ABSTRACT
Mter 1846, as never before, it is with a feeling of straying from the path that one follows the fortunes of the New Zealand Company. The destiny of the colony was being determined by the policy, and particularly the native policy, of Sir George Grey far more than by any other thing. The Charter of 1846 had been based upon a distinction between 'provincial districts' and 'aboriginal districts' in which native custom rather than British law was to be observed. The suspension of the constitution did away with the necessity for the distinction, but the problem it was designed to solve remained. The customary sanctions that hold a tribal society together were breaking down. The chief Tamati Ngapora wrote anxiously to the Governor:
It was a difficulty which the Governor could not but admit to exist. The only question was whether by the policy we have already outlined he was choosing the best way of meeting the difficulty. Lord Grey was doubtful. He by no means thought it desirable that in establishing the more complex ins.titutions of European civilization the ancient Maori system should be suddenly and entirely swept away. Could not the distinctions of rank among the natives be saved from obliteration? Would·it not be possible 'to promote a similar change in the state of society in New Zealand to that which at a remote period took place in this, and at different times in other European countries'-to transform the chiefs into a territorial aristocracy, owning the land, having the same right to dispose of it as any British proprietor, receiving payments in kind or money from native cultivators, and exercising some sort of semi-magisterial authority? 2 Sir George Grey never gave a direct answer to this question, but his policy in effect answered it in the negative. Presumably he thought that Lord Grey still considered the natives too much as isolated from the Europeans. His own great aim was to bring home to the Maoris -and for that matter to Europeans also-the fact that Maoris and Europeans were, and must be in increasing measure, members of a single community. To buttress up native customs would have been a retrograde step, setting, or seeming to set, two communities up in opposition one to the other. The breakdown of Maori society as such might be a matter of years, and indeed generations, but it was bound to come in the end. 'The utmost, therefore, that any Government could hope to do was to establish institutions which might imperceptibly but certainly lead to so complete a change of manners in a barbarous nation as was contemplated; and to secure these institutions by such laws and such a constitution as appeared to afford a reasonable guarantee for their perpetuity, the first step to be taken ... appeared to be, to convince the natives that our laws were better than their own, as affording more
This was the object of his system of Resident Magistrates with native assessors for the settlement of native disputes. Not that he neglected the chiefs: he gave small salaries to several of them and appointed them assessors: it was to his personal influence over them that he chiefly looked for the preservation of peace. His approach to the native problem was different from Lord Grey's, but his aim was identicalamalgamation without war-and he was hopeful of success.
