THE SATURDAY REVIEW ON THE GOVERNOR, THE MINISTRY, AND THE WAR.

Colonist, Volume IV, Issue 347, 15 February 1861, Page 2

THE SATURDAY REVIEW ON THE GOVERNOR, THE MINISTRY, AND THE WAR.

If any disaster should come of the little war of races into which we are plunging at the Antipodes, of course the Government at home will be held responsible. Possibly they may hold it a duty to defend at any cost their absent officers^ But in spite of this constitutional form, the reality Is unfortunately all the other way. They are never consulted about the constant wars at distant points which bring us such largo bills and such little credit, and^ which it is afterwards their onerous task to justify. Subordinate .officials of small celebrity and narrow functions have unfortunately the terrible power, of loading us with taxes, and burdening,tl(e. English name with responsibilities which no statesman under the eye of public opinion at" home . would have ventured to undertake. Whatever complicity the English Governmentmay hereafter find themselves driven by force of circumstances to assume, we propose in an unconstitutional way to discuss the war as the act, and the sole act, of Governor Browne. The policy of the war has been much canvassed in New Zealand; and the pleadings on both sides have now arrived in England. Several Englishmen^ high character and calm judgment are of opinion that the war is ah unjust one. The mass of the settlers, on the other hand, entertain no misgivings as to the justice of their cause, and call passionately for more troops, fiercer measures, and the rejection of all proposals of what they term a premature peace. The case of the natives, embodied in a pamphlet by Archdeacon Ha<?neld, has been for some months in England. The Governor, with more official deliberation, has only just printed and sent home the despatches which contain his own justification. The controversy ia by no means one on which Englishmen can afford to look with indifference. The last New Zealand war is stated, on good authority^ to have cost several thousand pounds for every' Maori we killed. There is.no ground for believing that the present contest will be a cheaper luxury. A New Zealand war has, therefore, this amount of interest for the English public, tHat it isonly a circuitous mode of expressing the more familiar idea of an extra penny or an extra twopence on the Income-tax.

The cause in dispute is in itselt very complicated, but the story of the quarrel is simple enough. The settlers of New Plymouth have long wanted land; and especially they have cast the eyes of desire on a bit of valuable land adjoining the mouth of the river Waitara, just to the north of their settlement, which, as the Governor expresses it, is " essentially necessary for the consolidation of the province.l' There was only one difficulty in the gratification of this legitimate desire, and that was, that the land belonged to Maori proprietors who did not choose, to sell it. To remove this difficulty, Governor Browne was brought down from Auckland, and made an expedition up to the Waitara to see if he could entice or overawe the recalcitrant proprietors. Having summoDed a meeting of natives, and announced that he would never buy land " without an undisputed title," he invited them to offer their land.- Thereupon one Teira got up and offered to sell the coveted block at the mouth of the river Waitara. The offer was not allowed to pass uncoutested. Another native, named Paoi a, denied Teira's pretension of sole ownership; and William King, the chief of the tribe resident on the land in question, told the Governor, "Waitara is in my hands, I will not give it up.' 1 It seems that the English language, like everything else, is upside down at the Antipodes, for this appears to have answered Governor Browne's notion of an undisputed title. Without any further ceremony than an investigation of title conducted in the office of a deputy land-agent, he closed with Teira's offer, and seized up6n the land. William King still maintaining his own right, resisted, first, the surveyors, and then the troops. Blood was shed, and a native war has been the result.

There are, too questions raised by Governor Browne's proceedings—a legal one and a political one; and the legal question is very far the smallest of the two. It is very difficult to arrive at even an approximate conclusion as to the strict legal rights of the parties to the dispute, for both the facts and the law are differently stated on either side. The Governor asserts that Teira" and his friends were the true and sole proprietors. Archdeacon HadMd, on the other hind declares that William King had a proprietary right in the land, and that whatever rights Teira ..possessed he possesses through his father, a gentleman named Tainati Raru, who was opposed to the sale. This fact, if true, would fatally invalidate Teira's right to alienate. ButofTamati Baru's opposition'to the sale there is no trace in the despatches. On the contrary, his name appears by the Bide of Teira's as siguatry to a figurative epistle, in which Teira and his friends exhort the Governor in this fashion:—

•' Our thoughts are that you should shorten our work and pay us for our piece ot land at Waitara, because, if it is prolonged, it will be. the same as a female forsaken by her lover. But marry, then we shall sleep properly upon the sacred law of God."

If, after signing this letter, Tamati Raru assured Archdeacon Hadfield that he had opposed the sale, it,is evident that he was addicted to romancing. On the other hand, the hypothesis is quite conceivable that his signature was attached, without authority, by his hopeful son Teira. Similar issues on matters of fact meet us at every turn. Governor Browne makes a great deal of an admission whicfcFa land agent is supposed to have extracted f?om William King to the effect that Teira had this much-disputed right to the bit of land. But then Archdeacon Hadfield replies that William King never made any such admission, and that the notion that he had done so had no other origin than the land agent's ignorance of the Maori idiom. Anyhow, King's letter to the Governor, proclaiming his own right to the land, is printed iii these very papers; and, therefore, of his protests, there could have been no doubt whatever. Then there is a whole crop of intricate questions touching William King's mana — i.e., his feudal right as chief, under Maori law, to veto the alienation of land by any member of the tribe. He had been absent a few years on a trading expedition. Did his absence destroy his mana? Or was it revived by his return? During that absence the WaikatO3 had overrun the land, and then retired. Did that foray transfer the mana to them? Then it so happened.that during his absence, the fraudulent purchases of the New Zealand Company took place, and that this block of land was involved in their transactions, and m all the network of revised and re-revised rearrangements which arose out of them. In short, it was as thorny a case as could well have been generated by the combination of uncertain law with disputed fact. It was just the sort of case which the Court of Chancery, in its old unreformed condition, would have gloated over and mumbled for at least half a century.

It is quite clear that no authority in Lngland can ever have the means of forming any decisive opinion as to the legal merits of the dispute. But it will not be by the mere legal merits that Governor Browne will be judged. Even if he was in the right, it was no case for applying the wmmwjus* &»<! he applied.it in a, clespotiq.

fashim which turned it into the deepest injustice. There were grave political considerations which could not have been absent from his mind. We can judge, from his own papers, of the delicacy of the position in which he knew himself to stand. In August last year, before: his course upon this question had been finally taken, he writes thus to the Secretary of State :— " I caunot, even by silence, lead you to suppose that I consider the force stationed in New Zealand sufficient to maintain the peace of the colony if threatened either from within or from without. . . . There are seldom wanting disaffected Europeans who, for wilful purposes (sic), desire to foment discord between the two races ; and, by the last mail from Wellington, I learn that a deserter and others have been disturbing the minds of the natives in that neighborhood, aud exciting them to anus: that they were purchasing arms extensively, and being drilled ; and that they had used menaces which had alarmed both the*settlers and the civil authorities. I trusUheie fears will prove exaggerated, and the evil influence has not spread beyond the district. If, however, blood were once shed by Europeans, even in self-defence, it would be impossible to foresee the consequence. Some unprotected family would probably be murdered in revenge ; the murderers would find countenance and support in their tribe; and the flames of war, once kindled, would extend throughout the island." Mr. Richmond, the New Zealand Prime Minister, gives a similar picture of the state of the native mind, at the same time affording us an insight into the cause to which it is due :— "But there are others whose objects [in the Native King movement] have been, from the beginning, less loyal. These men have viewed with extreme jealousy the extension of the settled territory and the increase of the European population. * Various influences have combined to augment tho offect on their minds of this natural feeling. 'The lower class of the settlers, sometimes wantonly, sometimes under provocation, have held out threats of a coming time when the whole race will bo reduced to a servile condition. Of late a degraded portion of the newspaper press has teemed with menaces of this kind, and with scurrilous abuse of the natives, and all who take an interest in their welfare. False notion.3 respecting the purposes of the British authorities have been industriously spread by Europeans inimical to the Government, and whose traitorous counsels enable them to maintain a lucrative influence over their credulous native clients." It must have been evident to the Governor himself that the danger of a war of races was imminent. Nor were the combatants very illmatched. The white and colored populations are about equal; and the Maoris are in possession of all the strong places in the island. The infatuated greediness of the traders has forced the colonial Parliament to relax the law against the sale of arms, which Sir George Grey had always insisted upon with especial earnestness; the result is that the Maoris are thoroughly well armed. To use the words of the commanding officer in one of the late affrays, " The natives soon made us aware that they possessed pieces of long range, against which our muskets were of i f o avail." Nor are they merely formidable in their own mountain fastnesses. The Native Secretary, a most competent authority, is of opinion that it will require a force of 5000 men simply to defend the English settlements, without any question of mastering the natives on their own ground. We suspect that it will require a great deal of eloquence to induce the English Government to bury a force of 5000 men in New Zealand .garrisons. It was in this condition of things that Governor Browne thought it wise to outrage a friendly chief—for in the days of Rangihaeta, William King fought on the British side, and has always opposed the Native King movement —by the forcible assertion of a disputed land claim. It was impolitic enough to insist at such a moment on such a claim. But the mode in which it was pressed changed impalicy into flagrant injiistice. Whether the Governor's title, acquired through Teira, be a good one or a bad one, there is no defence for the process by which it was enforced. It is one of the most striking instances of the " nigger-despising " temper—the bane of our colonial policy—that our recent history, rich in such experience, can furnish. If there had been a dispute as to the ownership of a real estate between the New Zealand Government and a white settler, the Governor would have condescended to a very different style of [proceeding. The case would have been tried in open court, before a tribunal scrupulously impartial; witnesses would have been examined by counsel on each side; and the facts of the case would have been decided by a jury carefully selected so as to be free frem bias or prepossession. A much simpler process is thought sufficient for one of the Queen's subjects of Maori blood. The jurisprudence of Brennus, the simple arbitrament of the sword, is Governor Browne's recipe for settling native claims. The title is tried in the office of a deputy landagent —the paid removable officer of the Government, that is, one of the parties to the suit. In fact, such is the simplicity of the Governor's jurisprudence that the deputy land-commissioner is plaintiff, judge, jury, witness, and constable all in one. He is bothared by no counsel, and hampered by no forms; and he is protected from the torments of indecision by the reflection that his continuance .in office depends on his success in purchasing land. His decision, once arrived at in this free and easy manner, is without appeal; and he proceeds himself to dispossess the native claimant, against whom he has decided on his own suit. And in carrying out this sentence he is to be backed, if need be, by the whole force of the British empire. If Mr. Cowper, desiring somebody's estate for the Crown, were to buy of one of the tenants on tho estate what the tenant professed to be a valid title to it, were to send it down to his own solicitor for investigation, and were then to march in the Grenadier Guards to take possession, the proceedings would be precisely amiogous ito that which the natives of New Zealand are now •engaged in resisting by force of arms. Is it to bo wondered at, that such a form of legal process should have inspired them <vith a very moderate confidence in the justice of the English Government? If the Maoris were as tame as they are spirited, and as weak as they are formidable, they would hardly submit to be thrust but of lands inherited from far distant ancestors at the beck of any subordinate official who can buy up a fictitious, or at least a disputed, counter claim. We can pretend to give no opinion upon the validity or invalidity of William King's claim upon the land. Probably no one on this side of the globe is in a condition to unravel the complicated threads of the dispute. But this at least is clear—that the Governor has dealt with a Maori as he never would have dared to deal with an Englishman, and that he has plunged us into a co3tly and perilous quarrel to uphold a paltry claim which, be it good or bad, lias been advanced, prosecuted, and carried out with very little regard for the most obvious principles of iustice.