llion, the result of the starving policy of the
first five years.

[Illustration: VIEW OF NELSON

Photo by HENRY WRIGHT]

Moreover, for the reasons already sketched, the English in New Zealand
formed a house divided against itself. The differences in the north
between Maoris' officials, Alsatians of the old school, and settlers
of the new, were sufficient to supply the Governor with a daily dish
of annoyance. But the main colony of New Zealand was not in the north
round Governor Hobson, but in Cook's Straits. There was to be found
the large and daily increasing antagonistic element being brought in
by the New Zealand Company. With an energy quite unchecked by any
knowledge of the real condition of New Zealand, the directors of the
Company in London kept on sending out ship-load after ship-load of
emigrants to the districts around Cook's Straits. The centre of their
operations was Port Nicholson, but bodies of their settlers were
planted at Wanganui, at the mouth of the fine river described in
the first chapter; at New Plymouth, hard by the Sugar-Loaves, in
devastated almost empty Taranaki; and at pleasant but circumscribed
Nelson in the South Island. Soon these numbered five times as many
Whites as could be mustered in the north. Upon them at the very outset
came the thunderbolt of Governor Hobson's proclamation refusing
recognition to their land purchases. Of this and of the land clause
in the Treaty of Waitangi the natives were made fully aware by the
missionaries. Rauparaha, before told of and still the most influential
chief near Cook's Straits, was exactly the man to take advantage of
the situation. He had taken the muskets and gunpowder of the Company,
and was now only too pleased to refuse them the price they thought to
receive. It was, as already said, impossible to justify all, or nearly
all, of Colonel Wakefield's gigantic purchase. But it was certainly
incumbent on the Government to find a _modus vivendi_ with the
least possible delay. On the one hand they had thousands of decent,
intelligent English colonists newly landed in a savage country, and
not in any way responsible for the Company's haste and ignorance. The
settlers at any rate had paid ample value for their land. They had
given L1 for each acre of it. Angry as the English Government had been
with the New Zealand Company for the defiant dispatch of its settlers,
Lord John Russell had instructed Hobson's superior, Sir George Gibbs,
that the emigra