NEW ZEALAND.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume IV, Issue 196, 14 October 1864, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEW ZEALAND.

(From the Westminster Review.) 1 New Zealand in 1842. By T. M. D. Martin, M.D., President of the New Zealand Aborigines Protection Association, and lately a Magistrate of the Colony. Auckland. 2 New Zealand and its Aborigines, By William Brown, lately a member of the Legislative Council of New Zealand. Smith, Elder, & Co. 1845. 3 Plain Facts relative to the late War in the Northern District of New Zealand. Auckland. 1847. 4 The New Zealand Question and the Rights of Aborigines. By Louis Alexis Ciiamekovzou. London : J. C. Newby. 1848. 5 A Speech delivered in the Provincial Council of Auckland, exhibiting a picture of Misgovernment and Oppression in the British Colony of New Zealand ; preceded by a Letter to his Grace the Duke of Newcastle, her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Colonial Department. By James Busdy, Esq. Auckland. 1853. 6 A Page from the History of New Zealand. By Metoikos. Auckland. 1854. 7 The First Settlers in Neio Zealand; being a Speech delivered at the Table of the House of Representatives, August Ist, 1856. 8 A Letter to his Fxcellency Colonel Thomas Gore Browne, C. 8., Governor of New Zealand, on “ Responsible Government" and “ The Governmental Institutions of New Zealand." By J ames Busby, Esq. Auckland. 1857. 9 Observations on the State of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of New Zealand. By F. D. Fenton, the Compiler of the Statistical Tables of the Native Population. Auckland. 1857. 10 The Right of a British Colonist to the Protection of the Queen and Parliament of Fngland against the Illegal and Unjust Acts of a Colonial Legislature or Government : ct. Letter to his Grate the Duke of

Newcastle, Iter Majesty's Principal Score• iary of State for the Colonies. By James Busby, Esq. Auckland. 1860. 11 Illustrations of the system called “ Responsible Government" ; in a Letter to his Excellency Colonel Gore Browne, C.B. By James Busby, Esq. Auckland. 1860. 12 The Maori King movement in New Zealand; with a full Report of the Native Meetings held at Waikato, April and May, 1860. By the Rev. Thomas Buddie, Auckland, 1860, 13 The Taranaki Question. By Sir W. Maetin, D.0.L., Late Chief Justice of New Zealand. Auckland. 1860. 14j Remarks upon a Pamphlet entitled “ The Taranaki Questionby Sir W f . Martin. By James Busby, Esq;, formerly H.M. Resident in New Zealand.' 15 Remarks upon a Pamphlet by James Busby, Bsq,. commenting upon a Pamphlet entitled '"The Taranaki Question,” by Sir W. Martin. By Geoege Glaeke, late Chief Protector of Aborigines. Printed for private circulation only. Auckland. 1861. 16 Notes on Sir William Martin's Pamphlet. Published by authority of the General Government. Auckland. 17 Memorandum. By Mr. Richmond. Auckland. 18 Remarks on Notes published for the General Government, and on Mr. Richmond's Memorandum, By Sir William Maetin, D.C. L. Auckland. 1861. 19 The Land Questionjof Taranaki. By E. A. Gaeeington. [Unpublished.] Taranaki. 20 New Zealand Memorial to his Grace the Secretary of State for the Colonies ; together with a Memorandum on Neio Zealand Affairs. London.* 21 The War in Neio Zealand. By William Fox, Member of the House of Representatives. Auckland. 22 One of England’s Little Wars ; a Letter to the Luke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for the Colonies. By Octavius Hadfield, Archdeacon of Kapiti, New Zealand. 23 New Zealand and the War. By William Swainson, Esq., formerly Attorney-Gene-ral for New Zealand. London: Smith, Elder, & Co. 24 The War in Taranaki during the Years 186061. By W. I. Grayling, of the Volunteer Rifles. New Plymouth. 1862. 25 ,, Letter to the Right Honorable the Lord Lyttelton, on the Relations of Great Britain with the Colonists and Aborigines of New Zealand. By Ceosbie Waed, a Member of the Government and of the House of Representatives of the Colony. London ; Edward Stanford. 1863. Of England’s fifty colonies, none has excited so much interest, has been the subject of so many experiments, or has given so much trouble to the Colonial Office, as New Zealand. Never before did a colony present so many tangled questions for solution, or become a prey to so many conflicting interests ; yet never w r as there a country which might have been more easy to govern, or a case in which the interminable difficulties which have arisen were more indisputably of our own creation.

New Zealand has certainly no cause to complain of neglect by the Home Government. On the contrary, she has been the victim of good intentions, or harassing watchfulness and needless interference ;in fact, of over-nursirg. The Benjamin of Colonies, the youngest and the best-be-loved, she risked the fate of the apeling that was smothered with hugging by its dam. Nostrum after nostrum was tried upon her, though all that was needed to ensure a hardy growth was to have turned her loose to shift for herself. The lesson has now been learned, and acted up to; but at no trifling cost, and somewhat late in the day. Experience has at least been gained, and a subject for an instructive book (should any one be minded to take such a work in hand), which might be entitled “Errors of Colonization;” drawing examples from the case before us, and showing how all might have been avoided by simply placing a little confidence in the right-minded-ness and practical good sense of the colonists themselves. “The Comedy of Errors,” we should rather have suggested as a title, were it not for the tragic issue—an internecine war, an enormous expenditure, and, by way of anti-climax, a hot dispute as to who shall pay the bill. Like those of Tristram Shandy, the misfortunes of the colony began before its birth. Begotten of a quarrel between the Colonial Office and a landtrading Company, that state of conflict which, in one form or another, has been throughout its normal condition, was ready prepared for the child at entry into the world. We have seen party feeling—that bane of the country from first to last—engendered at the very outset among the colonists, being the inevitable consequence of the formation of rival settlements, north and south by the Home Government and the New Zealand Government respectively. Contentions of almost unparalleled bitterness between the colonists and their governors; each side incessantly striving to make good its own case at the Colonial Office, and neither side, unfortunately, abstaining altogether from misrepresentation. We have seen governors, when Maori sympathy was fashionable in England, ostentatiously parading themselves as the protectors of the natives against the greed and violence of the settlers (a charge only in one instance handsomely retracted—by Colonel Gore Brpwne, whose well-known “Si possint, recte; si non, gwcumque niodo,” was unsaid for him by a friend, in the Assembly) ; advertising themselves as “ the real original Maori sympathizers,” and manifesting extreme jealousy whenever the settlers attempted to. exert themselves in behalf of their red fellow-subjects —an, interference which seemed to be treated as poaching on the Government manor ; and even going so far, in one instance, as to accuse the old settlers, including the Church Missionaries, of having provoked the war in the north.

We have seen the colonists, on the other hand, indignantly rejecting the imputation; casting it back upon an incompetent Government; protest-Jng-Bgajnst the timid procrastinations and temporizing system of native management ; styling

it the flour-and-sugar policy, degrading to both races alike; and maintaining that the sole object of governors was to make political capital out of the Maori—to keep all quiet by palliatives during their respective terms of office, but never venturing upon any effective measures for their permanent benefit; each in turn looking to the time when he should escape from the Colony, bequeathing his difficulties to his successor. We have seenthat even when recrimination between the governors and the governed was put an end to, by concession of representative institutions and of parliamentary government, this normal conflict was not yet at an end, for it broke out afresh between the races, and remains undetermined still. The colonial history is known only to those who have taken a part in making it. It has still to be written, and ought to be, while yet the tradition of it lives ; for the earlier actors, upon whom, and not upon blue-books or despatches, dependence must be mainly placed, are fast disappearing from the scene. Our present object is to redeem a portion of it from oblivion. In any account professing to be at once complete and intelligible, three subjects, which might be likened to the three strands of one rope, would have to be carefully distinguished, while collaterally treated ; namely, the political history of the Europeans ; the policy adopted towards the natives ; and the land question. In the limited space at our disposal, such an arrangement is out of the question ; we must therefore confine ourselves to the last. But events happen of themselves to grow up around it so naturally, that we still hope to give a tolerably continuous account. For it may be said that the history of the land question, that fans et origo malorum, is substantially the history of the colony. (To he Continued.)