Is it to be so in New Zealand? So far as
we have gone hitherto, the answer is positive.
Yet it is sad to watch even a savage people
gradually dying out before the inexorable
advance of a stronger and impatient civilisation;
a civilisation so proud, so strong, so
impatient, that it will neither stoop nor tarry
to lift up or convert, but impetuously destroys
all with which it cannot on the instant unite.
In olden times, when life was not so rapid and
the distinctions of race were not so cruelly
marked, such a people as the New Zealanders
would have been gradually incorporated into the
family of the invaders; they would have learnt
the better law, have been brought up to the
higher standard; they might, indeed, have
become absorbed, and their distinctness lost, yet
it would not have been by destruction but by
amalgamation, as was the case in Britain, Gaul,
Italy, and wherever the elder civilisations
obtained a footing. And has it not been by this
amalgamation—this fusing together of different
races—that we, here in England, have come to
our strength? And is it quite impossible, and
against all analogy, that the union of our present
high state of cultivation with the unworn freshness,
the youth, and immunity from the diseases
of civilisation, of the Maori family, should
produce as fine a result for the future inhabitants
of Tasmania? Perhaps our New Zealand settlers
might do worse than endeavour to found a nation
of Anglo-Saxons and Maoris united.

At present, however, there is no hope of any
such form of brotherhood; and, instead of
births and marriages, all the talk is of guns,
and flags, and war, and how the colonists can
best obtain by armed force the land which the
Maoris insist on keeping to themselves—or
rather, of which the chiefs assert their right to
dispose or not, according to their pleasure and
their best advantage. For this is the real
occasion of the war, and not the giving up of
murderers on either side, nor whether a strip
of bunting has borne one hieroglyphic or the
other. There are two movements in this war,
but both meaning the same thing; the King
movement and the Land movement. In the first,
William Thompson, the native Warwick as he
has been called, is one of the most prominent
actors. He has been described as a capable,
large-minded, patriotic, yet loyal and well-meaning
man, who ought to have been respectfully
treated by the colonial government, and
employed as mediator and peace-maker between
the colonists and his own people. Thompson, or
Tamihana according to Maori language, is a peace
man, and a Christian. This Tamihana was the
first to originate the King movement. He saw
that the colonial government did not affect much
paternal care over the Maori tribes, and that all
the moral and political advantages of the Queen's
rule were kept as the exclusive portion of the
eldest born, and did not help the younger sons
in the least.

"What we have actually done for the natives
amounts to almost nothing," says one English
writer. "There is nothing in the shape of law
or government throughout the greater part of
the North Island. The Queen's writ will not
run, nor would any magistrate attempt to issue
a writ in the greatest part of the native districts.
There is no power to stop, nor any attempt to
stop, native wars or native murders. And the
only law is the law of the old native justice of
revenge, modified by the local and personal
influence of the missionaries." So, said William
Thompson, the New Zealand Warwick, "we
want law and order, and a king of our own
choosing, who shall rule us according to the best
part of English law, and be under the supremacy
of the English Queen." This King movement
seeming to promise nothing very formidable,
and being in the hands of a man thoroughly well
affected to the government, a Christian, a firm
friend of the missionaries, and the active
promoter of schools, was suffered to take root and
grow into a substantial fact, neither colonists
nor governor attempting protest or check. But
now, when the Land League has assumed more
definite proportions, and the Waikato chiefs
deny Teira's individual right to sell his bit of
land at Waitara without their collective consent,
the government has become angry, attempting
to seize by force what the natives are determined
to defend by force, and making a bloody war
out of what should have been settled by quiet
negotiation. But as it is against the rules and
resolutions of this native Land League that any
one chief shall sell his land without the formal
consent of all the rest, the Maoris are right
according to themselves, and have never, until
now, been adjudged wrong according to the
government. As British law has never been
actually introduced among the people, it seems
only sound reason and justice that the Maori
law should be respected, until, at least, it is
formally set aside and another state of things
begun. There is a rough natural logic in this
position, which the natives, savage and untaught
as they are, can fully comprehend; while at the
same time they cannot understand how it is that
we refuse to see the justice which is so self-
evident to them, and how we can deny the
truths which speak with a hundred tongues
trumpet-voiced to their ears. But the colonists
are outraged and alarmed. They ask what will
be their future if the Maoris are suffered to
organise themselves into a nation, and allowed
to learn the strength that lies in union and the
influence that lies in property? So the war is
shifted from its true basis, and, while it means
that the colonial government denies the Maori
all right to law or internal development, assumes
to be a loyal defence of the Queen's supremacy
which no one has attacked, and a chivalrous
defence of the Taranaki settlers, whom no one, at
the outset, wished to injure. ln fact, the
question at issue may be narrowed into this: Is
English occupancy in New Zealand, military
conquest or peaceful colonisation? Are the
Maoris to be forced into doing our will, however
much against their own, or are they to be held
as owning rights, and capable of political duties?
Are they to be denied all tribal influence and