THE NEW ZEALAND WAR.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 6, Issue 2, 3 July 1865, Page 1

THE NEW ZEALAND WAR.

[From the Sydney Morning Herald.} The accounts irom New Zealand are disgraceful and deplorable. The British name must have a vast stock of glory to suffer without.conscious loss the misgovernment of her last acquired but very valuable colonial possession. We make every deduction for the bitter and sometimes unreasonable complaints of.the local Press. What they see, —what is done and endured around them, — is not likely to produce a very calm or discriminating judgment on proceedings only partly complete, and a policy whose character stic is mystery. lu spite of a most diligent and conscientious appreciation of events and the broader view rarely possible to the immediate actors, we cannot obtain any cle.tr idea of the aim of the Government, much less of its course. A rebellion, which certainly never adopted obscure language, or attempted to disguise its purpose, has co.itinued for years. Its pi'obabie development has been forecast with a certainty which gives to prognostics almost the detail of fact, and to prophecy the perspicuity of historical relation. It cannot be said that the colony, or the Home Government, or the local administration has encountered any task which was not foreseen step by step. If what is to happen hereafter cannot be foretold, that is because the policy of England with New Zealand is exceptional and new. She is the tirst victim of the new era of political economy, which teaches that “ ships, colonies, and commerce” are no longer necessary to each other, and that .England is henc forth a step-mother who clears her house of the iucumbrance of children. There is some consolation in that. New Zealand is the last theatre of an experiment of modern philanthropy which teaches that savages are

always the martyrs, and Englishmen always the robbers. The clergyman who narrowly escaped the spit from the fanatics of the new religion, and who witnessed the immolation of the Rev. Mr Volkner, a better man than himself, some score years ago put together and published in Maori every text of the Bible which could excite the distrust of the natives of the Government and the colony. And the same date the natives were made the judges in a grand con-troversy,—-namely, whether the baptism given by Wesleyan clergymen was orthodox. We should miss the proper fruit of these deplorable lessons if we did not see how disaffection for the Queen and apostacy from Christianity are the sad penalties of these mistakes—for so we are willing to deem them. Well, what we have sown we reap. New Zealand has been the prey of conflicting factions, and all who were striving to apply their egotistical systems have been mortified and defeated. The Home Government may turn round on the colony and call for the basin and towel to display her purity before the world, but she will not be acquitted any more for that. She did wrong in occupying New Zealand at all ? Well, admit she did, — still the sovereignty was assumed. She did wrong in allowing colonisation ? Admit it; she did more, she sold the land to the colonists. She did wrong in allowing the natives to be without regular government, and in suffering them to commit unpunished murders in sight of her Courts ; but it was Judges sent out from Downing-street that administered the laws. She did wrong in making war in the manner ot peace; fighting with ambiguous words; snubbing zealous subjects, and listening to those who were in the confidence of the rebels, and who supported them. But it was her own Governors who carried out the disgraceful farce by British soldiers, and subjected the arms of England to become the laughter of the natives. , She did, indeed, send one Governor who, though strongly inclined to the natives, with the instinct of a soldier, and characteristic indignation at the dishonor of his country’s flag, and, we may add, with the rectitude of a mind looking straightforward to the great objects of government, determined to tolerate rebellion no longer, no longer than was necessary to strike a decisive blow; but he was pursued with relentless acrimony, and was soon visited vrith recall 1

Sir George Grey, we are told by the old folks at home, in all forms, is a great favorite with the English people. He has been known to have a special aptitude to manage savage nations and to bring them into subjection by gentle methods. A Minister rarely alludes to Sir George Grey but with something complimentary to his character and his services. But here he has so far signally failed. We are not disposed to adopt the views of of the New Zealand Colonists, who, with few exceptions, seem to consider there eulogies rather as irony than simple truth. They are probably wrong, at least in some degree. Sir George Grey has failed because he tried a pacific scheme of government in the midst of a rebellion, plotted by a people whose former confidence, if it were ever worth the name, was gone, and who were prepared, upon a settled plan, to turn against the Governor every concession, and to laugh at every promise as false, and every threat as impotent. It is always dangerous for.a man to return long after as an actor to the sphere of his former labors and tempt Fortune when she has forgotten that she ever smiled upon him. He meets old enemies ; old friends have grown older, and often changed with time. His memory is apt to delude him with fallacious resemblances of the present with the past. The freshness of a new mind, and the vigour of a new agent, are but poorly compensated by a facility to distinguished tribal idioms, and to recognise peculiarities of tne skin. Sir George Grey, if he had suffered personally from h.s failure, would be entitled to commiseration. He has had to carry on a war hated by the Home Government, detested by almost every military officer above the rank of an ensign, in a country where all move-

ment is difficult, where there is no looting, and against foes respecting whom his first and last instruction was to spare them. The colony, naturally impatient of the hindrances and devastations of the war, wnich some* times have claimed nearly the whole male population, has goaded the Governor on. The philanthropic party has held him back by the chain of his former reputation, and, to be just, the Secretaries of State have done both feats ; be has been goaded and reined at the same time, until the distracted Sir George has been led into inconsistencies which one set of people call imbecility, another treachery, but which we are disposed to ascribe to afalseandanomalousposition. It is easy to dwell on the frightful crimes which have been perpetrated , on the character and proper punishment of which we imagine we are agreed. Such deeds as the murder of the Rev. Mr Volkner, who seems to have maintained a self possession and dignity in his awful circumstances worthy of bis profession, will, probably, be far more impressive in England than the burning of a score of villages, and the massacre of women and children. But is there any reason to hope for the decrease of these atrocities ? We fear not. The alarm of our correspondents we believe is genuine and well founded. Experience shows that a religious fanaticism, even if accepting some Christain doctrines and practices, grows increasingly cruel. The solitary murder becomes a general massacre, aud the crimes of a few become the habit of a race. In this colony the intelligence from New Zealand and the news from Loudon often meet. We read what is passing at both extremities of the same question at the same time. While the sister colony is groaning under a sense of niisgovernmeut and threat-, ened desertion, the London press is giving homilies on colonial rashness, rapacity, and discontent, on the fitness of leaving colonists who were got into war by the Home Government to get out or perish as may happen. Those who are specially concerned read these cold-blooded sneers at unremitted suffering with rage and tears. The gay officer reads and hopes that he will soon be in pleasanj quarters. The philosophical politician, meanwhile, reads aud admires the ways of Providence that gave a great empire to a small people, not one in ten thousand of whom knows whether New Zealand is not an island off Calcutta; a people who never, as a nation, did aught in favor of colonisation but sell territory, drive out their kinsmen by religious intolerance, cast out their criminals by penal law, or shuffle off a home burden or difficulty by pauper expulsions or cottar ejectments. The generation is probably born which will see the Colonial Office of England as tranquil as that of Spain, where, in the midst of grand palaces and great docks, the Minister sees not a sail to interrupt his horizon—nothing to disturb his serenity— if we except the question : Is St Domingo real[y worth keeping—yes or no ? Wiien this is answered, the colonial cares of one nation who came to dislike “ ships, colonies, and commerce” will be ended for good and all.