did not think that the objection was valid, believing, as he did, that the construction was correct; but he might at least observe, that Lord Stanley was not answerable for that construction. For by whom was that construction put? Why, by an officer appointed by the noble Lord the Member for London; and there was one gentleman, in particular, Mr. Spain, whom he believed to be an able officer, and well known to the noble Lord the Member for Tiverton (Lord Palmerston), by whom that construction was made. He had no interest in defending him, but he believed that that officer only felt that he was discharging his duty; and it was hard to charge the noble Lord the Secretary for the Colonies for the fault, if fault there were, of an officer with whom he had no connexion. It was, however, not an unimportant consideration that those instructions of the noble Lord the Member for London had not been treated as merely waste paper. They directed that the waste lands were to be acquired by purchase. That was done to a considerable extent by Captain Hobson. That was done by the Company themselves; and how could they now turn round and say that the whole was a mistake? Such being the state of matters when the Company called on Lord Stanley to find them land, or, as an alternative, to make compensation for an expenditure for which the Government and this country were not answerable, the noble Lord not unnaturally looked to the circumstances under which the agreement was made, and the terms of it; and instead of coming to the conclusion that the noble Lord the Member for London, in July, had made a Treaty, and in November had made an agreement wholly inconsistent with it, he (Lord Stanley) came to the very natural conclusion that the noble Lord, in November, had in view the Treaty which he had confirmed in July. And the House probably would be of the same opinion, if they considered the circumstances under which the Company applied to the noble Lord the Member for London. It appeared that they did not rely upon any Crown title of the lands they had acquired, but that they stated they had purchased them. As early as May, 1840, a statement appeared in the journals of this country, published by the Company, that large purchases had been effected—that Colonel Wakefield had bought extensive tracts of country; not only that, but it appeared, that before the Company applied to the noble Lord the Member for London, they had sent out two thousand settlers; and upon what title did they go? That of purchase from the natives only. At the time he had just referred to, before they had applied to the noble Lord, they had received from the public 107,000l. for land; and when they came to the noble Lord and stated, in this very agreement, that they had expended large sums of money in the purchase of land, was it to be presumed that that was a mis-statement, and that they had purchased nothing—the noble Lord, too, having declared that all land got from the natives was to be acquired by purchase? Was the noble Lord (Lord Stanley) to regard the whole of these purchases as mere waste paper, and that the whole responsibility of acquiring land by the Company was to fall upon him? The hon. and learned Member for Liskeard said that the noble Lord the Member for London had stated that he had granted to the Company an unconditional title. [Mr. C. Buller stated no such thing. He merely read a letter written by Lord John Russell to the Governor of the New Zealand Company, on the 29th of June, 1844.] Then he had misunderstood the hon. and learned Gentleman, and if it were only in that letter, then the noble Lord had answered in that proper mode in which an oracle should answer, by giving an answer that would bear a double construction. The noble Lord did not commit himself, for in that letter he said— I understood, in the first place, that the Company had made large purchases of land, fully equal to satisfy any claim they could make good under the agreement. [Mr. C. Buller: Read on.] Well, he would read on. This is not merely a suggestion of memory, but it is shown in my despatch to Governor Hobson, dated the 22nd of April, 1841. I there state, 'by the terms of the contract between the Company and Her Majesty's Government, enclosed in my despatch of the 10th of March, it was provided that, in respect of their antecedent expenditure for colonization, a certain extent of land should be conceded to them.' 'It was further agreed, that this land should be taken in that part of the Colony of New Zealand at which their settlement had been formed, and to which they had laid claim in virtue of contracts made before your arrival in the Colony.' This passage appears to me to indicate a belief on my part, that the contracts previously made by the Company would fully enable the Crown to satisfy its engagements. But the case might arise that these contracts were incomplete; that the claims of the Company to land were either insufficient or totally unfounded. Would it, in that case, have been my interpretation of the agreement, that the Crown was released from its promise to the Company? or ought the grant of land to be delayed until the Company shall have established their title before the Commissioner of Land Claims? The only answer I can give to such a question is, that I believed the extent of land which it would be in the power of the Crown to grant, to be far greater than would be enough to satisfy its engagements. I did not suppose that any claim could be set up by the natives to the millions of acres of land which are to be found in New Zealand, neither occupied nor cultivated, nor, in any fair sense, owned by any individual. It was impossible, from the terms of this letter, that it could be said the noble Lord looked to an unconditional grant to the Company. But that was not all: it appeared that the Company alleged they had laid out 60,000l. in the purchase of land. [Mr. C. Buller: Not all in land.] It might not have been all laid out in land; but the question was, whether the Company had any land. The Company claimed as against the public 60,000l. for purchases made by them of land; and yet they claimed, under the agreement with Lord John Russell, from the Government, compensation upon the ground that they had not made any such purchases. The only construction which could be put upon all this was, that their purchases were not satisfactory. He must contend, that according to the terms of the agreement with the Colonial Secretary (Lord John Russell), of November, 1840, the fact of the purchases by the Company was distinctly stated in it; the only description of the part of the island where the land was to be taken was by a reference to those purchases; and so far from the noble Lord the Member for London undertaking generally to find merely a certain quantity of land, the Company were to select particular spots. Instead of depending upon the noble Lord to find land for them, it was expressly stated in the agreement that they had then actually sold the land to others; and unless they had really, as they alleged, extinguished the title of the natives to a large extent of country, the surrender they professed by the agreement to make of a surplus to the Crown was merely illusory. They were to take their lands in particular localities; but those localities might be such as were occupied by the natives. And so it turned out; for the lands claimed were in the occupation of the natives. It was clear that the noble Lord considered that, by the general terms of the agreement, the Company were required to take possession of specific lands, alleged to have been purchased by themselves; and the demand which was now made, after having failed in proving the validity of their purchases, was wholly unjust. But it was said that the accountant (Mr. Pennington) had settled the question; but how could that gentleman settle the question between the natives and the Company? It was impossible to be maintained that the decision of a person appointed by the noble Lord (Lord John Russell) to investigate in London a mere pecuniary question between the Government and the Company, would be treated as that of an arbiter to decide the rights of natives to land, which it is impossible to ascertain, except by inquiry in New Zealand. Unless the noble Lord stated so himself, he should never believe that the noble Lord put such a construction upon the nomination of Mr. Pennington. He would refer to one further subject upon this point. The hon. and learned Member for Liskeard, being well aware of the statements made relative to the construction put upon the agreement by the Company's own agent, had endeavoured to weaken their force. But what was the view taken by Colonel Wakefield in his letter to Governor Hobson, dated 24th August, 1841. Colonel Wakefield said— It is presumed in the arrangement that the Company has acquired a valid title from the natives to a very large territory on both sides of Cook's Strait, to which they lay claim, and to which their settlements are to be confined. This was no Colonial Office construction. After stating what the condition of the grants were to be, Colonel Wakefield stated:— Provided always, that if any part of the said lands shall, upon due inquiry, be found not to have been validly purchased from them before the date of the alleged purchase by the New Zealand Company, full compensation shall be made to the natives. In answer to this letter, the Secretary of the Company replied,— 30th April, 1842. The Court entirely approves and commends your conduct of the important negotiations with the Government, to which your despatch of the 11th September relates. But that was not the only case in which the Company's own agents put a construction upon the agreement. The Agent, when the Commissioner proceeded to inquire into the validity of the purchases, made no objection to the construction thus put upon the agreement, but proceeded to examine the proofs of the purchase in each case. Colonel Wakefield continued, in a letter dated 30th May, 1842— I have not the smallest apprehension as to the result of the inquiry; nor do I think that Mr. Spain has any idea of the validity of the Company's titles being questionable. The impression prevails here that that gentleman's instructions from the Colonial Minister have been overruled, or much modified, by Governor Hobson, to meet the conditions of the Treaty of Waitangi. These conditions rendered it imperative on the Government, before making any grant of land, to acquire it by purchase from the natives; and it is to be presumed that the Governor, in charging Mr. Spain to investigate the Company's titles, intended only to fulfil that compact, although in doing so he should not follow the instructions of the Colonial Minister any more than he has done in maintaining three Commissioners, after the express appointment of a single one by the Home Government. He (Mr. G. W. Hope) thought that the reason of the thing, and the circumstances under which the contract was made and assented to, were alone sufficient to prove that the construction put upon it by Lord Stanley was inevitably right. [Lord Howick: Hear.] The noble Lord thought differently; but the noble Lord would excuse him if he thought otherwise. Lord Stanley was charged with a breach of faith, with fraud, and with every species of dereliction of duty, for maintaining a construction of this agreement, which construction, nevertheless, the hon. and learned Member for Liskeard must admit was, whether right or wrong, the very construction adopted by the Company's own Agent a year before this dispute arose. He would now address himself to the transactions of May, 1843, in which Lord Stanley was charged with fraud and deceit. It was affirmed by the hon. and learned Gentleman (Mr. C. Buller) that Lord Stanley had given a guarantee for the final possession of all the lands by the settlers. [Mr. C. Buller: No, no!] Most certainly the hon. and learned Gentleman did, and when he dissented for a moment by the exclamation of "No!" there was a loud shout, and the hon. and learned Gentleman could not help observing "that a little bit of Colonial Office practice had just peeped out," and now he said he never used those words. When the hon. and learned Gentleman had stated that his noble Friend had guaranteed the lands, he said "No;" and the hon. and learned Gentleman went on delighting himself that a little Colonial Office practice had been brought to light. But he would come to the substance of the proceeding. The hon. and learned Gentleman said that the Government undertook to grant the Company's settlers conditional and primâ facie titles; and then he alleged that a quibble had been raised about the demands. Now he (Mr. Hope) was not prepared to justify all that the Governor of New Zealand had done. He was not prepared to say that Captain Fitzroy had done all that was expected from him. But he (Mr. Hope) most certainly was of opinion that Captain Fizroy had done himself injustice in many instances by the deficiency of information which he sent to the Government and he was prepared to show that Captain Fizroy had done his best to put the Company's settlers in possession of their lands. An attack had been made on Captain Fitzroy on account of the case of Taranaki. That arose out of the reviving rights of slaves. By the influence of Christian missionaries, some of the people had been induced to release their slaves, and then arose the question to whom the land belonged: whether to the conquerors, or to the slaves, by the revival of their rights when made freemen. That was at least a very difficult question, and Captain Fitzroy stated that the case was so voluminous, that he had not been able to send home all the documents. Now, he would give Captain Fitzroy credit for good intentions, waiting till the whole statement was before him. He would now advert to Wellington and Nelson. By the statement made by the Company's own Agent, in the Seventeenth Report of the Company, it appeared that there was no trouble given by the natives in the neighbourhood of Wellington. All was quiet there. The same appeared to be the case as regarded Nelson. In the immediate neighbourhood of that place there was no real difficulty with the natives. In Taranaki, too, though the settlers there were not so numerous as at the other places, measures had been taken by Captain Fitzroy to put them in possession of land, and they were now in peaceable possession, by agreement with the natives, of such land as they required for occupation. Thus he had shown that, in three principal settlements, Captain Fitzroy had put the settlers in peaceable possession of their lands. With respect to the Valley of the Hutt, there had been a constant dispute as to the occupation, and every endeavour had been made by Captain Fitzroy to settle it. A compensation had been made to the natives and accepted, and Captain Fitzroy expected that they would retire; but by later accounts it appeared that they had refused to do so. Captain Fitzroy, so far from not exerting himself to put the settlers in possession of their lands, appeared, according to the Company's report, to have had recourse to military force for that purpose. Captain Fitzroy first negotiated; and negotiation failing, had recourse to force, but surely he could not be blamed for negotiating first before having recourse to force; but, if this were so, how could Captain Fitzroy be charged with taking no trouble on the subject? While the hon. and learned Member made it a charge against Captain Fitzroy that he had not granted conditional titles to the settlers, he would inform the hon. and learned Member that there were 400 deeds of grant in the office at Auckland, which they had not thought it worth their trouble to tale out. With regard to Lord Stanley, he denied that the charge of bad faith could be brought against that noble Lord. But the noble Lord was likewise charged with all the disasters which had occurred in the Colony, and more especially that lamentable occurrence which had taken place at Wairao. The blame, however, of those transactions rested with other parties, and not with the noble Lord. What was stated in the Resolution of the Committee? That the conduct of the New Zealand Company in sending out settlers to New Zealand, not only without the sanction, but in direct defiance of the authority of the Crown, was highly irregular and improper. That was the Resolution of the Committee, and he had no hesitation in saying that the difficulties in New Zealand were mainly to be attributed to the unauthorized and hasty proceedings of the New Zealand Company. For what was the cause of all the difficulties of the Colony? By the admission of all, disputes as to the occupation of land. But did not these disputes necessarily flow from the proceedings of the New Zealand Company? In May, 1839, they sent out an agent to acquire land. In the beginning of September of the same year, they sent out 846 settlers, the first purchase of land by the Company from the natives not being made till the end of September, 1839. This was shown in the Parliamentary Papers of 1840 relating to New Zealand, page 82. So that these 846 persons were sent out as settlers on the Company's land before the Company knew whether they should be able to purchase, and before the purchases of lands were made, on the faith of which they had been induced to go. What was the character of the people with whom they were to deal? In page 596 of the Report of the New Zealand Committee, the Company's officer, Colonel Wakefield, in his Journal, speaking of the very first purchase that he made, stated that he found 300 natives prepared to fight in defence of their land, never having made a sale before. He also described having seen 300 men fall in military order: and a battle, in which 700 fighting men had been engaged, as having recently taken place in the neighbourhood of his intended purchase. The hon. Gentleman then proceeded to state that the natives were totally void of the fear of death, and gave an instance of their contempt of pain, in the case of a native who had had his arm amputated by an English surgeon, and after the operation threw it up in the air, and cried out, "Well done, white man." Yet in the middle of such a people did the Company proceed to found a settlement. Nor was that all. Colonel Wakefield had been forced to make purchases of land in a hurried and incomplete manner: other witnesses spoke to this; but Mr. Spain's testimony was explicit, that Colonel Wakefield's purchases were incomplete, and that he did not acquire a proper title to the lands he alleged himself to have bought; but nothing could be stronger than Colonel Wakefield's own statement in his letter to the Company of April 15, 1843,— The Court is not ignorant of the duties which devolved upon me in the early days of the Company's existence; of the necessity of acquiring a territory on which to locate the emigrants destined to follow me from England with so little delay, without the sanction, if not in direct opposition to the wishes of the Government; of the difficulty of obtaining in a limited period a clear and indefeasible title to sufficient land to enable the Company to meet its engagements, in a country where such confusion as to proprietorship existed as I found here. The incomplete nature of his transactions was forced on him by the precipitate conduct of the Company in sending out settlers before proper preparations had been made for them; and when the hon. and learned Member for Liskeard charged upon the Colonial Office the deaths of the unfortunate persons who were lost at Wairoa, he was only shifting the blame from the shoulders of the Company, for it was to their precipitancy that all the differences with the natives were to be traced; and in proof of this, he would allude to the first contentions between the Colonial settlers and the natives, which arose from a change in the site of the town of Wellington. Originally it was fixed at a place called Petoni, of which the sale was admitted by the natives, but this was found not suited to the purpose. The site was then changed to the present one, of which the sale was denied by the natives from the very first, and thence had arisen the bad feeling on the subject. He further contended that the demand made by the Company to be put by the Crown in possession of what they claimed, was wholly unsupported by the Resolutions of the Committee, as they claimed not mere waste land, but land actually occupied and enjoyed by the natives; that they had sold land so occupied to European settlers before they even applied to the Government; and that the differences between them and Government had arisen from their having made a demand, which asserted that Government had guaranteed them possession of these lands, and maintained an obligation to have been contracted by Lord J. Russell to dispossess the natives of them. He now came to the important question of the present state of the Colony. The hon. and learned Member for Liskeard had represented the whole of that country as in the most perilous and critical condition. The hon. and learned Member spoke partly, he (Mr. G. W. Hope) believed, on the authority of Dr. Evans, who had lately returned from the Colony. Now, Dr. Evans left the Colony on the 7th of December last. He wished to make no imputation on the statement of Dr. Evans, which had appeared in the public prints; but Dr. Evans' impression, when he left the Colony, was that some great and general rising was apprehended. But he had seen a gentleman who had brought intelligence of a later date, from whom it appeared that up to the 19th of February no collision had occurred at Wellington. He (Mr. G. W. Hope) had also got information from Nelson up to the middle of January, and no apprehensions were then entertained there. The relations of the settlers with the natives of Auckland were in a satisfactory state. In the Bay of Islands, which was 130 miles from Auckland, disturbances had occurred, consisting partly of attacks on the Government, and partly of outrages on individuals. From the statement of the magistrate before whom the depositions relating to the transaction were taken, it appeared that of the two cases of outrages which had occurred, one was very slight, and the other had been very much exaggerated. He said, therefore, that events had not verified the apprehensions that were entertained in December. Though there was an uneasy feeling of insubordination among the natives, the feeling of apprehension was confined only to particular districts at the date of the departure of the latest information. With respect to the military force on the island, it might be satisfactory to the House to learn that, in addition to the troops that had been obtained by the Governor from New South Wales, a regiment, which was about to leave this country under orders for New South Wales, had received orders to sail for New Zealand; and he had had great pleasure in being able to assure various relatives of persons in New Zealand, who had made application at the Colonial Office, that such a force would be placed at the disposal of the Government of New Zealand as, in the opinion of Captain Fitzroy and other persons, was necessary to maintain a moral influence in the country. A vessel of war had already been stationed there. A misrepresentation had been made of what had fallen from him the other evening, which he was desirous to correct, namely, that in his answer to the hon. and gallant Member for Westminster (Captain Rous), he stated that the recall of Captain Fitzroy was in no way connected with the charges that had been made against him as Governor. The absurdity of the statement refuted itself. It was only as Governor that the Home Government knew him. What he stated was, that the recall of Captain Fitzroy was not connected with those charges which had been made against him, affecting his character as a man of honour and a gentleman. And the Government, thinking it necessary to make every allowance for the difficulty of his position, had supported him as long as they thought it consistent with their public duty to do so. He could not produce, at present, the despatches recalling Captain Fitzroy; but he would state generally what the grounds of his recall were: first, the omission on his part to send the necessary reports of his proceedings, without which it was impossible for the Government either to judge of the propriety of what he had done, or to justify the course he had taken; secondly, his direct disobedience of his instructions on the important questions of finance, land, and militia; thirdly, the want either of judgment or of firmness in his proceedings with regard to the natives: of judgment, if he sent for troops unnecessarily—of firmness, if, having sent for them properly, he did not use them; and lastly, the hasty and apparently inconsiderate course of his legislation—which, in addition to the evils of rapid change, was also liable to the serious objection that, from the distance of many of the settlements, the objections or remonstrances of the settlers could not even reach the seat of Government in the time which elapsed between the proposal of several important measures and their final enactment into laws. As regarded the claims to land of the New Zealand Company also, although he believed that on this as on other questions he had done himself injustice by his silence, he appeared not to have executed the instructions issued to him; and although he did not doubt that Captain Fitzroy believed that in doing, as he had shown he had done, all he could to obtain actual possession of land for the Company's settlers, he was substantially executing his orders—he admitted that he ought, if he had been requested to make primâ facie grants under Lord Stanley's instructions (of which, however, he, Mr. Hope, had no evidence), not to have refused to do so. But he could not conclude this part of the question without again bearing testimony to what he believed to be Captain Fitzroy's anxious desire to do his duty, and the courage with which he undertook the responsibility of what he considered essential to the performance of it. Having touched upon the causes of Captain Fitzroy's recall, he would proceed to the course which it was proposed to adopt in consequence. Her Majesty's Government considered that at the distance of the other side of the globe, when a year must intervene between each question and the answer to it, and that answer might find the whole state of circumstances altered, it was absurd to attempt to prescribe the details to be adopted—that the only course was to choose a person of known ability, discretion, and experience; to point out to him the general views of the Government; but to leave him a wide discretion as to the mode of carrying them into execution. With this view Government had selected Mr. Grey, now Governor of South Australia. He had been appointed by the noble Lord opposite five years ago, to execute a very similar service in South Australia; except, no doubt, that the difficulties of that Colony were not aggravated by the presence of a numerous, half civilized, and warlike race of natives. The task he had executed, by the admission of all, in a manner most creditable to himself. The instructions with which he would proceed, he could not at present be expected to produce to the House. He would, however, state generally that they contained a disapproval of many of Captain Fitzroy's proceedings, more especially as regarded finance and land, with an expression of a wish that he might be able to retrace his steps; though leaving him, under the circumstances of the great difficulty of in any case undoing such acts as had been done, more especially after the lapse of a year and a half, during which they had been in force, a full discretion whether to make the attempt or not; making, however, to the giving of these instructions the important addition of placing at Mr. Grey's disposal that amount of military and naval force which, according to the best opinions, would be sufficient to enforce the observance of, and ensure respect to whatever laws, on full consideration, he might determine to adopt. Such, he contended, was the only practical—the only rational course to pursue. He would contrast with it the course proposed by the hon. Member for Liskeard. Of the long string of Resolutions proposed, he believed he might assume that the first, second, and fifth, relative to the Treaty of Waitangi, being injudicious, and calling upon the House to assert a title to all waste lands, respecting only land in the actual occupation of the natives, were the most important; and from the whole tenor of the hon. Member for Liskeard's speech, it was clear that he wished the Treaty to be considered as a fiction, and all right of the natives, except as allowed by that Resolution, to be disregarded; and he professed to urge the adoption of these Resolutions simply, and as they stood, on the authority of the Select Committee which sat last year on New Zealand. But, was he justified in doing so? Although the Committee stated in these Resolutions their views of the abstract right of the Crown, did they advise their assertion? Far from it. Though the hon. Member adopted the Resolutions, he omitted the modifications by which the Committee, in their Report, accompanied and qualified them. He would read them to the House. In the fifth page of the Report it is said— The information which has been laid before us, shows that these stipulations, and the subsequent proceedings of the Governor, founded upon them, have firmly established in the minds of the natives, notions which they had recently been taught to entertain, of having a proprietary title of great value to land not actually occupied. And again, in page 9, after giving their general views, so far from pressing their immediate adoption, they state distinctly— That they are not prepared to recommend that the Governor should be peremptorily ordered to assert the rights of the Crown as they believe them to exist. Yet, in the face of this qualification, the hon. and learned Member relied upon the authority of the Committee for the seizure, by the Crown, of the whole waste lands of the Colony. But if the previous practice was an obstacle to the adoption of the views of the Committee a year ago, was it less so now? Did not every month which had passed add to its force? In addition, however, to what was contained in his Resolutions, the hon. and learned Member for Liskeard had spoken of the necessity of having a popular legislature. The hon. Member was much mistaken if he supposed that, as far as the Colonial Office was concerned, the leaving the Colony itself to settle its difficulties would not relieve that Office from a considerable amount of trouble. By the institution of a popular legislature, the Colonial Secretary would be freed from much responsibility with respect to many important matters. The great difficulty in the way of accomplishing such an object was, that they had there a population of only 15,000 British, whilst the native population amounted to 100,000. There was a difficulty in forming a legislature in which the natives would be fairly and fully represented, without British interests being endangered. It would certainly be absolutely necessary to carry on legislation with the greatest care. But to return to the Resolutions of the hon. and learned Member. If the hon. and learned Member wished the House to disregard the qualifications of the Committee, and the despatch of Lord Stanley of the 13th of August, 1844; why had the hon. Member allowed so many months to elapse without proposing what he had proposed that night? If he imagined the adopting the Resolutions would tend to benefit the natives, to bring about the pacification of the Colony, or promote its harmony, he should not feel it his duty to oppose them; but convinced as he was that it would be a fatal step to declare such rights over the land of New Zealand, as those which it was their main object to assert; that considering, by the admission of all, that this step would unite against us the otherwise discordant tribes of New Zealand; and, moreover, believing it to be a measure of which the inevitable result would be resistance and bloodshed, he for himself, and on behalf of Lord Stanley, protested against them. The first and most necessary course to take for the welfare of the island was to maintain inviolate the faith of this country to the natives; and however the hon. and learned Member might ridicule the provisions of the Treaty, he contended it ought to be solemnly maintained. It was by convincing the natives of the justice of the laws of this country that they could alone secure the settlement of New Zealand. It was by such measures alone that they could succeed in building up their dominion in that country. Their power would not then rise on the ruins of the aboriginal race; but they would combine them with themselves by links of fellow, ship, and at length they would break that spell which seemed, in all attempts at colonization, to the reproach of civilized man, to have made his advent the unerring forerunner, not of the civilization, but of the destruction of the savage.

Debate adjourned.

House adjourned at half-past twelve o'clock.