stablished complete and lasting peace through New Zealand,
that his name should be remembered. By liberal payment for service, by
skilful land purchases, by showing respect to the chiefs, and tact and
good humour with the people, McLean acquired a permanent influence
over the race. The war party in the Colony might sneer at his "Flour
and Sugar Policy"; but even the dullest had come to see by this time
that peace paid. Into the remnant of the King Country McLean never
tried to carry authority. He left that and the Urewera country further
east discreetly alone. Elsewhere the Queen's writ ran, and roads,
railways, and telegraphs, coming together with a great tide of
settlement, made the era of war seem like an evil dream. It is true
that the delays in redeeming promises concerning reserves to be made
and given back from the confiscated Maori territory were allowed to
remain a grievance for more than another decade, and led, as late as
1880, to interference by the natives with road making in some of this
lost land of theirs in Taranaki. There, round a prophet named Te
Whiti, flocked numbers of natives sore with a sense of injustice.
Though Te Whiti was as pacific as eccentric, the Government, swayed
by the alarm and irritation thus aroused, took the extreme step of
pouring into his village of Parihaka an overwhelming armed force.
Then, after reading the Riot Act to a passive and orderly crowd of
men, women and children, they proceeded to make wholesale arrests, to
evict the villagers and to destroy houses and crops. Public opinion,
which had conjured up the phantom of an imminent native rising,
supported the proceeding. There was no such danger, for the natives
were virtually not supplied with arms, and the writer is one of a
minority of New Zealanders who thinks that our neglect to make the
reserves put us in the wrong in the affair. However, as the breaking
up of Parihaka was at last followed up by an honourable and liberal
settlement of the long-delayed Reserves question, it may be classed as
the last of the long series of native alarms. There will be no more
Maori wars. Unfortunately, it has become a question whether in a
hundred years there will be any more Maoris. They were perhaps,
seventy thousand when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed; they and the
half-castes can scarcely muster forty-three thousand now.

Chapter XVIII

GOLD-DIGGERS AND GUM-DIGGERS

"Fortune, they say, flies from us: she but wheels