NEW ZEALAND.

New Zealander, Volume 2, Issue 85, 16 January 1847, Page 3

NEW ZEALAND.

[From the "Liverpool Mercury," June 26.] To the populous, industrious, and wealthy commercial community, of which this great shipping port is the centre, every item of intelligence which reaches it from abroad, and especially from our own colonies, must be a subject of interest and significancy. To Liverpool it may be laid, in the language of the scriptures, that Providence " tins given the uttermost parts of the earth for a possession." livery wind that blows wafts some homeward bound barque nearer, or some outward-bound ship further away from this their native harbour. No good that occurs to human kind in the remotest and wildest regions, no "ills that flesh is heir to" that afflict an; por■lion of the family of man, are without a direct effect upon the fortunes of our merchants.} Here, indeed," the ends of (he earth are met together," and disease at the ultima thule of hu.nauity, is felt and has its influence on this common centre of the wo! Id's commerce. The recent despatches from New Zealand cannot, therefore, fail to be regarded with deep and

pleasing interest by our townsmen. It will be seen that the only "crook in the lot" of that valuable colony has now been made straight. The natives have not only been subdued phjsicallv, but have become submissive morally 5 and all that was wanted to make that British possession the finest region for the pursuit of human happiness in the whole world, security from violence) and the power to "sit under one's own vine and fig tree, with none to make him afraid," seems now in fair course of being realized. Governor Grey has exhibited not only the txcellen ces peculiar to his profession, but n knowledge of human nature, and a discreet moderation, from which the best future results may be anticipated. He seems to have carefully studied the history of the colony, of the natives, and of the administration of his piedecessors. lie has wisely walked by the light of experience, and taken timel) warning by the blundering conceit and stupid incapacity of those who have mismanaged the colony before him. He has discovered the necessity of teaching the natives the difference betwixt moderation and imbecility. He has vindicated the Queen's power and sovereignty, and asseited, with the most vigorous practical emphasis, the physical superiority of hurope over the irregular energy of barbai ians. The redoubted HeLe and li is rebellious colleagues have been entirely subdued, and a wise clemency has crowned the moment of victory. The rebels gave up their lands, liberty, and life into the hands of our" viceroy, aifd he has told them to keep them and become peaceable and well affected subjects. The way, then, is cleared for our ships, our merchants, our emigrants. The moment is auspicious for emigration, and to the farmer who dreads the effects of the repeal of the Corn Law, to the father of a family who feels embarrassed in his plans for the ptovision of his children, and to the invalid, or even to those who, although not in sickness, are at the mercy or the caprice of insidious and other hereditary diseases, there is not, on the face of the globe, a field for exertion, a haven of test from worldly anxiety, a refuge from disease, and a promised land of health, at all to be compared with our newly-pacificated colony. It consists of three islands, embracing an area of about* 3000 square miles more than that of Great Britain. Its moderate size and insulated position, therefore, give it extreme compactness, and the defence of a great natural barrier against foreign aggression. It is encircled with innumerable noble harbours, many admirably land locked.and splendid rivers stretch- | ing far inland, and studded at their mouth with small islands that afford the finest shelter for ships. Excellent water is every where, and at all times, abundant, and the climate is the finest in the world — the temperature exhibiting less variation than that of any other country, and varying only from 38 degrees in the coldest, to 76 degiees in the warmest days, with an annual mean of 59 degrees; a winter average of 51 degrees, aud a summer average of 67 degrees. The soil, too, is of the most eligible description, yielding two crops in the year, and producing, in equal perfection, the fruits of the tropics and the different grains and esculents of the temperate zone. The finest timber for all, but especially for ship-building and rigging purposes, is found in inexhaustible abundance, and vast open fertile plains, occupied only by the fern root, render the expense of clearing comparatively 'rifling. Snow and frost, except on the hills, are only found for two or three dajs in the year, which, in this country, has 200 dry days, 100 of gentle showers, and 65 of rain. In one exquisitely beautiful and fertile district, innumerable hot and tepid springs, impregnated with every variety of medicinal properly, act as complete restoratives to the invalid, and the combined influences of soil and climate are so favourable to European health, fecundity, and longevity, that a belief prevailed among the natives fora considerable period after the arrival of the first settlers, that Europeans never died. For twenty-eight j ears the Church Missionary Society had a staff of thirty-five missionaries and catechistsin the colony, and during all that time there did not occur a single death. Every creek, bay, and inlet, abounds with the finest fish, ojsters and eels being especially plenteous. Coal, iron, lime, manganese, copper, lead, tin, nickel, marble, sulphur, nitre, soda, potash, mineral dyes, fuller's and brick earth, are every where easily accessible, and have already teen worked to good profit; and above all, the luxuriance of the phormium tenax % or silk flax, the finest of all plants for the production of linen yarn, is so abundant, and the wool is so much finer and longer in the fleece than is to be found any where else, that there can be no doubt that, assisted by the splendid ship building aud ma-chine-making timber of the colony, it mini speedily become one of the greatest manufacturing and mercantile countries in the world, the be«t naval depot of all our possessions, and entirely without a rival as a point of British emigration. It is within three weeks' sail of South Ameiica, China, and India, and a week from New Holland. It subjects the European constitution to none of that languor which it experiences more or less in all other climates ; and the labourer can work in the open air with ease and vigour every day, and all the ) ear round, thus making disservices much more valuable than in Canada or the United States, \\ here summer heats and winter frosts, so often and so long arrest the progress of human industry. As a hospital for our Indian troops, and ultimately as a recruiting station for our Indian army, a splendid country, within afoitnight's steam-boat reach of our eastern possessions, is of inestimable value politically to our Government ; and to our teeming population, knowing not where to turn in the struggle and competition of life, it is not easy to ovei -estimate its manifold advantages. The recent events which have attracted so much public notice to this great settlement, have not unnaturally led to the conclusion that there is one great drawback to emigration to that region, which to peace-lo\ing and timid, natures is apparently insurmountable. They heat that there are canni'.als amongst the native population, and that the aborigines, numbering eight times the European population, consists of tribes of fierce savages. Novr as the murder of female infants is a universal practice among the natives, so that for each couple married, two children is a high average, while the fecundity of the European is

quite without example, the preponderance of a native population is rapidly correcting itself.— The great number of children, the offspring of native motheis and European fatheis, begins to form a natural connecting link between the aborigines and settlers, which will gradually absorb the former into our system. But iudepeti - dently of these considerations, the existence of a considerable native population is one of the chief advantages of the colony. The New Zealanders are excellent boatmen and sailors.skilful and dexterous in every use of a spade, hoe, and sickle, patient and industrious agricultural labourers, good shepherds, ingenious house and boat-build ers, and so addicted to commerce and traffic, that mere barter has long ceased among thum : they demand money for the goods they sell, and pay it for those they buy, many of them having in their possession not inconsiderable sums, and in the aggregate being by far the best customers for, and consumers of, all the European goods imported into the colony. They make steady and tractable domestic and out-door servants. A considerable number of them, it must be iemembered, are Christians, and can read and write, having, in fact, a newspaper in the native language Not a few are even eloquent preachers, and all ate anxious to g«i Europeans to settle among them, and are devoutly impressed with all the iiiperior advantages of civilization. They are naturally so temperate in disposition, so sagacious in intellect, so gentle and even kindly, that nothing but the grossest injustice, combined with the greatest imbecility on our part, could ever have placed any of them in a hostile attitude to the Europeans; and nothing is required but a scrupulous adherence to truth and justice in all our dealings with them, and a firm vigour in the assertion ot our authority, to make them the most peaceable of the Queen's subjects, and the best friends and fastest allies of the settlers. In answer to the question of Mr. Buller, we observe' that Sir Robert Peel has already pledged himself to carry through a bill to remedy the existing evils of the colony, and to give it pro* bably an independent representative constitution. The blunders committed by the Home Government and the stupid Governors it has successively inflicted on the natives and settlers are past, and under Governor Grey are not likely to be repeated. They may, therefore, repose in the limbo of those bad things which cannot be recalled, and therefore cannot be helped. The report of the New Zealand Company exhibits a sad spectacle of mismanagement. It confesses to having spent £600,000 of haid cash, to have induced the influx of £2,000,000 more into the colony, and with all this money, to have only procured the emigration of 9000 settlers, the survey of 300,000 acres only of land, and the making of some £35,000 worth of roads and bridges. Its settlers are ruined, its own capital sunk, and, according to the authority of the Wellington Independent, the organ of its own colonists, who do not hesitate to call themselves its dupes and victims, " there has been a loss of £2,200,000 out of £2,600,000." Nay, it adds, "we see in the Company the main obstacle to the peaceful and prosperous settlement of these islands, and doubt whether the resumption of their operations may not be one of the worst evil* that could have befallen the colony." The fact is this, that this company sold £100,000 worth of the land of the colony in this country, and sent out ship load after ship load of emigrants to settle upon it, when they themselves had net acquired a valid title to a single acre, and had not surveyed a single rood. Having floundered throngh that blunder, they tried to extricate themselves by another, and attempted to bully the natives out of their land, in spite of common justice and common law. Having got up to the neck in wrong, they thought it best to plunge over head and ears in the mud of injustice, embroiled themselves and their settlers in furious quarrels with the natives, and brought down upon them the Wairau massacre, by attempting to seize property which fairly belonged to others But, undoubtedly, their chief blunder and absurdity has been in making choice of the southern, in place of the noithern part of the north island, as the scene of their operations. In point of soil, of climate, of natural productions, of fine harbours, and rivers, there is no com parison whatever between the two. The Company's settlements are subject, from the high rugged mountains which run through them, and every where destroy internal communication, to extremes of heat and cold, and furious gales of wind quite unknown in the northern part of the island. Wellington, in Cook's Straits, the company's capital town, is on a dangerous and boisterous coast, wheie the navigation is most uncertain. Scarcely any continuous tracts of level arable land can be found on this part of the island ; and the chief port, in place of having a fine low country lying far and wide behind it, is snnounded with lulls coining nearly up to the town, with no valley but the small patch of the Hult swamp, up whose gullies the wind lages with uncontrollable fury. The rugged nature of the surface rendeis the construction of toads, or communication between the different littleseltlements of the company, quito impracticable j and, in short, neither in timber, mines, levelness and fertility of soil, line harbours, or ease of communication and climate, are the company's tracts for an instant to be compared with Auckland and the northern part of the island generally. Yet such is the infatuation of meie selfishness, that nothing will content this magnanimous body of trading patriots but the removal of the seat of government to Wellington, and the practical abandonment of by far the most valuable part of the colony. We trust that misfortune has at last cleared all this nonsense out of the heads of the directors. Let them put their money into a grateful soil, and it will yield a liberal return. It is useless to expect grapes from thistles, or a prosperous Colony at Wellington, or Nicholson, or Nelson, or Otago. The fact that tlie natives have long since abandoned the southern districts, or that those tribes who have not become almost extinct, is the best proof of the superiority of the northern portions of New Ulster. Let the company dissolve, ar^d reconstruct itself on the principle of colonising the Thames and Aucklaiul.districts, wlieiethe seat of government is; , where soil, climate, mines, timber, coal, flax, all offer their treasures to the enterprise of wise men. Let them cease to rail at the government, and discover and lament 1 their own faults. They have now aa able governor j

they will soon have ah indqwndentconstitutian ; tliej* have subdued the natives ; the settlers have suffered and surmounted their chief disasters. A noble fieldj of useful enterprise yet opens to the company. Let them abandon Middle Island and begin with the Auckland district ; and, if they will take this tide in their affairs at the flood, it is sure to lead them on to fortune.

[From the "Wellington Independent."] The Hobarl Town AUoertiser of llie IGtfi Nov. contains a very rabid article, vvriliea by some ill-informed person, in that bombastic style which Ancient Pistol nsed, and which Shakespere distinguishes as "King Cambyses' vein." The subject of it is the execution of the rebel chief at Porirua, under sentence of Court Martial. This act our cotemporary describes as an atrocious murder, which has inflicted a foul, a damning blot, upon our national character ; meaning thereby the British character, we presume, not that of Van Dieman's Land. But let us quote his words in inverted commas, lest they should be mistaken for ouis. " Afoul,adarnning blot." says he, " has fallen upon our national character. A cold blooded murder has been perpetrated. It has been made w orse by judicial mockery A native of New Zealand, taken in arms, has been tried, convicted, and hanged I ! ! as a rebel!— A rebel! To whom ? To n couniiy, to a Government to which he owed no allegiance? In defence of his own liberty} his own rights. — Good God ! Can this be ?" And then follow^ a Jong rbodomontade about Poles and Greeks, Caradoc and Kosciusko, llefei and Tell, D'Enghiea and Napoleon, u Inch w e have no room to extract, but would amuse the readers of our less rhetorical paget if we were to do so. Well, now, sober men of common sense, who may happen to read what we are writing, let us put down on paper the real facts of the case, which has so greatly excited the wrath and philantrophy of this organ of public opinion in Van Dieman s Land. Here they are. Seven yeais ago the agent of the New Zealand Company i purchased from the natives of Port Nicholson, 1 among their lands, a valley called the Hutt; and allotted it to purchasers. Subsequently to this* a number of natives from another part of the. country come and intrude upon the surveyed lands, and oppose the progress of the settlers.— On remonstrance by the Colonial authorities, tha natives in question admit that they have no business there and enter into a written agreement to quit as soon as they have cleared a crop which they had planted in the ground usurped by them. Observe that the* themselves admit tliat they had no right to that district, the Land Claims Commissioner is of the same opinion, and the other natives who had sold the district, confirm the assertion. Well instead of quitting as they had promised, they slay theie for five yeais, resisting all attempts on the part of the true owners to obtain possession, and, finally became so troublesome, that troops are stationed for the protection of the settlers in the lower part of the valley.— Then these natives, without any provocation, commence a series of cold blooded and barbarous murders, massacreing peaceable and unoffending s'ettleis, and the Governor determines to dislodge them (as we think it was his duty to do) by force of arms. Several skirmishes ensue, and in one of them, or immediately 'afterwards, a chief who had been engaged in them is taken ia arms. He proves on examination to be a native from a place 120 miles distant from the district where tbe disturbances existed, whose right* or those of his tribe, had never been meddled with, and who had no assignable reason for joining the other natives, except a dr»sire to exterminate the Europeans, who had never done or intended him or his any harm. He is tried by a Court Martial, sentenced to death, admits the justness of his sentence and folly in taking up arms j and as a warning to others, is lmnged in due course of law. And this it is which our cotemporary, \> ith a great deal more zeal than knowledge, calls cold-blooded murder, describing the Court Martial as an assemblage of " mercenary butchers, who condemned the native for their days pay," and wishing for His Excellency, Capt. Grey, that "he may become a spectacle and mockery to all men j that the worm which dieth not, and the fire which is not quenched, may batten on his conscience, and his punishment cease when"&c. Among the other equally sagacious observations, our contemporary* assures us that " the usurpation of New Zealand was a crime, a great' crime j one equally against the laws of nations and the immutable .law* of right." As to our occupation of New Zealand being against the laws of nations, we think it unnecessary to discuss that point, since M. Guizot, the Prime Minister of France, Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister of England, Lord John Russell, Lord Ho wick, and many other statesmen of like note, have recorded their opinions to the contrary. As to its being against the immutable laws of right, we really cannot view ourselves in the light of transgressors on that score. "God has made the world" as Lord Grey eloquently said, " to be cultivated and enjoyed, not abandoned as a desert for cannibals and savages to possess to the exclusion of civilized man." We found in these islands, containing an area of nearly an hundred million acres, about 110,000 inhabitants, occupying chiefly their northern extremity, cannibals, rapidly exterminating themselves by wars, infanticides, and many other hortid crimes. We proposed to- occupy those deserts where they had never set foot, to convert them into f)ouii»hing settlements, and to give tothe savages the arts of civilization and the blessings of peace. A large propoition of them, receive us wiih open arms : a few turbulent spirits resist us, and intruding into distiicts which were never theirs, commit hori'id murders, and oppose our peaceful occupation of the soil. The Government of our country comes to our aid, and a chief, acting as we have above described, is punished by death as a warning to bthers yet in arms, and equally guilty and foolish. We really do not feel, on the most careful probing of our conscience, that either our occupation, of -the country, or the subsequent evenl-^arVtf "friint'," with which we ought to go burfhened till the day of judgment, or for any more limited period. If, however, we arc to blame, we may perhaps be excused for asking whether it is public opinion in Van Dieruen's Land that we ought to look fdr oaf .reproof. What has become of the very numerous „&borigiues of that inland ? Montgomery Martiu tellt us that, after " a desultory warfare" had long co«*

tinned between them and the settlers, tlie miserable remnant was hunted into a corner, caught, and exported to a barren island in Bass's Straits. Martin asserts that they had been reduced to about 300 in number. Bishop Broughton, before the Aborigines' Committee, says they were only 50, if our memory misleads us not, The blood' of those exterminated— not by any judicial sentence and execution, but by rifle and other less open methods — cries out against the Tasmanians to this day, and their death was, if you like it, " a crime, a very great crime," of which it is to be hoped our neighbours had repented before casting the first stone at us. Nor can we help thinking that the violent language and strong expressions which our contemporary has directed against Capt. Grey, for his supposed share in the transaction might have been spared. We, in New Zealand, are perhaps quite as moral a people as the inhabitants of Van Diemen's Land : we have no particular reason fur wishing the gallows abolished ; no hostile reminiscences of stocks, whipping posts, Or iron garters ; nothing which induces us to desire that the rigours of the la vv should be so relaxed as to enable every man to make free with his neighbour's Hie or pro pcrty, and (o do whatsoever is good in his own eyes. We arc anxious that the svord of justice should not be unsheathed without a cause ; but no less desirous that it should be wielded with whatever severity is needful to protect peaceful and civilised man from the aggressions of the savage and cannibal. The miserably feeble policy adopted by previous Governors towards the natives, is the sole cause of the existing necessity to control them by force, and Captain Grey never did a more humane act, nor one which tended more to prevent bloodshed, than when he permitted the sentence of the Court Martial to be cxc euted.

AN EMIGRANT'S FAREWELL. yarewell, England! blessings on thee, Stern and niggard as thou art ; Harshly, Mother, thou hast used me, And my bread thou hast refused me ; But 'tis agony to part. 'Twill pass over ; for I would not Bear again what I could tellHalf the ills that I haye suffered— Though I loved thee twice as well. So— my blessings on thee, England, And a long and last farewell. Other regions will provide me Independence lor my a/re; Recompense lor hard exertion, For my children {he reversion Of a goodly heritage. -England — this tliou could'sl not give m»; England, pamperer of squires, Landlord-ridden, pride encumbered, Quencher of the poor man's fires ! But, farewell ! My blessing on thee; Thou art country of my sires. Though I love, I'm glad to fly thee. Who would live in hopeless toil. Evil-steeped, and ill-exampled, Press'd and jostled, crushed and trampled, interloper on the soil, If there were one other country Where an honest man might go?— • Winning corn-fields from the forest, All his own too— blow by blow. Farewell, England,— l regret thee, But my tears refute to flow. Haply, o'er the southern ocean I shall do my part to rear A new nation, Saxon-blooded, "Which, with plenty crowned aud studded, To its happy children dear, Shall eclipse thy fame, 0 England ; Taught and warned alike by thee;— Mightier with unshackled commerce, Mightier in her men more free, Mightier in her virgin vigour, And her just equality. But farewell. My blessing on thee ! Never, till my latest day, Shall niy memory cease to ponder On thy fate, where'er I wander. Never thall I cease to pray That thy poor may yet be happy ; That thy rich their pride may quell ; That thou may'st in peaceful progress All thy misery dispel. Queen of nations— once their model — God be with thee ! Fare-thee-well. —Voices from the Crowd, by Charles Mackay.