A leading Maori chief of the district went away, to be out of the serious trouble which, he feared, might arise at any moment.  The Governor sent after him the message:  ’The manner in which to meet difficulty is not to flee from it, and you must come back.  I relied upon you to behave with sense and courage, and I’m confident you will still bear me out in that view.’  The chief did return, but said Sir George, ’He upbraided me as being, to all appearance, a Governor quite unable to deal with such a problem as confronted me.’  This was an exquisite turning of the tables.

‘Why,’ argued the old Maori, ’could you not at once have hanged the natives who were arrested?  If you had done that, everybody’s mind would have been at rest, but, as things are, nobody feels safe.  We imagine that we may be blamed for the crime, while the English can have no confidence so long as no person has been punished.  You see at what we have arrived.’

Any spark might now fire the bracken, and it was the task of Sir George to prevent that.  His despatches and blue-books, fodder for the browse of Downing Street, had to wait upon this other business, which would not even go into them.  Not unless there was a crash, during a moment’s want of vigilance, or by lack of perfectly deft management.  The greater empire making, it is evident, was not to have to write any blue-books.  None were written, for the tension between European and Maori healed in the hands of the patient doctor.  It turned out that a Van Diemen’s Land convict was the villain of that remote New Zealand drama.

Patoune, an influential Maori chief, had been zealous in the unfathoming of the mystery, and mentioning that, Sir George Grey was led to say, ’Some time before his death Patoune rowed over from Auckland to my island at Kawau.  Seeing the boat coming, I walked down to the shore to meet its occupant and conduct him indoors, where he had a long conversation.  On leaving he spoke, “Yes, I wanted to be with you once more, before I go the way of all men.  I have had my last fallen-out tooth set in a walking-stick, which pray accept, a mark of our friendship.”  As you can suppose, this affected me deeply.  A piece of bone is a kind of Maori talisman, and Patoune meant his tooth to bring luck to me.  He thought my carrying it about with me, might one day save me from misfortune.’

The incidents of governing are incongruous; they jostle queerly.  An official letter was put into the hands of Sir George Grey, as he stood on the seashore at Wanganui, watching a skirmish in progress with the Maoris.  He seated himself, opened the envelope, and forgot the crack of muskets in the document it contained.  This was the first constitution for New Zealand, and he was instructed to introduce the same.  He didn’t; only that is a very red-letter tale.  It should be told simply, as Sir George Grey told it.

‘In the middle of the turmoil at Wanganui,’ he stated, ’out comes a constitution which had been passed by the British Parliament, and published in the “Gazette.”  It was, you understand, to be the instrument under which the New Zealand people should take their full, free place in the Empire.  Up to that date they had not been self-governing; the Governor ruled.  Well, having studied it carefully where I sat, I arrived at the conclusion that it would not do at all.