Not the least of poor Mr. Shortland’s troubles were financial.  He inherited debts from his predecessor.  Indeed, the New Zealand Treasury may be said to have been cradled in deficits.  In 1841 Hobson’s expenditure had been L81,000 against a revenue of L37,000, most of which was the product of land sales.  In 1842 the revenue was L50,000, of which only L11,000 came from land sales; and in 1843 this source of income fell to L1,600.  The southern settlers complained, truly enough, that whilst they found much of the money, nearly all of it was spent in Auckland.  In 1844—­if I may anticipate—­Mr. Shortland’s successor had the melancholy duty of warning the Colonial Office that to meet an inevitable outlay of L35,000 he could at the best hope for a revenue of L20,000.  Mr. Shortland himself, in 1843, tried to replenish the treasury chest by borrowing L15,000 in Sydney.  But New Zealand, which has lately borrowed many times that sum at about three per cent. interest, could not then raise the money at fifteen per cent.  Mr. Shortland next drew bills on the English treasury, which were dishonoured, though the mother country afterwards relented so far as to lend the sum, adding it to the public debt of the Colony.  Finally, the Governor, who on arrival superseded Mr. Shortland, made a beginning by publicly insulting that gentleman.  With proper spirit the Secretary at once resigned, and was sent by Downing Street to govern a small island in the West Indies.

If neither Captain Hobson nor Mr. Shortland found official life in New Zealand otherwise than thorny, their career was smooth and prosperous compared to that of the Governor who now appears on the scene.  Admiral—­then Captain—­Robert Fitzroy will have a kind of immortality as the commander of the Beagle—­Darwin’s Beagle.  His scientific work as a hydrographer at the Admiralty is still spoken of in high terms.  He was unquestionably a well-meaning sailor.  But his short career in New Zealand is an awful example of the evils which the Colonial Office can inflict on a distant part of the Empire by a bad appointment.  It is true that, like his predecessors, Fitzroy was not fairly supported by the authorities at Home.  They supplied him with neither men nor money, and on them therefore the chief responsibility of the Colony’s troubles rest.  But a study of his two years of rule fails to reveal any pitfall in his pathway into which he did not straightway stumble.

Captain Fitzroy was one of those fretful and excitable beings whose manner sets plain men against them, and who, when they are not in error, seem so.  Often wrong, occasionally right, he possessed in perfection the unhappy art of doing the right thing in the wrong way.  Restless and irascible, passing from self-confidence to gloom, he would find relief for nerve tension in a peevishness which was the last quality one in his difficult position should have shown.  An autocratic official amid little rough, dissatisfied communities