FOOTNOTES:
[58] Autumn, 1907.
INDEPENDENCE AND ARGUMENT
Most people agree that the method adopted by the New Zealand Company in their anxiety to acquire land might have been improved upon, but few will deny them the credit which is theirs in the matter of actual colonisation. They were the first to colonise systematically; they were careful in the selection of their colonists, striving after the finer types of manhood; and they planted settlements with extraordinary rapidity, considering the difficulties of transit and transport.
It was the destiny of the Islands of the South to be colonised by the people of Great Britain and, since this was so, it was best that the infant colonies should be cared for by those capable of the task. Australia—in part—and Tasmania suffered from the obnoxious policy which used them as pits into which was swept the refuse of the British people. From this fate, its terrible results, and the long purification it necessitated, New Zealand happily escaped. That she did so was in no small measure due to the efforts of the Company, whose powerful Directors strenuously opposed the project in their day, just as the humane impulse of the British had opposed it in cannibal days.
The Company were very active in the first year of their existence. A twelvemonth after the founding of Wellington they had three new settlements to their credit and, before two years were out, they had added a fourth. There might have been a fifth, but, owing to the inability of the Company to furnish titles, only one shipload of immigrants disembarked at Manukau, and the idea of forming a settlement there was abandoned. Manukau is six miles west of, and almost opposite to, Auckland, to which it forms a second harbour, the land portage between the two inlets being barely a mile across.
Afraid to purchase land without a title, yet receiving from the Company the offer of no other in that locality, a couple of hundred immigrants removed themselves to Whanganui, on the west coast, one hundred and twenty miles north of Wellington. If the Company owned the land which the settlers took up there, the latter were hardly allowed to possess it in peace; for Whanganui was for years after its settlement in a state of unrest, and the pages of its history contain the record of at least one dreadful tragedy. The beautiful river—the Rhine of New Zealand—enters the sea close by the town, forming a waterway by which the Maori of the interior could easily approach and as easily withdraw; a condition of things of which they took full advantage in turbulent times. The Company's settlers called the town they founded "Petre," but the picturesque Maori name has survived.