and decency, otherwise not.  How in the last resort he was to stamp out inhuman and indecent customs was left unexplained, though he asked for an explanation.  Certainly not by force; for it would have been flattery to apply such a term to the tiny handful of armed men at his back.  Troops were not sent until the war of 1844.  During the five years after that the defence of New Zealand probably cost the Imperial Government a round million, the result of the starving policy of the first five years.

[Illustration:  VIEW OF NELSON

Photo by HENRY WRIGHT]

Moreover, for the reasons already sketched, the English in New Zealand formed a house divided against itself.  The differences in the north between Maoris’ officials, Alsatians of the old school, and settlers of the new, were sufficient to supply the Governor with a daily dish of annoyance.  But the main colony of New Zealand was not in the north round Governor Hobson, but in Cook’s Straits.  There was to be found the large and daily increasing antagonistic element being brought in by the New Zealand Company.  With an energy quite unchecked by any knowledge of the real condition of New Zealand, the directors of the Company in London kept on sending out ship-load after ship-load of emigrants to the districts around Cook’s Straits.  The centre of their operations was Port Nicholson, but bodies of their settlers were planted at Wanganui, at the mouth of the fine river described in the first chapter; at New Plymouth, hard by the Sugar-Loaves, in devastated almost empty Taranaki; and at pleasant but circumscribed Nelson in the South Island.  Soon these numbered five times as many Whites as could be mustered in the north.  Upon them at the very outset came the thunderbolt of Governor Hobson’s proclamation refusing recognition to their land purchases.  Of this and of the land clause in the Treaty of Waitangi the natives were made fully aware by the missionaries.  Rauparaha, before told of and still the most influential chief near Cook’s Straits, was exactly the man to take advantage of the situation.  He had taken the muskets and gunpowder of the Company, and was now only too pleased to refuse them the price they thought to receive.  It was, as already said, impossible to justify all, or nearly all, of Colonel Wakefield’s gigantic purchase.  But it was certainly incumbent on the Government to find a modus vivendi with the least possible delay.  On the one hand they had thousands of decent, intelligent English colonists newly landed in a savage country, and not in any way responsible for the Company’s haste and ignorance.  The settlers at any rate had paid ample value for their land.  They had given L1 for each acre of it.  Angry as the English Government had been with the New Zealand Company for the defiant dispatch of its settlers, Lord John Russell had instructed Hobson’s superior, Sir George Gibbs, that the emigrants should be regarded with kindness and consideration.