Rusden's History.

Thames Star, Volume XIV, Issue 4566, 23 August 1883, Page 2

Rusden's History.

In a review of the above concocted his* tory of New Zealand, the jiijrdney Morning Herald says . —" We pass for the present the fluent invective which Mr Rusden flings at everybody in New Zealand, and at Secretaries of State in England, who incurred his wrath and indignation by holding views concerning the European settlement of New Zealand which did not accord with his own. What we wish to point out now is fhat the enormous labour he had evidently imposed upon himself in acquiring information, the apparent earnestness which pervades his writing, the cunning quotations from speeches, reports, pamphlets, and letters, and the equally cuuning suppression of inconvenient facts and opinions, all help to mislead the English reader as to the merits of the long struggle between Maori and B-ilon, and to inocculate him with a general suspicion as to the methods of colonisation in Australasia. Mr Bryce was not far out when be said that Mr .Rusden wanted to prove was "that the New Zealand colonists were villainous in their entirety. The slanders in the book may be laughed at in Wellington, Auckland, or Dunedin, as also in Melbourne or Sydney; but they are not laughed at ia London, where the book is, probably, a successful deception.