New Zealand, and by treaty some sixty to seventy thousand Maoris
were given a title guaranteed by England--the best title in the
world--to some sixty-six million acres of valuable land. Putting aside
the question of equity, it may be observed that, had not this been
done, the Maoris, advised by the missionaries, would certainly have
refused their assent to the Treaty. The millions sterling which have
had to be spent in New Zealand, directly and indirectly, in acquiring
Maori land for settlement, supply of course no argument whatever
against the equity of the Treaty. When honour is in the scale, it
outweighs money. Yet had Captain Hobson been able to conceive what
was entailed in the piecemeal purchase of a country held under tribal
ownership, it is difficult to think that he would have signed the
Treaty without hesitation. He could not, of course, imagine that he
was giving legal force to a system under which the buying of a block
of land would involve years of bargaining even when a majority of its
owners wished to sell; that the ascertainment of a title would mean
tedious and costly examination by courts of experts of a labyrinth of
strange and conflicting barbaric customs; that land might be paid for
again and again, and yet be declared unsold; that an almost empty
wilderness might be bought first from its handful of occupants, then
from the conquerors who had laid it waste, and yet after all be
reclaimed by returned slaves or fugitives who had quitted it years
before, and who had been paid for the land on which they had been
living during their absence. Governor Hobson could not foresee that
cases would occur in which the whole purchase money of broad lands
would be swallowed up in the costs of sale, or that a greedy tribe of
expert middlemen would in days to come bleed Maori and settler alike.
Yet it would have been but reasonable for the Colonial Office to exert
itself to palliate the effects of the staggering blows it thus dealt
the pioneer colonists of New Zealand. They were not all land-sharks;
most of them were nothing of the sort. It was but natural that they
felt with extreme bitterness that the Queen's Government only appeared
on the scene as the friend and protector of the aborigines. For
the Whites the Government had for years little but suspicion and
restraint.

It would have been only just and statesmanlike if the recognition of
Maori ownership had been accompanied by a vigorous policy of native
land