Maories, and Red Indians, in the outlying parishes of her Empire. To characterize these benevolent contrivances as uniformly resultless and futile, would imply a forgetfulness of the indirect advantages derived from all failures of well-meant efforts to remedy real evils, in eliminating from the catalogue of prescriptions and panaceas those which have been tried and found wanting. But if the petting and patronizing policy by which Great Britain has attempted, for more than half a century, to coax her savage subjects into loyalty, to compensate them for the sufferings of their forefathers, and to allure them into the paths of civilisation, be tested by the practical ordeal of results, whatever doubts we may still entertain as to any possible euthanasia for the brown man, all hopes of solving the problem of his preservation by a process of coddling and insulation from European contact will be assuredly abandoned. In six years, from 1856 to 1862, upwards of £220,000 was spent in the Cape Colony in 'civilizing the Kaffirs;' and though this amount is small indeed in comparison with that which, within the last quarter of a century, has been devoted to their destruction, it would be difficult, we fear, to show any value received by the Colonial Government in the political tractability of the frontier tribes, or by those tribes themselves in their own moral or material progress. The 'presents' to the Red Indians have been notoriously media for conveying to them the virus of a degrading civilisation. The same may be said of all the bounties which have been wasted on native races in other portions of our Empire.

It has not been a less serious mistake of the philanthropic policy to which we allude, to assume, for all purposes of treaties and contracts, the equal capacity with ourselves of the coloured races with which international bargains have been made.

If these arrangements were uniformly understood to be, what they really are in many cases, a mere diplomatic pastime, carried on between the Queen's representative and a set of tattooed and feathered chieftains, for the innocent amusement of the high contracting parties, they would only be objectionable in so far as they are childish and ridiculous; but when we bear in mind that these bargains are for the most part extracted from the feeble and ignorant, by the dominant and educated race, that they are often, as in the case of the Treaty of Waitangi, executed by barbarians in the full conviction that by these presents,' inestimable and substantial rights are solemnly guaranteed by the stronger to the weaker power, the mischievous consequences of obligations of such a nature, lightly undertaken and lightly violated, cannot possibly be over-estimated.

It may possibly have been beyond the power of British law

to punish as he deserved the Colonial land-shark, who for some trumpery consideration of beads, sugar-plums, or red-blankets, swindled the unsuspecting native out of his territorial birthright, but when we read of more than a hundred treaties with West African chieftains, during the last century of British rule, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that these illusory documents, whether purporting to secure protection, amity, or territorial rights to the patronized power, are, in fact, so many registered and attested pretexts for oppression on the one side and insurrection on the other. Such, nevertheless, was the well-intended but farcical machinery with which Great Britain blundered on for nearly a century with her native treaties, native protectors, and native land-reserves, till a fresh difficulty arose to complicate still further the political embarrassments incidental to all double Governments of unequal races within the same territory.

So long as the policy to be pursued towards aboriginal races depended only on the arbitrament of the Crown and of the Imperial Parliament, the boundaries of controversy were necessarily limited to those topics which the fluctuations of public opinion at home might from time to time originate.

But when the new era of Colonial self-government was inaugurated, and had passed through the successive stages of its progress, an entirely fresh element was imported into the unsolved and apparently insoluble problem of native administration. Representative institutions, if indeed we may dignify by that title the miniature caricatures of the Imperial Parliament reproduced in the old Charter Colonies, had indeed existed (as the recent case of Jamaica has proved) long enough to be thoroughly worn out. But though more vigorous offshoots of the parent stem have sprung up at a later period in the Australian, North American, and South African Colonies, and promise, when their first year of rank luxuriance shall have passed, to exhibit some, at least, of those properties which have made the British Constitution the admiration of the world, the practical assertion of the rights of self-government on the part of our Colonial communities has brought in its train political embarrassments from which it may puzzle some of our wisest statesmen to escape.

To comprehend under a common dominion within the same territory two or more distinct races, each claiming the maintenance of their respective laws, usages, and religion, so to arbitrate between them as that they shall dwell side by side in peace, and shall have scope for the development of their distinctive nationalities, were a task hard enough for an autocrat unfettered by Parliaments. How shall it be accomplished amid the jar

of rival potentates striving for the mastery? So long as our Colonial Governors were simply the representatives of the Royal will, surrounded by Executive Councillors owning allegiance to no other suzerain, their chief difficulties were those inherent in the distance of time and space interposed between the first order and its final execution. But when not only full powers were conceded to the Colonial Assemblies, together with the administration and expenditure of their territorial revenues, but they were enabled to displace by their vote, whenever they might think proper, the Executive Councillors by whose aid the representative of the Crown was carrying out his Imperial instructions, it is obvious that the last-named functionary might at any moment be called upon to choose which of his two masters he would obey. And it was in Colonies containing a large native element in their population, and vast tracts of unsold and unoccupied land within their borders, that a subjectmatter of contention between the provincial Legislatures and the Imperial authorities was most certain to arise.

The embarrassments which may beset the Queen's representative in working out the theory of responsible government, which appear to have been foreseen by Lord Russell when, twenty-seven years ago, he expressly forbade Lord Sydenham to permit its application to Canada,1 have received their most recent and most remarkable illustration in New Zealand. Throughout the brief but tempestuous annals of that Colony, comprising even now little more than a quarter of a century, the energies of the parent State have been expended in efforts, hitherto ineffectual, to adjust the everlasting disputes of the European and native populations. Twice during that short period has the same officer, Sir George Grey, been summoned somewhat abruptly to New Zealand from other governments,from that of South Australia in 1845, from that of the Cape of Good Hope in 1861,-on the simple ground of his supposed qualifications for dealing with native races, and the problems arising out of their treatment. The policy of Sir George Grey and its results form no part of our present inquiry, except so far as they may illustrate the accumulated difficulties which have attended each advancing stage of Colonial self-government.

During his first administration, which closed before responsible government was full-blown in New Zealand, we find the Governor adjusting with some apparent success the disputes between antagonistic interests-with one hand protecting the aborigines, with the other vindicating the fair rights of European colonists. Whatever tact and special aptitude for this business

'See Despatch from Lord J. Russell to Lord Sydenham dated October 14, 1839, Parliamentary Papers.

he may have possessed had at all events fair-play. With few restrictions, he was (so far as native policy was concerned) an autocrat, whose fiat was law, except in those rare instances in which it might be reversed or modified by the Home authorities. Contrast this comparatively calm political horizon with the storms which greeted the same Governor on his return, only a few years later, to resume his former adminstration. It was not only that a newly-erected Legislature, flushed with successful conflicts with his predecessor, had been in the meantime substituted for the tractable machinery which had before proved the unresisting instrument of his will, but even the native policy which he had been specially commissioned to regulate was gradually drifting from his control. The functionaries to whom, under various titles, the protectorship of native rights and lands was officially committed, scarcely knew whether they owed allegiance to the Home authorities in Downing Street, or to the Colonial ministry in Auckland. The same might almost be said of the large army of Imperial troops, which, though nominally commanded by Imperial officers, and drawing its pay from the Imperial Treasury, was by the mysterious workings of responsible government compelled to march or halt with marionettelike obedience to the Colonial managers who pulled the wires. Thus it came to pass that while the Waikato chieftains were laying in abundant supplies of powder and copper caps, illegally purchased from Colonial traders, deepening their rifle-pits, and strengthening the stockades which surrounded their forest fortresses, the Governor and his Executive Councillors were brandishing in each other's faces the memoranda' of their quarrels, while the Commander of the Forces and the Deputy Commissary-General were wrangling with the civil power over the tactics by which they were to terminate a war which the Secretary of State had already triumphantly assured the House of Commons to be 'virtually at an end.' Whether the New Zealand war is really at an end is a matter on which it might be dangerous to hazard a conjecture. Predictions, however rosetinted in their language, and however comforting in their assurances, lose force in proportion to the frequency of failure in their fulfilment; and we have so often been beguiled by telegrams of the final defeat or surrender of the Maories, which the Australian mail of a fortnight later was sure to contradict, that an abiding faith in a permanent peace will scarcely be established, until massacres, ambuscades, and all the varieties of guerilla warfare which have hitherto enlivened New Zealand annals, have disappeared altogether for a sufficient length of time to give a fair guarantee against their recurrence. For the purpose, however, of our present argument, it little matters whether

the rumours of a successful termination of hostilities are accurate or premature. New Zealand, under any possible circumstances, must present for many years to come an example of that class of Colonies in which a large native population must continue to survive. The practical question will remain, how this and similar dependencies are to be dealt with. Deliberate extermination being happily impossible, insulation from European contact having been proved to be chimerical and Utopian, the only remaining alternative is that of a gradual and peaceful absorption of the expiring race in that of the conquerors.

But it may perhaps be asked by what instrumentality this end is to be attained, in a Colony to which the privileges of selfgovernment, including that of dealing with native rights and native territories, have been conceded. Shall the Crown, by a similar resumption of its prerogatives to that which has been adopted in the case of Jamaica, take the colonists of Auckland at their word, and accept the ungracious and hopeless task which it is sought by the prayer of the memorialists to impose upon the Imperial Government? Though it may perhaps be safely assumed that a policy so reactionary will find no favour with the Home authorities, it may not be irrelevant to examine for a moment the pretexts on which it is advocated.

Taking New Zealand as the most conspicuous example of that class of self-governing Colonies in which an aboriginal race, manifestly decreasing in numbers, still survives side by side with European colonists, it must be borne in mind that it is in the northern island only that the questions of native policy are raised. This portion of the Colony contains, in round numbers, about 50,000 natives and about 90,000 Europeans, including military settlers and Colonial militia, but exclusive of Imperial troops. An agitation has been initiated in Auckland, having for its object the severance of the four provinces of the north from their fellow-citizens of the south, and has been favoured, in some degree, by a section of the latter, who are not unnaturally rather wearied of a costly war, in the result of which they have no direct interest, and the maintenance of which has involved a large subtraction from provincial revenues, otherwise applicable to the development of southern resources.

It is under such circumstances, then, that an appeal for separation is preferred to the Imperial Government; and by this proposal the whole question of the present and future native policy of the Colony is at once raised. Let us suppose for the moment that the petition of the Auckland colonists is conceded. The first act of the Home Government must of course be to improvise a system of native administration for the provinces reserved by the Crown. On the possible details or