paid for the land on which they had been living during their absence.  Governor Hobson could not foresee that cases would occur in which the whole purchase money of broad lands would be swallowed up in the costs of sale, or that a greedy tribe of expert middlemen would in days to come bleed Maori and settler alike.  Yet it would have been but reasonable for the Colonial Office to exert itself to palliate the effects of the staggering blows it thus dealt the pioneer colonists of New Zealand.  They were not all land-sharks; most of them were nothing of the sort.  It was but natural that they felt with extreme bitterness that the Queen’s Government only appeared on the scene as the friend and protector of the aborigines.  For the Whites the Government had for years little but suspicion and restraint.

It would have been only just and statesmanlike if the recognition of Maori ownership had been accompanied by a vigorous policy of native land purchase by the authorities.  But it was not.  Captain Hobson was only scantily supplied with money—­he had L60,000 sent him in three years—­and did not himself appear to recognise the paramount need for endowing the Colony with waste land for settlement.  He is said to have held that there need be no hurry in the matter inasmuch as the steady decrease of the Maoris would of itself solve the problem.  Nearly sixty years have passed since then, and the Maori race is by no means extinct.  But Captain Hobson, though a conscientious and gallant man, was no more imbued with the colonizing spirit than might be expected of any honest English naval officer.  Of such money as he had he wasted L15,000 at the outset in buying a site for a town in the Bay of Islands on a spot which he quickly had to abandon.  Moreover, he was just what a man in his irksome and difficult position should not have been—­an invalid.  Within a few weeks after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi he was stricken with paralysis.  Instead of being relieved he was left to be worried slowly to death at his post.  To have met the really great difficulties and the combination of petty annoyances which beset him, the new governor should have had the best of health and spirits.  The complications around him grew daily more entangled.  In the North the excellent settlers, who with their children were to make the province of Auckland what it is, were scarcely even beginning to arrive.  The Whites of his day there were what tradesmen call a job lot.  There were the old Alsatian; the new speculator; genuine colonists, rari nantes; a coterie of officials; and the missionaries, regarding all with distrust.  The whole barely numbered two thousand.  Confronting the Whites were the native tribes, who, if united and irritated, could have swept all before them.  Hobson, a man accustomed to command rather than to manage, was instructed to control the Maoris by moral suasion.  He was to respect their institutions and customs when these were consistent with humanity