THE NEW ZEALAND WAR AND SIR GEORGE GREY. I T
is tolerably certain that the policy of Sir George Grey in
New Zealand has borne its natural fruit in the new war, begun by the Maories with circumstances of great atrocity, which we described last week, only a day or two before the departure of the last mail. The result is said, on apparently good authority, to have been an urgent request despatched to Lord Elgin by Sir George for the loan of some Sikh regiments to put down the insurrection,—the very suggestion which we ourselves offered last week, but which we accompanied by another of almost more importance to the peace and good government of the colony, —the recall of Sir George Grey, and the substitution of Sir John Lawrence, or some other first-class administrative ruler experienced in dealing with enemies of the Maori class. The Sikhs may do to reduce the Maories, but a head is wanted as well as hands, and a head accustomed to make inferior races feel at once respect and confidence. Now Sir George Grey has throughout mis- taken the true policy to be adopted towards the Maories. He has mistaken a coaxing policy for a kind policy ; and no unkindness could in effect be worse. The Governor has attained amongst the natives the reputation of burrowing to his ends "like a fox or a rat" beneath the ground. They have met him in the same spirit—with outward concilia- tion concealing a spirit of fixed hostility. In March the Governor made an attempt to detach the powerful tribe of the Waikatos from the league which centres round the Maori King. He was received with open arms and pleasant smiles till he came to the real point at issue, and endeavoured to make them abjure the dream of Maori inde- pendence or the native king movement. Then all became sullen reserve ; nothing could be obtained from the Waikatos; it was certain that they would not sacrifice their policy of independence, and tolerably certain, though at the time they disclaimed the intention, that at the first breach they would rush to the support of the Maories in the neighbourhood of Tataraimaka, who were living on land that they claimed only by "right of the conquest" made two years ago. In short, they smiled on Sir George Grey, on condition that he would let them do as they would towards the colonists. They had no notion of sacrificing anything in deference to his command.
Indeed, Sir George Grey's peace has been all along a hollow truce. The Queen's authority has never been re-established over the Maories of the northern island at all. Sir George Grey has ruled the colonists, but he has scarcely even affected to rule the native tribes. They have quietly remained in possession of all they had taken from the English at Taranaki ;—the settlers have never ventured to return to the outlying farms; —the roads (for example, the Omata road) have not been made, for the Maories would not permit it ;—the mails have sometimes been stopped; men's lives have not been safe; law and justice over native criminals have been a fiction, and the ship Lord Worsley was openly pillaged. In the settlement of Hawke's Bay, as we are told by the Nelson Examiner. " Lynch law is chronic, and is the regular resort of the natives for disposing of the trespass cases that arise in all pastoral countries." At Mongonui, " native offenders against the laws of the colony openly mock at the European, when they see him receiving punishment for the same offence which passes unnoticed in themselves." At Wanganui, a native sued in an English court and lost his cause. Had lie gained it he would have used the authority of the Court. But having lost it he forcibly seized property of sixteen times the value, and the defendant who gained the- cause has to pay costs. In another case we read that a. Maori attempted violence to a girl ten years old ; the- criminal escaped, and the native-king soldiers with loaded. guns resisted the native police who attempted to make a capture. Over the whole island the Ranangas, recently. formed for the administration of justice among the natives, are defied in multitudes of cases. Such was the state of things before this new act of war was committed. And yet, in spite of all this, Sir George Grey has shut his eyes, and "made belief very much" that the natives loved and were prepared to obey him. He has amused himself with saying "peace and safety" while all was war and danger. He has reported the most beautiful things of the Maori dispositions_ Hehas urged the settlers to have faith, or, perhaps we should say, superstitious belief, in the pacific resolves of natives who were known to have decided on war, and to have- been lying in ambush for English lives. He has remon- strated with solitary settlers for not trusting themselves on distant farms ; he has tried to persuade ladies that. it would be perfectly safe to ride freely into the unprotected country,—and all this up to the very hour before an out- break which will probably set most of the fightine-° men among 70,000 Maories at open war with the English Government and colonists. We can call Sir George Grey's conduct nothing: short of absolute infatuation. The native land commissioner, Mr. Parris, was so persuaded of the imminence of the outbreak from the information given to him by friendly natives, that he went down to the boundary of the land between the English settlement and the native settlement, and remained_ there warning people not to pass along, and yet, as we said. last week, it was admitted that the Governor had strongly opposed his imparting this conviction to others. In short, Sir George Grey, though he had never re-established the Queen's authority in the northern island, could not bear to- admit even to himself, still less to others, how powerful and how rapidly increasing were the elements of disaffection ill-concealed beneath the heaving surface of the Maori society.
Now this is not a man to entrust with the re-organization of this thoroughly disturbed colony. A man who cannot face- his difficulties boldly, who tries to think and to make others think that he has removed a volcano which he has only tempo- rarily smothered with materials that the first explosion will turn into dangerous missiles, is not the man whom the Govern- ment ought to leave at the head of affairs in a time of so- much peril. The New Zealand Government has, it is said, been hampered in the native question by the Colonial Legisla- ture. If so, it is only the more reason for sending out it Governor who can control the Legislature in these respects ;— which he can only do by first showing that he can govern the Maories. The interferences of the Legislature have arisen, entirely from the helplessness of the system hitherto followed. Weowe it to the Imperial Government, to the unfortunate natives themselves, to the colonists most of all, to send them a man who has proved that he can grapple with one of the most difficult of all problems—the just government of a warlike but inferior race.
Previous page
