SIR GEORGE GREY’S POLICY.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume II, Issue 109, 24 April 1863, Page 3

SIR GEORGE GREY’S POLICY.

[From the Nelson Examiner, 4th April]. The history of Taranaki is not advanced by any startling event in the last budget of nows. "We lately ventured to express the belief that no particular fitness in the present moment had brought Sir George Grey to the ruined settlement. The New Zealander confirms this belief, in one of the solemn articles which it devotes periodically to the admonition of our neighbors. It is, we are given to understand, the address of the settlers to the Queen, which has brought her representative to the place. This address, which our readers will remember was a simple narrative, a ten times told tale, which no one who has been an observer of the last three years’ events will gainsay, the New Zealander considers to have been an attack on the Governor, and like a good old nurse, it holds up its finger and cries fie. Such is the reason given by a humble adorer of Sir George Grey, for his visit to Taranaki. Preserve !us from our friends! Sir George is, however, amply supplied with the statesmanlike gift of “never minding,” and does not yield too freely to pressure from without. If the address has brought him down, it is because it is not an attack, but a thing far more dangerous to his reputation than an attack. The spleen of any penny-a-liner or personal enemy Sir George Grey can despise. But the cry of a handful of ruined men, carried in the language of simple fact to the ear of the British monarch and people, may have roused him to say, “I must make a show of doing something.” Let us do full justice to Sir George Grey. He has a policy, but, as the man in the farce says, “ there’s nothing in it.” Nothing is, in fact, its essence, and yet it has a fair seeming. It is comprised in the words, repeated again and again, “It is easier to outlive than to conquer the natives.” The policy is, patch the dam, a shovelful here, a shovelful there—it may be of gold or of more precious things, what does it matter?—the coast is rising, soon we shall be above the reach of the flood. Well this is an intelligible if not a practicable policy. Sir George Grey is entitled to honour for his tenacity of purpose in sticking to it. But he would hunt with the hounds and run with the hare ; he claims the credit of being a statesman whilst he is a pure temporiscr. At home, at least, he, wishes perhaps to appear in the nobler colours. And perhaps the New Zealander is right in suggesting that he is gone to Taranaki in consequence of the address, and is making a practical minute on it to beu'ead at home. Wo cannot believe, however, that he is really giving up his cherished policy, for' Sir George Grey is fifty years old, and has been a political temporiser, as we have seen, for the last fifteen. Among Sir George Greys virtues or weaknesses, frank generosity is not one, and this will prove one cau'so of his failure in a temporising policy. He is unloyal and uncandid. His constant care to hedge round his own personal position, his habit of fencing with facts and their names, proclaim the absence of that nobleness and earnestness

which is proper, and all but essential for the leader of free intelligent people. They equally disqualify him for gaining the permanent confidence of a suspicious, semi-barbarous race. Y>‘ e are bold to say, notwithstanding his marked cleverness and high attainments, that a more signally unfit mart for Governor of New Zealand at the present moment could hardly have been selected among those who could have any pretensions to such a station. A diplomatist is the last person to checkmate men, who like the Maories, are all diplomatists, and from whom no securities can be taken except bonds on their affections and their personal fears. A military or autocratic Governor must show rare genius in an emergency to enlist the hearty cooperation of intelligent persons. Sir George Grey habitually uses language as a cloak for his thought. ITis assiduous efforts to understand the ways of thinking, and acquire the forms of speech of the Maori, falling in with his natural bent, seem to have lowered his habits of dealing to the level of Maori cunning, instead of helping to raise the race to the level of Christian frankness and loyalty. At Taranaki, in receiving a deputation of settlers, he has given the colony an exhibition of this, the bad side of his character, which is ghastly in contrast with the earnestness of his interlocutors, and the reality of the ruin they came to talk of. On this and other occasions lie professed ignorance, almost disbelief in the possibility of facts the most notorious in the late and present troubles. The condition of the settlement, the audacity of the natives, the bunsling of the former military commanders, were matters of astonishment to the man chosen our physician, after eighteen months of pulsefeeling. Of course lie does not expect or wish to be believed in the colony. We know that no man here is better informed in-the ease than he. He is a student, and there are voluminous blue-books and the files of the Native Office ; he is a master of the art of cross-examination, and has had men of all sorts in the witness box, from the Maori tuiua to the late Governor; he has advisers, some of them actors in the former policy, all of them crammed with details of the late transactions. It is only official ignorance he is professing. But the levity, the petty art, or the utter contempt of his fellow-men shown in such discourse strikes one with a sort of despair. This is not the way to mould a people to forbearance, or to win the disaffected to confidence. And if he cannot do these things his policy must break down. One is loth to believe that there is any idea of making excuses to a remote tribunal by such affectation. It will be as incredible at home as here, that a very clever and zeakms officer, on the spot, is less informed on his own special business than an obscure writer in an English newspaper. It is most likely, only a marked instance of a most pernicious habit that wo see in the Taranaki interview. The Governor is more plastic than the natives; he came to impress them—they have moulded him. He is more than a half-caste in the art of evasin.

The only chance for the temporising plan is the plainest, speaking at all times. The value of diplomatic reserves and subterfugas is always doubtful; but, where power at the back of the diplomatiser is scanty, his case is bad indeed. News from Waikato shews the difficulty greater than ever. Mr. Gorst, the Resident Magistrate there, is a true missionary, and a true friend to the natives. His court-house has, however, been floated down Waikato out of his Majesty Matutaera’s dominions, and the press and type of his periodical, the Pihoihoi (“the sparrow on the house top,”) lias been destroyed ; some accounts say the type has been converted into bullets, but this is not likely : the Waikatos would draw a true distinction between a political act and a robbery. Mr. Gorst himself, it is said, is threatened with expulsion. William King, of Waitara, was one of the party who executed these measures. The excitement has travelled down southwards, and there is no possibility of reckoning where the flame may end. Driven to action, we believe Sir George Grey will act well. In his pertinacious inaction even we can respect him. One fatal tendcncy in him New Zealand has cause to deplore, and if, as we believe the case will be, his favourite policy fails, tiis own want of condour and trustfulness will be among the rocks on which it perishes.