ess to direct.
Lookers-on asked for more stable executives and more definite lines of
cleavage. Newly arrived colonists impatiently summed it all up as mere
battling of Ins against Outs, and lamented the sweet simplicity of
political divisions as they had known them in the mother country.

Chapter XV

GOVERNOR BROWNE'S BAD BARGAIN

"In defence of the colonists of New Zealand, of whom I am
one, I say most distinctly and solemnly that I have never known
a single act of wilful injustice or oppression committed by any
one in authority against a New Zealander."
--_Bishop Selwyn_ (1862).

Colonel Gore Browne took the reins from Colonel Wynyard. The one was
just such an honourable and personally estimable soldier as the other.
But though he did not involve his Parliament in ridicule, Governor
Browne did much more serious mischief. In ordinary matters he took the
advice of the Stafford Ministry, but in Native affairs the Colonial
Office had stipulated that the Governor was to have an over-riding
power. He was to take the advice of his ministers, but not necessarily
to follow it. To most politicians, as well as the public, the Native
Department remained a secret service, though, except as to a sum of
L7,000, the Governor, in administering Native affairs, was dependent
for supplies on his ministers, and they on Parliament. On Governor
Browne, therefore, rests the chief responsibility for a disastrous
series of wars which broke out in 1860, and were not finally at an end
for ten years. The impatience of certain colonists to buy lands from
the Maori faster than the latter cared to sell them was the simple
and not too creditable cause of the outbreak. A broad survey of
the position shows that there need have been no hurry over land
acquisition. Nor was there any great clamour for haste except in
Taranaki, where rather less than 3,000 settlers, restricted to 63,000
acres, fretted at the sight of 1,750 Maoris holding and shutting up
2,000,000 acres against them. So high did feeling run there that
Bishop Selwyn, as the friend of the Maori, was, in 1855, hooted in
the streets of New Plymouth, where the local newspaper wrote nonsense
about his "blighting influence." Yet, as he tersely put it in his
charge to his angry laity of the district guilty of this unmannerly
outburst, the Taranaki Maoris and others of their race had already
sold 30,000 acres near New Plymouth for tenpence a