picked up some knowledge from other Maoris who had come overland from
Port Cooper. During the night, "they commenced the recital of the
morning service; before morning they had repeated the Litany four times,
the whole version of the Psalms, three or four creeds, and a marriage
service, and then the whole morning service again."[4] Men who could do
this might surely be expected to be equal to anything. Altogether, the
unfolding of the Maori nature at this time was such as to arouse the
highest hopes for his future greatness. To the friends of the mission in
England it seemed as though the angels' songs over a repentant nation
could be almost heard. Their orators, like Hugh Stowell, indulged in
rhapsodies over the isle "now lovely in grace as she is beauteous in
nature"; and even a philosophic thinker like Julius Hare could give it
as his deliberate opinion that, for many centuries to come, historians
would look back to the establishment of a Christian empire in New
Zealand as the greatest achievement of the first part of the nineteenth
century.

[4] This account is taken from the _Nelson Church Messenger_, of some
years ago. Bishop Williams thinks the surveyor must have been misled
to some extent.

Second Period.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NEW ORDER.

(1839-1842).

Replenish the earth, and subdue it.
--_Genesis._

The missionaries had worked wonders in New Zealand, but the very success
of their work proved to be its undoing. Now that the islands were safe
and quiet, they attracted a rush of white settlers who were eager for
land and gain. Instead of whalers and flax traders, whose settlements
were only temporary, there appeared farmers and artisans who had fled
from the misery of the mother country to found for themselves permanent
homes in the "Britain of the South."

Many of the immigrants came singly from Australia, but from the year
1839 the New Zealand Company sent thousands of settlers in more or less
organised fashion to the country on either side of Cook Strait, to
Wellington, Nelson, and New Plymouth. This company was founded by the
celebrated Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a man who had read and thought much
upon the subject of colonisation. His views reflected fairly the public
sentiment of the day. The colonists should be grouped in communities for
mutual help and safety; they should have churches and clergy and as much
religion as sensible men required at home; the