shifted and changed like the cloud shown to Polonius.  Politics made strange bedfellows; Cabinets were sometimes the oddest hybrids.  One serviceably industrious lawyer, Mr. Henry Sewell, was something or other in nine different Ministries between 1854 and 1872.  The premier of one year might be a subordinate minister the next; or some subtle and persistent nature, like that of Sir Frederick Whitaker, might manage chiefs whom he appeared to follow, and be the guiding mind of parties which he did not profess to direct.  Lookers-on asked for more stable executives and more definite lines of cleavage.  Newly arrived colonists impatiently summed it all up as mere battling of Ins against Outs, and lamented the sweet simplicity of political divisions as they had known them in the mother country.

Chapter XV

GOVERNOR BROWNE’S BAD BARGAIN

“In defence of the colonists of New Zealand, of whom I am
one, I say most distinctly and solemnly that I have never known
a single act of wilful injustice or oppression committed by any
one in authority against a New Zealander.”

          
                                                            —­Bishop Selwyn (1862).

Colonel Gore Browne took the reins from Colonel Wynyard.  The one was just such an honourable and personally estimable soldier as the other.  But though he did not involve his Parliament in ridicule, Governor Browne did much more serious mischief.  In ordinary matters he took the advice of the Stafford Ministry, but in Native affairs the Colonial Office had stipulated that the Governor was to have an over-riding power.  He was to take the advice of his ministers, but not necessarily to follow it.  To most politicians, as well as the public, the Native Department remained a secret service, though, except as to a sum of L7,000, the Governor, in administering Native affairs, was dependent for supplies on his ministers, and they on Parliament.  On Governor Browne, therefore, rests the chief responsibility for a disastrous series of wars which broke out in 1860, and were not finally at an end for ten years.  The impatience of certain colonists to buy lands from the Maori faster than the latter cared to sell them was the simple and not too creditable cause of the outbreak.  A broad survey of the position shows that there need have been no hurry over land acquisition.  Nor was there any great clamour for haste except in Taranaki, where rather less than 3,000 settlers, restricted to 63,000 acres, fretted at the sight of 1,750 Maoris holding and shutting up 2,000,000 acres against them.  So high did feeling run there that Bishop Selwyn, as the friend of the Maori, was, in 1855, hooted in the streets of New Plymouth, where the local newspaper wrote nonsense about his “blighting influence.”  Yet, as he tersely put it in his charge to his angry laity of the district guilty of this unmannerly outburst,