THE NEW ZEALAND SUBSIDY NO BOON.
IT is a premium on the perpetration of official injustice, that those who do justice after a long course of the reverse, are sure to meet
with censure from some quarter ; not because the act may be wrong, but because official persons always have antagonists ; and in such cases the censure is determined not by the merits but by the persons. It is the converse of the virtuous maxim "measures not men." Thus, in the instance of New Zealand, maxim, are doing something towards repairing the past misconduct of the Colonial Department ; and the Bentinck-Disraeli Opposition at- tacks them for favouritism, inconsistency-, and other hideous vices. There is nothing to be said against the arrangement ; but as money forms part of the concession, it is easy to throw out insinuations.
Lord George Bentinck, and after him, with more elaboration, Mr. Disraeli, tried to get up an idea that Government were making some sort of" advance" to the New Zealand Company— some such an advance as the two censors had asked for Irish rail- ways and had been refused. A grosser misrepresentation never was uttered or imagined. Government have made no advance— granted no boon—but have onlygone a very little way to retrieve the consequences of past official misconduct. It cannot even be called " compensation," or the surrender of a benefit to counter- balance some injury. The New Zealand Company were pre- pared to enter into the subject of compensation-; but Lord Grey, through Mr. Hawes, declined to do so,—offering the terms ao- cepted by the Company, not as compensation, not as a favour to the commercial speculators, but as something to counteract the mischievous conduct of the official department, and to make the Company an efficient agent for the public service.
The history of the affair is well known. New Zealand is not only the key to maritime power in the Southern hemisphere, as England is in the Northern, but it is particularly the key to those positions which are most important for the maintenance of the growing British interests at the foot of the four continents, espe- cially Asia. It had long been regarded as a natural appendage to the British possessions. But, as we are destitute of a coloni- zing department, we were helpless to take it by official means, unless there had been a war. It remained without formal occu- pation. The French were on the point of seizing it ; and had they done so it would have taken a world of money and trouble to recover it. At that critical juncture, the New Zealand Com- pany stepped in for the benefit of the empire,—planted settle- ments on the soil, established the rights of Englishmen, and ob- liged the official Government to extend their own jurisdiction over the islands. The service which was thus neglected by the official Government and performed by the trading Company was one of inestimable value to the British empire.
But the misconduct of Government did not cease with their compulsory abandonment of neglect : as if in the spleen of jealousy, they continued to impede the action of the Company which really supplied the population and the government for the British settle- ments on New Zealand. Men were appointed to the local offices who evoked every possible hostile influence : the Aborigines, who had welcomed the settlers with open arms, were worked upon until they rose in revolt against the settlers; the most fantastic claims to wild lands were gravely entertained by the officials, to exclude the Company ; and rival settlements were formed, not in a spirit of colonization, but in order to paralyze the colonizing operations. We are not saying this in reproach, for the retror spect would be idle, but in order to make the more recent and altered course adopted by the Government quite intelligible. In the struggle with the Government of the most powerful empire in the world, the Company was ruined. Had it been actuated merely by trading motives, it would have wound up its affairs and dissolved. But a higher ambition urged the Company to maintain its ground, until at last the disasters consequent on the official policy in New Zealand convinced the statesmen in office of their error. With more than customary diligence the. sel themselves to retrieve the past. A new Governor—young, intelligent, trained in the business of colonizing by his ex- periences in South Australia—was sent to New Zealand. He reversed the action of his predecessors. With mild firm- ness he repressed the Natives. He endeavoured to diminish the land litigation. He counteracted the worldly antago- nism of the Missionary party. He was seconded by the Go- vernment at home ; which has at last made arrangements to facilitate the operation of putting the Company in possession of its own lands. By reversing, the Government condemned their own past po]icy. When they were about to use the Company as the best instrument for colonization, they found that the Company had been paralyzed in struggling, against the consequences of that condemned policy. Absolute justice would have required the Government to place the Company in statu quo ante helium : that was too much for the official nature, which never can find heart to do anything thoroughly. But an attempt towards a restora- tion was made; and one element in that attempt was a subsidy to restore the Company from the insolvency inflicted upon its corporate exchequer by the past antagonism of the Government. It will therefore be seen that the concession to the Company bears in no degree the character of an advance. To make the case of the Irish Railway Companies at all like this, the railways ought to have been established, Government ought to have raised disputes as to the titles of land, ought to have turned the Riband- men against the railway navigators, and encouraged the Catholic priests 111 a crusade against railways in general. The New Zea- land case is more like the payment of a debt; but it is not even that—it is really the composition of a debt. It is confessedly no "compensation," but something in lien of compensation, not to pay for the injury, but to supply a means of undoing it.
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