HL Deb 10 July 1845 vol 82 cc312-9
The Earl of Chichester

presented a petition from the Church Missionary Society of Africa and the East, respecting the rights of the natives to the full enjoyment of their lands, and praying that the same may be effectually secured to them. It stated, that there were 35,000 attendants at religious worship, 15,000 scholars, and 300 native teachers. The petitioners stated, that from the period of the cession of the land by the native princes, they did everything to promote harmony between the aborigines and the colonists: that they were deeply impressed with the necessity of having the land question speedily and finally settled. That the Queen, by the Treaty of Waitangi, guaranteed full and undisputed possession of their lands to the natives, and that, in the opinion of the petitioners, the Report of the Committee of the House of Commons, affecting the rights of the native princes, was contrary to the principles of justice, and to the express declaration of the Treaty of Waitangi. Their Lordships could understand the alarm felt by the Society, whose petition he had read, as well as the alarm of all those who took an interest in their happiness and welfare. The missionaries of the Society were alarmed at a course of policy being suggested, the pursuance of which would set aside the Treaty of Waitangi, which provided, that natives should not have lands taken away from them by virtue of the sovereignty over the island, ceded by them to the British Crown. Nothing, he thought, could be more clear, than the actual meaning of the Treaty; and he believed that the New Zealanders were sufficiently enlightened and educated, perfectly to understand the interpretation which common sense would put upon it. To act in any way in contravention to the Treaty, would be to pursue a course at once fraught with disaster to the natives and to the settlers in New Zealand. He wished to take the opportunity of making a statement to the House upon the part of the Church Missionary Society, because, among other charges made by the friends of the Company, was one which accused the missionaries in New Zealand of having acted in an improper manner; of having, in fact, impeded the progress of the Colony, and of having obtained—not by the most reputable means—a very large quantity of land. Now, the land in question was held under certain regulations made by the Missionary Society, which allowed a certain sum of money to the missionaries for every child above fifteen years of age; that money had been invested in the purchase of land, obtained, not for the private advantages of the missionaries, but for the public good. The regulations had been strictly acted upon in these purchases, and he possessed authentic information of the exact quantity of land so obtained. The Society had also purchased a certain portion of the land for the purposes of the mission, but the whole of this property had been placed at the disposal of the Crown. No missionary held more land than he was strictly entitled to hold under the regulations of the Society, and there was no instance of a missionary's claim having been disallowed by the Government Commissioner. In the cases in which a reduction had been made in the quantity of land possessed by missionaries, the reduction had been effected with the perfect consent of the holders. He would remind the House of the favourable testimony borne to the conduct of the missionaries of the Church Society, by all who had had an opportunity of witnessing it. New Zealand had been visited by many travellers—some of them in an official capacity; it had been recently visited by two bishops, and the conduct of the missionaries had also been watched by witnesses not likely to be partial to them—he meant the emissaries of a neighbouring, not a rival institution—the Wesleyan mission—the missionaries of the Church Society had been watched, and their conduct had been commented upon by all those witnesses to it, and he had never heard it asserted that they had been led away from their ministerial duties by any occupation connected with the possession of land. On the contrary, every report which he had seen on the state of New Zealand was most creditable to the missionaries, and proved them to be most worthy and disinterested men. One of the great objects he had in making these remarks was, if possible, to draw from Government some assurance that the alarm felt by the petitioners, from the cause to which he had alluded, was unfounded. He believed that the maintenance of that interpretation hitherto put upon the Treaty of Waitangi was of the greatest importance to our own reputation for good faith, and to the cause of the civilization and progress of New Zealand. So long as the missionaries had been unmolested by voluntary settlers, nothing could have been more satisfactory than the way in which the natives had conducted themselves, and nothing more rapid than the progress they had made in Christian knowledge. He hoped that the Government would feel the great importance of promoting that object, and would recollect that it could only be attained by maintaining the strictest good faith towards the natives themselves—by showing that we were alive to their bet interests, and that we had taken New Zealand under our protection, as much with a view to their benefit as our own.

Lord Stanley

Your Lordships will feel that it would be very inconvenient were I at all to enter at this time upon the general question connected with New Zealand. I have no intention of troubling you with a single word upon that subject; but the noble Earl has indicated a desire to hear the views of Her Majesty's Government as to that Treaty by which the sovereignty of New Zealand was ceded to the British Crown. I have no hesitation in giving the noble Earl the assurance which he seems to desire. At the same time, however, I should have thought—whatever may have been the suspicions—whatever may have been the blame cast upon the Government in the matter—that the course which they have pursued would have prevented its being imagined for a moment that they entertained an idea of avoiding, or in any way violating a Treaty by which they consider themselves to be bound. Almost the whole of the difficulty with which the Government has had to contend in New Zealand, has arisen out of the apparently conflicting engagements entered into towards the New Zealand Company on the one hand, and, under the Treaty of Waitangi, towards the natives on the other. Had we felt ourselves at liberty to depart from the strictest fulfilment of the terms of that Treaty, we should have met but little difficulty; and in proof of the fact, our embarrassments have arisen mainly from our feeling that, however desirable and important it is to promote the colonization of New Zealand, yet that object would be very dearly purchased were it to be obtained by the slightest reflection on the good faith of this country, or by any liability to the imputation that we wished to shrink from an engagement we entered into with the natives—an engagement which I think the natives perfectly understand, the full importance of which I think they are as deeply impressed with as we can be—and an engagement which we have always felt that the Government of this country were bound to adhere to in its fullest integrity. I assure your Lordships that we have strictly, in every instruction we have issued (and the Papers upon the Table prove the fact), insisted on the strict fulfilment of the spirit and the letter of the Treaty of Waitangi. Our instructions upon that point have been uniform. They were given to Captain Fitzroy, and whatever instructions may have been since despatched to his successor, they have in this respect remained unaltered. We have told him—our declarations to the effect have been reiterated—that while he should seek in every possible mode to promote the amicable settlement of the affairs of the New Zealand Company, that he should always consider it to be the paramount duty devolved upon him, specially, and scrupulously, and religiously to fulfil our solemn engagements with the natives of New Zealand.

Lord Monteagle

thought that it would be very satisfactory were the noble Lord to state more definitely what was the precise construction put by the Government upon the Treaty in question. He would wish to know whether he carried the principle so far as to assume that there was to remain to a semi-barbarous population such a right over the whole of the immense territory of New Zealand as would preclude the possibility of our exercising a right of government, except by the permission of the natives themselves. With respect to the general subject, he was far from adopting all the views of the New Zealand Committee. He knew the difficulties which the Colonial Office had to contend with in the cases of Colonies founded by unauthorized settlers. Most of the difficulties of New Zealand had arisen from that cause, and from the character of many of the original settlers in New Zealand, comprehending, as they did, some of the worst portion of the population of Australia and of this country. He repeated that he did not by any means fully adopt the Report of the New Zealand Committee; but still the opinion of that body was entitled to very considerable weight, when it was recollected that it had been appointed with the approval and concurrence of the Colonial Office. He did not want to go beyond the fact that the Report of the Committee had been generally adverse to the system pursued by the Colonial Office in the administration of New Zealand; and the members of the Committee so far had been amply supported by events which had occurred in the Colony itself. But he entirely protested against the doctrine that the finding fault, even by inference, with the management of New Zealand, was to suggest that there had been any bad faith or double dealing on the part of the Colonial Office. Any such charge was as much unsupported by proof as it was contradicted by the character of the noble Lord at the head of that branch of the public service. Still, however, a more melancholy instance of mismanagement than that displayed in the local government of New Zealand, never was exhibited in the colonial administration of any country; and he was convinced that until there should be a clear and distinct exposition, upon the part of Government, of the exact construction which it would be prepared to put upon the Treaty of Waitangi, that the state of confusion which now existed in New Zealand would continue. He wished to guard himself from being supposed to acquiesce in all the statements of the petitioners; but he did believe that had the missionaries been left unmolested by the vicious population which had settled around them, the results of their labours would have been such as had been anticipated by his noble Friend who had presented their petition. But from the evil influence exerted upon New Zealand by its first settlers, a train of calamities arose. Insults had been offered to the British name, crimes had been committed, wars waged to an extent unequalled in the history of our colonial administration. He repeated that the Colonial Office was not to be blamed for this. He had been for a short time in that Office himself; and he could not forget not only the difficulties but the perfect impossibility which, as it seemed to him, existed in many of the duties of that Office, as at present constituted, being satisfactorily performed. In 1834 a change had taken place in the Colonial Office, which it would have been well to have adhered to. Our Colonies had increased in numbers and in importance, to such an extent, that his noble Friend, with all his energy and ability—or, indeed, that two equal to his noble Friend, would be incapable of carrying on the manifold duties of the Colonial Secretary in such a manner as to be generally satisfactory and generally successful, and as it had been comparatively easy to manage them fifty years ago. He expressed his regret that the improvements introduced into the constitution of the Colonial Office, in 1834, had not been adhered to.

The Earl of Chichester

never considered that the Government could be fairly charged with any breach of faith in their administration of the affairs of New Zealand, The Church Missionary Society, however, had reasonable grounds for the fears expressed in their petition. He was satisfied with the distinct intimation of his noble Friend at the head of the Colonial Department, and he was sure that that intimation would be equally satisfactory to the petitioners.

Lord Stanley

I beg to say one word. I should have wished that my noble Friend had either abstained from touching on the topics to which he has alluded, or that he had brought forward the subject in a more distinct form, and at a period of the evening, and in a state of the House, when I could have entered into a full explanation of the different points alluded to. Under present circumstances, then, I will abstain from doing anything but answering the demand made upon me by my noble Friend as to the construction which Government is prepared to place upon the Treaty of Waitangi, The whole question of that Treaty I will not argue now. If my noble Friend will give me an opportunity of arguing it, I will undertake to prove to demonstration, that not only by the present, but by all former Governments—that not only by the noble Lord who preceded me, but by the noble Mar- quess who preceded him—that not only by the present but by former Parliaments, has the same construction been placed upon the Treaty of Waitangi—that construction which never was disputed by any authority, by any party, until the year 1842. I am prepared also to show, and whenever I am called on I shall show, in this House, that whatever may be the apparent discrepency between the conditions of arrangement entered into by Lord John Russell with the New Zealand Company, and those concluded under the Treaty of Waitangi, that discrepancy is not real, but apparent, and that it arose from Lord John Russell acting on the misrepresentation of facts made to him by the New Zealand Company. He conceded to that Company, on the past of the Crown, a certain number of acres, providing that that number of acres should be taken within a certain district—the foundation of the whole arrangement being the assertion and declaration of the New Zealand Company, that they had purchased the whole of that district, comprising a space of about twenty millions of acres, from the natives themselves. In that way, and in that way alone, can the arrangements of the noble Lord be consistent. In that way they are consistent, and in that way the declaration and agreement made by Lord John Russell, confirming, instead of contradicting, the Treaty of Waitangi—namely, that on the part of the Crown, he confirmed the claim of the Company to a certain tract of land, on the assumption that they had bought it from the natives. In that way I contend the arrangements of the noble Lord are perfectly consistent. His assumption, proved by his agreement, leads to the inference, that, in his opinion, the natives had a right to sell to the Company that tract of land which they did not inhabit; and I can show by repeated Acts of Parliament that that right to sell on the part of the natives, not the land which they occupied and enjoyed, but the waste land which they did not occupy or enjoy, was uniformly recognised during the period from 1836 to 1842. I am not prepared to say that there may not be some districts wholly waste and uncultivated—there are such in the northern island—but they are few in number; but I know that a large portion of the district in question is distributed among various tribes, all of whom have as perfect a knowledge of the boun- daries and limits of their possessions—boundaries and limits in some places natural, in others artificial—as satisfactory and well defined, as were, one hundred years ago, the bounds and marshes of districts occupied by great proprietors and their clans in the Highlands of Scotland. With respect to the greater portions of New Zealand, I assert that the limits and rights of tribes are known and decided upon by native law. I am not prepared to say what number of acres in New Zealand are so possessed; but that portion which is not so claimed and possesed by any tribe, is, by the act of sovereignty, vested in the Crown. But that is a question on which native law and custom have to be consulted. That law and that custom are well understood among the natives of the islands. By them we have agreed to be bound, and by them we must abide. These laws — these customs — and the right arising from them on the part of the Crown—we have guaranteed when we accepted the sovereignty of the islands; and be the amount at stake smaller or larger; so far as native title is proved—be the land waste or occupied—barren or enjoyed, those rights and titles the Crown of England is bound in honour to maintain; and the interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi, with regard to these rights, is, that, except in the case of the intelligent consent of the natives, the Crown has no right to take possession of land, and having no right to take possession of land itself, it has no right—and so long as I am a Minister of the Crown, I shall not advise it to exercise the power—of making over to another party that which it does not itself possess.

Petition read and ordered to lie on the Table.