land. About the time at which South Australia was first settled, and the first foundations of Melbourne were laid, an Association was formed in London for colonising another New Zeagroup of islands in the Pacific Seas. It either purchased, or it enabled individuals to purchase, large tracts of land from the native chieftains of New Zealand, and in 1838 it applied to Parliament for powers to govern the colony. The Colonial Office opposed the proposal; a Tory member declared that we had no more right to colonise New Zealand by an act of the Imperial Legislature than to colonise France; 2 and the bill was thrown out by a large majority.3 But in the following year the Government found itself compelled to take the step which it had properly refused to allow others to take for it. It declared New Zealand to be subject to the Crown of England, and it empowered the Governor of New South Wales to subject British residents in New Zealand to his authority. In 1840 it took a further step by appointing a Lieutenant-Governor of New Zealand, and soon afterwards it constituted the colony by royal charter.1 Blessed with a climate resembling that of England, New Zealand has been popularly regarded as the future Britain of the Southern Hemisphere. The progress which the colony has made has both encouraged and apparently justified the prediction. Yet there are few subjects on which ordinary people betray greater ignorance than on the position of New Zealand. Sir Charles Dilke has pointed out that, though "the future of the Pacific shores is inevitably brilliant, it is not New Zealand, the centre of the water-hemisphere, which will occupy the position that England has taken in the Atlantic, but some country such as Japan or Vancouver, jutting out 1 Hansard, vol. xliii. pp. 542, 871. The Church Missionary Society had, among others, acquired land of the native Maories. Ibid., p. 873. The land was usually acquired for a nominal consideration, “such as a blanket, a hatchet, or a gun." Porter's Progress of the Nation, p. 776. 2 Inglis, in Hansard, vol. xliii. p. 872. 3 By 92 votes to 32. Ibid., p. 882. 4 Labouchere, on the 25th of June 1839, said that steps had been taken which would probably lead to the establishment of a colony in New Zealand. Ibid., vol. xlviii. p. 828. into the ocean from Asia or America, as England juts out from Europe." New Zealand, separated from Australia by more than a thousand miles of stormy ocean, can never prove to Australia what England has proved to Europe. Her own advantages of soil and climate may raise her to greatness. She will not rise to greatness as the emporium of Australian trade.1 At the time at which it became a colony New Zealand was inhabited by men of a Malay race. The Maories, as they are The called, are physically among the finest specimens of savages with whom the British have been brought into contact. In dealing with them British authorities have shown a great-Sir Charles Dilke has thought, an excessive 2 -consideration for their rights. The success which devout missionaries working among them achieved gave religious England a peculiar interest in their welfare; and perhaps, in the earlier days of the colony, there was no race in the world which seemed so capable of living, and even combining, with British settlers. But the same fate has overtaken the people and their religion. The race is disappearing, and Christianity is losing its hold on its survivors. The Malay race, of which the Polynesians and Maories are offshoots, readily accepts the truths of Christianity. But its conversion is merely superficial. "The story of Christianity," wrote Sir C. Dilke, "in Hawaii, in Otaheite, and in New Zealand has been much the same; among the Tahitians it was crushed by the relapse of the converts into extreme licentiousness; among the Maories it was put down by the sudden rise of" an antichristian "fanaticism." So quick was the reaction that in a day the number of native Christians was reduced from thirty thousand to some hundreds." A whole 1 Sir C. Dilke's Greater Britain, p. 281. 2 Ibid., p. 277. It is worth while comparing this opinion with Mr. Froude's recent account of New Zealand in Oceana, and especially the remark of one of his informants: "There was one resource between them and bankruptcy. There was the native reserve. It was the richest land in the islands, and, if necessary, could be entered upon and sold." New edition, p. 284. 3 Greater Britain, pp. 268, 269. It may be of interest to add that, when people relapsed thus suddenly from Christianity and civilisation to their old savage habits. extinction. The eventual failure of missionary effort may have been perhaps accelerated by the rapid decay of the Maori race. Before, indeed, a white settler set foot in New Their Zealand, the Maories were probably decreasing in gradual numbers. Since the British have occupied the land the natives have been in process of rapid extinction. Man for man, the Maori has proved himself able to contend with the Briton in war and to rival him in peace. But, race for race, he has fallen before the new-comer. Cannibalism, and wars waged for human flesh, kept down the population before the British came. Drink and immorality have kept down the population since their arrival. The Maori would hardly have been human if he had permanently adopted the God of a people which was supplanting his own race, and he relapsed into his old habits and his old faith. 1 Thus, while in a period of forty years the British population of New Zealand has risen to half a million of persons, the native population has dwindled to less than 50,000 souls;1 and it is almost certain that in the course of time, and of a very short time, no representatives of the Maori race will survive. So rapidly is the superior superseding the inferior race, that, while only a few years ago the two races strove in constant warfare, and the British, supported by the strength and the purse of the mother-country, did not always gain the upper hand, at the present time no Maori chieftain would venture on a fresh appeal to arms. Though for some years the mother-country has thrown on the colony the burden of her own defence, the Maories have not ventured to renew the struggle. The increase of the new-comers has ensured the perpetuation of peace. Selwyn was appointed Bishop of New Zealand, Russell undertook to pay his salary. Stanley, succeeding to the Colonial Office, thought himself bound to carry out Russell's promise. Hume declared that, if Russell had made the promise, he ought to pay the money himself. Hansard, vol. lxv. p. 205. 1 There were 105,000 natives in the Northern Island in 1848, and only 36,000 in 1868. Creasy's Colonial Institutions, p. 337. Moralists may lament the extinction of a race whose individual members have displayed qualities which command both sympathy and admiration. Ordinary people will perhaps conclude it to be neither wise nor useful to regret that a country enjoying great capacity and a fine climate should have passed into fitter hands. New Zealand, probably, at the present time contains one-tenth of the population which England and Wales possessed at the time of the Revolution. But the income and expenditure of the colony, its debt, and its trade already far exceed the income and expenditure, the trade and debt, of England at that time. And income and expenditure, trade and debt, population and capital, are increasing with a rapidity which in the mother-country is not only unknown, but would be impossible. Colonial Thus, from 1840 downwards, the power of England in the Southern Hemisphere was rapidly developed. With this development new ideas of colonies were formed, policy. and new demands were raised by the colonists. The growth of these ideas, the presentation of these demands, cannot be traced with precision in this chapter. Instead of attempting to do so, it will perhaps be more useful to dwell shortly on three great subjects connected with Australia. The first of these is the extinction of the native race; the second, the abolition of transportation; the third, the claim for free institutions and self government. Native races. The researches for which the present generation is famous are gradually revealing to us the history of prehistoric man. We know enough to see that successive races, each possibly evolved from the same central birthplace, have gradually spread over the earth, and introduced, one after another, a slightly higher culture than their predecessors. Professor Boyd Dawkins has shown how in our own country palæolithic man was succeeded by neolitithic man, and how a race which may be possibly identified with the Eskimo gave place to a people which perhaps has its solitary survivors in the Basque provinces, and which in its turn was succeeded by the Celt, just as the Celt was supplanted by the Saxon. These successive strata of people marked, in Western Europe, à gradual evolution. The savage was not superseded by civilisation, but only by a race a little more advanced than himself; and hence in these countries the process of supersession was in many cases slow and in some instances incomplete. The Basque or Iberian, as well as the Celt and the Saxon, the Dane and the Norman, have, it may strongly be suspected, all left their impression on the character and capacity of the modern Briton. A process, in one sense similar and in another sense opposite to this, is going on in our own time. The Anglo-Saxon race is rapidly spreading over a wide portion of the earth's surface. But, instead of superseding, as our ancestors superseded, men in organisation and culture only slightly inferior to itself, it has been brought into contact with whole races living much in the condition which prehistoric man occupied in these islands, thousands and tens of thousands of years ago. The modern Briton, armed with rifle and rocket, would not have had much difficulty in conquering the primeval inhabitants of Great Britain, whose deadliest weapon was a flint-flake or a piece of wood. And the modern Briton has found adversaries thus armed in the countries which he is occupying, and they are disappearing before him like doves before hawks. In some cases the men whom the modern Briton encounters are physically and mentally capable of contending with him on no very unequal terms. They go down before him from the inferiority of their organisation and of their weapons and tools. In other cases the races with whom he is brought into collision have not the physical and the mental capacity which under a higher civilisation might have enabled them to hold their own. In these cases they hardly venture on engaging with the Briton in a struggle for existence. They were, and they are not. The result, however, is in either case the same. Just as the husbandman, advancing his enclosure, reduces the feedingground of the bison and the deer, so the Briton, advancing his boundaries, drives back the primitive races before him. The Maori, like the bison, disturbed in his solitude, turned on |