It should be mentioned that while all this was going on, the Premier, Mr. Stafford, was absent in England, and that his colleagues supported the Governor’s action.  Parliament did not assemble until war had broken out, and then a majority of members conceived themselves bound to stand by what had been done.  Nevertheless, so great was the doubt about the wisdom and equity of the purchase that most of the North Island members even then condemned it.  Most of the South Island members, who had much to lose and nothing to gain by war, thought otherwise.  Very heavily has their island had to pay for the Waitara purchase.  It was not a crime, unless every purchaser who takes land with a bad title which he believes to be good is a criminal.  But, probably wrong technically, certainly needless and disastrous, it will always remain for New Zealand the classic example of a blunder worse than a crime.

[Illustration]

Chapter XVI

TUPARA[1] AGAINST ENFIELD

  “The hills like giants at a hunting lay,
   Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.”

[Footnote 1:  Tupara (two-barrel), the Maori name for the short double-barrelled guns which were their handiest weapons against us in bush warfare.]

In 1860 the Taranaki settlement was growing to be what it now is—­a very pleasant corner of the earth.  Curving round the seashore under the lofty, lonely, symmetrical cone of Egmont, it is a green land of soft air and many streams.  After long delays and much hope deferred, the colonists—­mostly English of the south-west counties—­had begun to prosper and to line the coast with their little homesteads standing among peach orchards, grassy fields, and sometimes a garden gay with the flowers of old Devon.  Upon this quiet little realm the Maoris swept down, and the labour of twenty years went up in smoke.  The open country was abandoned; the settlers took refuge in their town, New Plymouth.  Some 600 of their women and children were shipped off to Nelson; about twice as many more who could not be induced to leave stayed huddled up in the little town, and the necessity of keeping a strong force in the place to defend them from a sudden dash by the Maoris hampered the conduct of the campaign.  Martial law was proclaimed—­destined not to be withdrawn for five years.  After a time the town was protected by redoubts and a line of entrenchment.  Crowded and ill-drained, it became as unhealthy as uncomfortable.  Whereas for sixteen months before the war there had not been a funeral in the district, they were now seen almost daily.  On the alarm of some fancied Maori attack, noisy panics would break out, and the shrieks of women and cries of children embarrassed husbands and brothers on whom they called for help, and whose duty as militiamen took them to their posts.  The militia of settlers, numbering between four and five hundred, were soon but a minor