ABSTRACT
The youngest of the British colonies- New Zealand was, in a not very quiet or contented family, the one that Lord Stanley found most troublesome of all. For several years New Zealand had been the scene of valuable whale- and seal-fisheries and of a growing trade between the Maoris, a vigorous and attractive native race, and the Australian colonies; and settlement had followed trade. The New Zealand Company had attained one at least of its objects, and New Zealand had become a British colony. But at the same time the Treaty of Waitangi turned over a new leaf in British colonial policy and offered the natives a guarantee that colonization, inevitable though it might be, should not proceed without regard to their just claims. Controversies on matters of principle are often fruitful: ‘success in political construction requires not only the cooperation, but the free conflict of many minds and wills.’
