private bargaining with the natives for land, has always been very strong, especially in the Auckland district.  Repeated experience has, however, shown that the results are baneful to all concerned—­demoralizing to the natives, and by no means always profitable to the white negotiators.  When Fitzroy proclaimed that settlers might purchase land from the natives, he imposed a duty of ten shillings an acre upon each sale.  Then, when this was bitterly complained of, he reduced the fee to one penny.  Finally, he fell back on the desperate expedient of issuing paper money, a thing which he had no right to do.  All these mistakes and others he managed to commit within two short years.  Fortunately for the Colony, he, in some of them, flatly disregarded his instructions.  The issue of paper money was one of the few blunders the full force of which Downing Street could apprehend.  Hence his providential recall.

Before this reached him he had drifted into the last and worst of his misfortunes, an unsuccessful war, the direct result of the defeat at the Wairau and the weakness shown thereafter.  It was not that he and his missionary advisers did not try hard enough to avert any conflict with the Maoris.  If conciliation pushed to the verge of submission could have kept the peace, it would have been kept.  But conciliation, without firmness, will not impress barbarians.  The Maoris were far too acute to be impressed by the well-meaning, vacillating Governor.  They set to work, instead, to impress him.  They invited him to a huge banquet near Auckland, and danced a war-dance before their guest with the deliberate intention of overawing him.  Indeed, the spectacle of fifteen hundred warriors, stripped, smeared with red ochre, stamping, swaying, leaping, uttering deep guttural shouts, and brandishing their muskets, while their wild rhythmic songs rose up in perfect time, and their tattooed features worked convulsively, was calculated to affect even stronger nerves than the Governor’s.

It was among the discontented tribes in the Bay of Islands, where Alsatia was now deserted by its roaring crews of whalers and cheated of its hoped-for capital, that the outbreak came.

In the winter of 1844, Hone Heke, son-in-law of the great Hongi, presuming on the weakness of the Government, swaggered into Kororareka, plundered some of the houses, and cut down a flagstaff on the hill over the town on which the English flag was flying.  Some White of the beach-comber species is said to have suggested the act to him by assuring him that the flag-staff represented the Queen’s sovereignty—­the evil influence which had drawn trade and money away to Auckland.  Heke had no grievance whatever against the Government or colonists, but he and the younger braves of the Northern tribes had been heard to ask whether Rangihaeata was to do all the Pakeha-killing?  At the moment Fitzroy had not two hundred soldiers in the country.  He hurried up to the scene of