THE CASE OF THE NEW ZEALAND COMPANY.

THE case of the Company against the Government is stated in the Twelfth Report of the Directors, (reprinted in the Commons Committee's

Appendix, pp. 501-511,) in a Memorandum from the Directors, (Appendix, pp. 370-378,) and in a Statement submitted by the New Zealand Company to the Committee, (Appendix, pp. 380-386). The essential points in these documents appear to be the following.

I. The purpose of the Company, in its acquisition and sales of land in New Zealand, was to obtain a site and raise a fend for colonizatiOn, of which they were to be the trustees and administrators. Of the gross sum realized by their land-sales, they proposed to retain a percentage for themselves sufficient to pay the expenses of

superintendence and interest upon the capital invested by them in the purchase of land from the Natives, and in other prerequisites of their scheme. The distinguishing characteristic of their system, having for its object not mere emigration, but the transplanting at once of all the component parts of society as it were "in frame," was the sale of land in this country at such a price as would create a fund by which a suffi cient supply of labour might be carried to the settlement without further expense to any individual. Besides this, in the Company's second settlement, a considerable proportion of the purchase-money has been devoted to the formation of roads and bridges; and in all, efforts have been made to insure provision of religious instruction, and other ameni ties for the colonists. Whilst it was essential to the Company's objects that they should procure the land for the settlements which they proposed to found, they felt that no price, whether great or small, which they might pay for it at the moment, would be of lasting benefit to the

Natives ; and considered it their duty to make such provision for the future and permanent interests of those parties as would at once be a real consideration for the cessions to be obtained from them, and afford

a guarantee that the Aborigines of New Zealand should not share the common fate of rude tribes brought suddenly into collision with civi lized communities. It was provided, that the land being apportioned by lot to parties purchasing from the Company, one-tenth of the whole area, chosen in like manner, parcel by parcel, should be set aside as inalienable Native reserves; with the expectation that the lands so intermingled with the possessions of a civilized and improving society, would rapidly increase in value, and afford to the Natives a certain pro tection from destitution or being driven back into the wilds. By these arrangements, the Company hoped to rescue the Natives from evils already impending over them ; to relieve the pressure of redundant

labour and capital in England ; and to call into existence a new country,

which should be bound by the closest relations of affection and interest to the old ; while both should be fitted to afford reciprocally the best of

markets for their respective productions. The association of a commercial undertaking with the prosecution of these objects was forced upon the projectors by the Colonial Office, which refused them a charter of incorporation except upon the condition of their becoming a jointstock company. IL The New Zealand Company is now incorporated by a Crown charter, and claims its lands in New Zealand under a promised grant from the Crown. The Company assumed its present form and character

subsequently to the assumption of the sovereignty of New Zealand by the British Crown. They had acquired, or believed they had acquired, a very large tract of land from the Natives, by purchases made, in the only mode then recognized in that country, before the proclamation of British sovereignty ; but subsequently to that proclamation, they aban

doned all claims on the grounds of such purchases, in consequence of an

agreement contracted with them by the Secretary of State for the Colonies. By the agreement in question, the Company undertook to "forego

and disclaim all title or pretence of title to any lands purchased or ac quired by them" from Native chiefs of New Zealand and others ; and to increase their capital stock from 100,000/. to 300,000/. On the other

hand, Lord John Russell undertook that the Crown should grant to the Company four acres of land within a certain district for every pound sterling that should be ascertained by a Government-accountant

to have been expended by them "iii the purchase of lands in New Zea

land from the Native chiefs and others ; in the taking up, chartering, and despatching of ships for the conveyance of emigrants thither ; in the maintenance of such emigrants before and daring the outward voyage; in the purchase and transmission of stores for the public use of the settlers collectively on their arrival ; in surveys ; in the erection of buildings or the execution of other works dedicated exclusively to the public service of the settlement ; and in other heads of ex

penditure or absolute liabilities unavoidably required or reasonably incurred for the above-mentioned purposes." The sole condition at tached to the grant was "proof of expenditure to the satisfaction of the Government-mountant." This agreement was con * Minutes of Evidence to Committee's Report, p. 202. t Appendix to Fourteenth Report of Directors, p. 100. 4 Appendix toCommittee's Report, p. 375.

hided in November 1840. The Company has proved, to the satisfaction of the Government-accountant, an expenditure entitling it to a grant of 762,593 acres of land. The Company increased its capital to the amount required. The charter was issued in February 1841.

IR The Company's agreement with Lord John Russell appears to have been treated as waste paper by the Local Government from the beginning. In a letter addressed by Mr. Vernon Smith to the Chairman of the Company, by direction of Lord John Russell, in December 1840," it was intimated that the Crown intended to lay claims to all lands is New Zealand granted by the chiefs to Europeans for some adequate consideration previously to the establishment of British sovereignty in the islands, and to grant Crown-lands to all British subjects who had spent money there for colonizing purposes, in proportion to their expenditure' in the same way as in the case of the New Zealand Company. The rights acquired to the Company by purchase from the Natives were transferred to the Crown ; and the Company was entitled only to a grant from the Crown of four times as many acres as they had expended pounds sterling for colonizing purposes. The Crown had become the claimant of the lands which the Company's agents had purchased. In this view, the Company ought not to have been called as a litigant party before the Commissioner of LandClaims, but simply as a witness for the Crown. A consequence of the contrary construction put upon the agreement by the Local Government, has been, that the Company and its settlers have been made to appear in a position adverse to the Natives ; the delays in pronouncing a decision have been most vexations; and up to the time of the most recent despatches from the colony, the promised Crown grant had not been issued for a single acre of the Company's land. The mode of procedure in the Commissioner's Court is thus described in the Twelfth Report of the Directors " A Court of Claims was established in the midst of the district to which the Company had acquired a claim by Native purchase when there was no British authority nor any other government in New Zealand; and into this Court the Company was called as a party, and required to establish the claims which Lord John Russell's Agreement had properly compelled them to abandon. The Natives were the party on the other side. Intermediate parties appeared in the form of Whites claiming to have purchased from Natives before the Company. The Court consisted of a gentleman who did not understand a word of the Native language. The Interpreter of the Court held the office of Sub-Protector of Aborigines ; and in that character not only prepared out of Court the claims of the Natives against the Company, but acted as their counsel in Court. There has since been added to his functions that of Arbitrator, to assist in determining the amount of compensation to be paid by the Company to Natives under decree of the Court. He had been appointed, moreover, to the office of Sub-Protector of Aborigines by his father, the Chief Protector for New Zealand—a lay missionary, personally and largely interested in whatever might affect the value of landed property at and near Auckland. There was no surer method of raising the value of land near Auckland—no more certain means of promoting colonization near Auckland at the expense of the Company's settlements—than by decisions of the Court of Claims adverse to the Company, or by delay in coming to any decision. The Court sat for nearly two years without deciding a single case. When you are informed that the gentleman filling the incompatible offices of Protector and Interpreter, and subsequently of Arbitrator, was under twenty years old at the time of receiving these appointments—when you reflect on the right qualifications for the office of Protector of Aborigines in a country like New Zealand, such as experience, habitual prudence, weight of character, and perfect freedom from even the suspicion of self-interested bias—when you consider how the real value of land, and the ideas of the Natives on that subject, had been altered by British colonization—when you think of the utter confusion of ideas which even now prevails among the Natives with respect to their own rights to property in land— and when you make allowance for the facility, and the hope of profit for themselves, with which some of the Whites might instigate the Natives to set up new and extravagant claims for compensation—you will not be surprised at the failure of the Commissioner's Court to produce any but the most deplorable

results. •

" But it is not to the Court that we object, or have ever objected. A Court of Claims seems to have been necessary, in order that the Native title should be extinguished by the Government. What we object to is, the making of the Company a party before the Court, instead of only a witness on behalf of the Crown, according to the principle of Lord John Russell's Agreement. That Agreement contained, in fact, a surrender by the Company to the Crown of all the land which you previously claimed in virtue of purchase from the Natives. If the Company, and other Europeans claiming to have once purchased from the Natives, had only been called as witnesses to satisfy the Commissioner that the purchases had really taken place, the follies and calamities of such a litigation as actually occurred would have been avoided. The spectacle which that litigation presented excited a general ridicule. The claims and counterclaims, direct and intermediate, were as numerous as the considerations alleged to have passed, and the proofs of contract were various and conflicting. Some of the parties in this strange contention of private interests employed English attornies and barristers; one or other of the languages used was always unknown to one or more of the parties interested ; the very thoughts of the several parties on the subject of property in land were so different as to be respectively incomprehensible; the parties best informed on the subject in debate—the Natives, whose law a real property was to be the guide of the Court—never had any law of the sort, but only vague, diversified, conflicting customs; and, to crown all, the Court itself, whose functions were really more important and more delicate than those of the Governor, consisted of a country attorney recently imported from England. The picture is really shameful."

IV. Another source of serious injury to the Company and its settlers was the rival colonization attempted by the Government-officers at Auckland. From the time of the foundation of Auckland, continuous efforts were made to divert capital and labour from the Cook's Straits settlements. Governor Hobson endeavoured, though in vain, to induce the colonists who settled at Nelson to plant themselves in the neighbourhood of Auckland. Labouring emigrants were attracted from Wellington to Auckland by promises of high wages, offered in a Government advertisement, and by emissaries who addressed their solicitations to them in pot-houses. A continuous drain of capital from Cook's Straits was effected by taxes raised from the settlers there and spent at Auckland. Another consequence of the settlement of Auckland as the capital was, that the Cook's Straits settlements were left without the protection of an efficient government. By land Auckland is 600 miles distant from the Company's settlements ; for all practical purposes it is in reality more distant than Sydney or Hobart Town. Hitherto the intercourse has been almost entirely by sea ; the voyage Occupying, at certain periods of the year, little less than a month.

• Parliamentary Papers, 1841; No. 311, page 88.

V. The Local Government's disregard of the agreement with Lord John Russell was countenanced by, if indeed it did not ori • te with the Colonial Office. To the condition imposed by Lord John Rtussell os the Company, that previous to their receiving a grant of land front the Crown, they should prove the amoiaat of their espenditvre for colonizing purposes, to the satisfaction of an accountant named by the Colonial Secretary, Lord Stanley added another—that they should prove the validity of their purchases from the Natives. No such condition is mentioned in the agreement. It is inconsistent with the views of the Government at the time, as expressed in Mr. Vernon Smith's letter of 2nd December 1840, quoted above. On the 29th June 1844, Lord John Russell himself wrote to Mr. Somes—" I believed the extent of land which it would be in the power of the Crown to grant to be far greater than would be enough to satisfy its engagements. I did not suppose that any claim could be set up by the Natives to the millions of acres of land which are to be found in New Zealand neither occupied nor cultivated, nor in any fair sense owned by any individual. I believed, therefore, that, in any case, the Crown could fulfil its promise ; and that when so many pounds had been proved to be expended by the Company in the purchase of landconveyance of emigrants, the purchase of stores, erection of buildings, and other purposes named in the agreement, the Crown would be able to grant to the Company four acres of land for each pound so expended." The Colonial Office has, upon a construction of the agreement irreconcileable with its terms, resting upon hypothetical intentions attributed to the noble lord who contracted it, insisted upon the Company's proving the validity of their purchases from the Natives, and has thus sanctioned and perpetuated the vexatious delays opposed in the Court of the Commissioner of Land-Claims to the completion of the Company's titles.

VL Wearied out by the pertinacity with which the Colonial Office insisted upon the exaction of this additional condition, the Company, in May 1843, accepted a compromise from Lord Stanley. In return for promises of a conditional grant of lands pending the investigations of the Commissioners' Court—of "instructions to the Governor to define Native titles, to settle the claims to land, and to do their best to aid the agents of the Company"—of a local judge, and local representative of the Government at Cook's Straits—the Company agreed to accept the said conditional grant of the lands selected by their agents, with the option, in the event of prior titles being set up, of receiving other lands in lieu of them, or obtaining from the Crown its right of preemption ; and in addition, to accept of 50,0001. worth of land at Auckland, in lieu of 50,000 acres of the land they were already entitled to. A confidential despatch of Lord Stanley to Governor Fitzroy, dated 26th June 1843, explained, and in the opinion of the Directors materially varied, the terms of the agreement ; and of this despatch they were kept in ignorance till the 1st of February 1844. In justification of communicating this gloss or commentary to the Governor unknown to the other contracting party, the Colonial Office " distinctly denies that the arrangement made by the letter of the 12th May 1843, as to the confirmation of the Company's titles, can either in a popular or technical sense be termed an agreement." And not a single step appears to have been taken by the Governor either to define Native titles or to expedite an interim grant of lands to the Company. VIL In addition to the obstacles opposed to the Company's colonizing operations by withholding the promised grants of land and establishing rival settlements under the auspices of the Crown, they complain of impediments from the vexatious delays of office. For instance, when the Company complained of the abstraction of labourers from Port Nicholson by the Governor, they were informed, that "Lord Stanley postponed any observations until he shall have received the petition through Captain Hobson." This postponement was justified by the alleged necessity of adhering to a rule of the Colonial Office, that all complaints against the Governor of a colony must be transmitted through himself. The difficulty of complying with this rule in the case of a colony where the Governor had voluntarily placed himself at such a distance from the main body of settlers is obvious ; but still more glaring is the refusal to afford redress to a company resident in this country for an injury done to them until a year had been wasted in pro forma despatches to and from the colony. The same evasive procrastination was pursued in a case where the rule was totally inapplicable. A lighthouse was wanted for the harbour of Port Nicholson: the Company's agents in the colony could not pledge the funds of their employers for its erection : the Company in London offered to the Government here, to send out the required light on the understanding that the outlay shall be deemed a charge on the harbour-dues levied on vessels entering Port Nicholson. This offer was made in furtherance of one of the main objects for which the Company was incorporated—for that "of executing, erecting, contracting for, and subscribing towards, such public works and buildings, &c. as may be proposed, undertaken, or sanctioned, by us, our heirs, or successors, or by the Governor," &c. The Government was as capable of deciding in Downing Street on the expediency of accepting the offer as the Governor at Auckland—it might at least have done so conditionally; and the Governor certainly could not have been injured by its acceptance. But the "rule" of the Downing Street Office was inexorable.

VIII. The conduct of the Home and Local Government has been to the Company's settlers most disastrous. The dubious state of the Company's title destroys the security of every title in Cook's Straits ; because of the 10,000 British inhabitants of those settlements every occupier derives his title from the Company. This insecurity has produced .an indisposition to invest capital in lands, and exercised a paralyzing influence on the activity of the settlers. The Natives have assumed an attitude of aggression, and the settlers are filled with resentment and alarm. The orders of the Local Government have suspended surveys, and directed Europeans in no case to retain possession of land to which any Native shall merely assert a claim. The result has been, that nilmerous claims have been advanced ; and that the great mass of the agricultural population have in consequence abandoned their settlements and flocked into the towns. The settlers whose courage induces them to confront the danger, remain under a sense of absolute precariousness of possession, if not of life. The labourers are left without employment, and the capitalists forced to subsist on their capital. Some have returned home ; some have gone to New South Wales and Van Diemen 's

Land ; and some have emigrated to Valparaiso, for the purpose of nettling in South America. IX. The effects of the conduct of the Home and Local Governments on the Company's affairs have been equally pernicious. The only source of their income being the sale of lands, the doubts cast on the 'validity of their titles necessarily operated to prevent their deriving any large sums from that source. A still more fatal impression was pro duced by the Wairau massacre, and the conduct of the officers of Government towards the settlers immediately after that event. The im pression that there was no protection for life and property in the Cook's -Straits settlements rendered land utterly unsaleable. None could 'be disposed of either here or in the colony. And while their sources of revenue were thus dried up, their expenditure was unexpectedly increased to a serious extent. The labourers employed by the settlers and on the survey being thrown out of work, the Company's agents were obliged to take them into employment, to save them from starvation. In the settlement of Nelson alone, three hundred labourers were thus thrown on their hands at once, and unrestrained by any authority, exacted :what wages they chose to demand. The Company saw its commercial credit about to be destroyed, and the settlements to be deprived of their support—works stopped, improvements suspended, labourers deprived of subsistence, and intercourse with Europe rendered rare and precarious. At the period of Captain Fitzroy's departure, they found that they had exhausted, in the necessary and legitimate expenses of carrying out emigrants, and of establishing and maintaining their settlements, not only the sum of 280,840/. raised by the sale of lands, but also the whole of their paid-up capitals Under, these circumstances, the Company resolved to contract its operations within the narrowest possible limits, and appeal to the great inquest of the nation. This resolve is expressed in the following terms, in the Twelfth Report of the Directors, approved of by the shareholders of the Company on -the 26th April 1844—

" Our reluctance to entertain a belief in the systematic hostility of the Colonial Office has been destroyed at last. You may now appeal for justice to .a higher tribunal. Conscious as we are of the great disadvantages under which individuals or private parties' labour in struggling for no more than justice against the policy of any department of the Government, we nevertheless rely on the flagrant character of the wrong which has been done you by Lord Stanley's interpretation of Lord John Russell's Agreement; an interpretation which virtually annuls that deliberate contract between the Crown and a body of her Majesty's subjects. We cannot suppose that either Parliament or her 3Hajesty's Ministers collectively will fail to perceive, or decline to remedy, the gross injustice of first requiring you to surrender a large tract of land which you obtained when New Zealand was treated as a foreign country, and to .treble your original capital of 100,0001., and then denying you the promised grant of land from the Crown in proportion to your expenditure for public purposes, which formed the consideration for that surrender and for that increased subscription of capital. We also believe that Parliament will make allowance for the undoubted fact, that the formation of this Company was first proposed by the Colonial Office, and pursued by its founders against their own Inclination, as the only means then available of securing New Zealand for Bri-tish colonization. 'We believe that the sanction by the highest authority of your objects and plans,which is implied by the terms of your Charter under the .head of 'Objects of Incorporation,' will not be overlooked by her Majesty's Ministers or Parliament.

"But an appeal against the Colonial Office forjustice is not our sole reliance. Even if the love of fair play which characterizes our country should not prefer justice to the indulgence of that Department in its animosity towards the Company, we should still hope for a reversal by Parliament of the policy of the Colonial Office in New Zealand. Ever since you, in reality, snatched those islands from the dominion of France, their colonization by England has been inevitable. That may be impeded, but cannot be prevented. Terrible disasters may befal our countrymen now settled there; the war of races which has begun may continue for years ; accounts of shocking scenes of bloodshed and starvation may even now be on their way ; but still in the end British colonization will proceed. How it may be controlled and regulated so as to benefit instead of exterminating the Native race, is a subject of which all the interest must now revive. A former inquiry into that subject by Parliament exposed the mischiefs of the irregular colonization which went on under the mockery of a Native sovereignty, really but feebly exercised by British Missionaries, and steadily upheld by the Colonial Office as preferable to regular colonization. The strange policy which the Colonial Office had till then pursued towards New Zealand, was set aside in favour of more comprehensive, more rational, and really more humane views. But the execution of the new policy has been miserably defective. To say nothing of the lavish expenditure of the Local -Government, with no result but that of fomenting hatred and producing collision between the two races—or of its actual bankruptcy, notwithstanding the -considerable revenue which it has derived from your colonization, and chiefly expended without benefit to anybody but the recipients of official salary—the state of relations between the colonists and the Natives is such as to call for the interference of Parliament. We confidently trust that the whole subject of colonization and government in New Zealand, including the proceedings of this Company, will be strictly investigated by that competent authority. A 'fall and searching inquiry into our own conduct is what we most desire."