RESIGNATION OF GENERAL CAMERON.

Evening Star, Volume III, Issue 844, 19 January 1866, Page 2

RESIGNATION OF GENERAL CAMERON.

(From the “ United Service Gazette.”)

It is now a pretty long time since tl>e Untied Service Gazette discovered that General Cameron was not the man for New Realand. We then stood alone in our adverse criticism, the columns of our contemporaries being filled act-nauseiim eulogies of the skill, promptitude, and success of our campaigning under the Southern Cross. At last we find the general public coming round to our views, and not the least important, the gallant commander himself, who, an obscurely worded telegram informs us, has resigned, and is coming home. . General Cameron should have resigned long since, and for causes other than a disagreement with the Colonial Government. As it happens he has given way when he ought to have held fast, and is a martyr on accotmt of the only wise thing he had done since his arrival in the colony. In the beginning he committed a very grievous offence against the prestige of the British army, by allowing our troops to be repeatedly foiled baffled, and butchered by a. nor ,le of unskilled savages, who should have been demolished in a single expedition. The Home Government had provided him with means sufficient to conquer native New Zealand ten times over, and hj s return was merely a series of abortive ent >rprises, in which hundreds of gallant lives were lost thr ugh the stupid' obstinacy of the commander. General Cameron’s only idea was ip fact, to set his soldiers on like so many bull dogs against pas, stockades, stone-walls—anything. He ordered them to conquer, but forgot to provide them with the means which were so amply at his disposal, and the consequence was demoralization of our troops, exaltation of the barbarian enemy, slaughter out of all proportion to the magnitude of the war. and general clamour and discontent in the colony. With the latter we have no sympathy whatever. The object of the land sharks was to despoil the natives of their hunting grounds, and British soldiers were ignobly employed in doing their dirty work, thus creating a service the ve.y name of which raised a shudder throughout the arm} 7 . It was bad work, and in General Cameron s hands, it was badly done ; but the original instigators gave it the coup de grace by daring in their journals to accuse the British troops of cowardice. However, it is happily now over, in as far as our soldiers are concerned The aspiring colonist-who longs for an • statemust follow Paddy’s advice respecting the Hessian, and ‘• <7 kill a Maori for himself.” Our brave regiments are coming home, and with them.the equally brave but unskilful commander who has handled them so recklessly. We shall hear little more of New Zealand as a military station, and certainly no more of such wars as that which has been brought jto so “ lame and impotent a conclusu n.” Had General Cameron been recalled after one , of his abortive assaults on the pas, where men had been flung recklessly .against impossible entrenchments, only to be shot down and hurled back by an unseen enemy, we should not have accused his military superiors of any undue severity : but unfortunately bis recall was re-

served fey: the period ■when? the errdr/of his ways, and wa#:&ctias t as we could have wished. up active operations as asbad johj.afficd’had come to see completely through, the objects of'the colonists. All our later news from New Zealand told of disputes between the General and the Administration, 'and of the resolute refusal, of the former to allow her Majesty’s troops to be employed any more in land plunder. 111-natured, people might be inclined to say that, the General having tried all he knew and failed, his final fit of public virtue was only of that soft which is said to be the creation of necessity, but for ourselves we are simply grateful for results, and have no . desire too critically to t ana,lvse causes. We? saw our troops engaged in a war from, which they could reap neither glory nor profit ; in which, if they succeeded, the prize went to mere lookers-on, and if they failed they were exposed to unnecessary torrents of aimsa from the ' colonial press. Wc saw that this war, bad as it was in principle, was still worse in the mode in which it wis c. aided oh, and we opened e ch fresh file of New Zealand papers with terrible misgiving that we were only about to read the record ofi more blunders and more slaughter. General Cameron did not win, and for that we blamed him, because we believe he ought to have won; but he did the next best thing, he refused to put himself or his soldiers in the way of losing any more in a cause which he at L ast found out was w a oily unworthy of our arms. If, therefore. his recall has been a result of his change of policy, we regret, because that change of policy is the one thing we see to praise in the gallant General’s whole arrangement of the w-ar.