ABSTRACT
For three days the House of Commons debated New Zealand affairs. Not since the Canadian rebellion had there been a colonial debate on such a scale. Buller led the attack on 17 June in the longest, ablest, and most eloquent of all his colonial speeches. He saw that the Company must take high ground, and he took it. He maintained that the Company were pursuing objects of national importance in spreading British power, British settlement, British language, arts, and institutions in the uttermost parts of the earth, and that the Government were to be con~emned for preferring to listen to the counsels of missionaries who misrepresented for their own purposes the state of advancement of the Maori race. For the Maoris, he airily remarked, were certainly inferior to the Kaffirs and the American Indians. Doubtless we were bound not to deprive them of their actual possessions, and we ought to do our utmost to raise them to a higher state of civilization; but no lawyer or moralist had required us to allow to savages rights of which they themselves had no conception. The payments made to the natives were not in reality payments for their lands, but inducements to secure their consent to settlement in their neighbourhood: the real compensation to the natives lay in the value given to land which produced nothing before and in the permanent property secured to them for ever by the plan of native reserves adopted by the Company. Only by such an 'amalgamation' of the races could the natives be saved from degradation and annihilation. The spirit that had inspired the Treaty of Waitangi was excellent, but it was not to be put on a level with the Treaties of Westphalia and of Vienna. 'You would not be justified in enforcing or executing any stipulation incompatible with the well-understood interests of the people with whom you made it.' FitzRoy'S abandonment of pre-emption was but the logical outcome of Stanley'S misinterpretation of the treaty. The Governor would have been wiser to occupy himself for the present mainly with the colonists, to lessen the chances of jealousies and
collisions by keeping them as far as possible apart from the natives and leaving the natives as far as possible alone. There was only one sovereign remedy for the ruin and despair to which the colony had come-self-government. I
The policy propounded in Buller's speech was in many respects open to the same criticism that had been levelled against the 1844 report, and Hope in his defence of Stanley maintained that his policy was the only one that would work. Yet it could not be denied that the colony was in a bad way, and, though much of the blame might be laid at FitzRoy's door, it was difficult to escape the conclusion that the policy of the Imperial Government must in some particulars be susceptible of improvement. The speeches of Peel and Graham later in the debate were in fact largely composed of admissions and concessions. Peel went so far as to say that he considered the Treaty of Waitangi 'a most unwise one, even for the natives'-though he did not agree that that lessened its binding force. Graham put forward a new proposal for the settlement of land titles: all claimants to land, whether natives or settlers, were to be called upon to register their titles within a limited time, and then a tax was to be imposed upon waste lands. Both pointed out that representative government would raise difficult problems both of geography and of native policy, but their tone was extremely conciliatory. More was to be done in the way of encouraging local self-government; and Peel avowed that in view of the distance of New Zealand from the Mother Country he was strongly inclined to favour its claim, though not perhaps its immediate claim, to representative government. 2 These speeches were made on the last day of the debate, and it was well for the Government that they were made, for even as it was Buller's motion to go into Committee on 'the state of New Zealand and the case of the New Zealand Company' was lost only by 223 to 173.
