NEW ZEALAND.

Anglo-Maori Warder, Volume 1, Issue 11, 4 July 1848, Page 4

NEW ZEALAND.

The bait which the New Zealand Company threw out nearly three years ago to catch victims for the settlement of New Edinburgh, has at length been swallowed; and the last accounts from New Zealand furnish us with the information! that the first batch of emigrants had already arrived at Otakou. This appears but the commencement of the renewal of emigration to that colony ; since we find the follow* ing passage in the New Zealand Spectator of the Ist March:—"Two ships, of about SUO tons each, the Philip Laing and the John Wickliffe, the former from the Clyde and the latter from the Thames, were advertised to sail on the 30th October last, for Otakou, with passengers and stores. It ss expected that 50 cabin and 200 male steerage passengers, with their families, will be conveyed to the new settlement in these vessels. This piece of intelligence must have been peculiarly gratifying to the colonists in the settlements already formed; gratifying, we say, because the settlers had a right to expect that that part of the Wakefield system of colonization which professes to centralize rather than disperse, should have been implicitly followed in all th arrangements of the New .Zealand Company, and that instead of placing New Ediuburgh nearly five degrees to the southward of Wellington and Nelson, seven degrees to the southward of New Plymouth, and nine degrees to the southward of Auckland, the New Zealand "Company should have availed themselves of the Wyderop Valley, a valley replete with the elements for the formation of a settlement, and situated by a road now in the course of formation, and nearly completed, within five and thirty miles oi Wellington, the Company's principal settlement. But the Wyderop Valley is, we presume, to be reserved for other purposes. We remember at the time of the proposed formation of a Scottish settlement at Otakou, (a sectarian scheme which emanated from the fertile imagination of Mr. George Rennie,) that the Church of England party in England who were interested in the colonization of New Zealand, fearing that there might be a preponderance of Scotch influence in the colony, resolved upon forming a Church of England settlement. Otakou resembling more nearly than the Wyderop the climate of the Highlands of Scotland, was selected for New Edinburgh, whilst the Wyderop Val'ey was the locality intended for the opposition settlement. The proposal to form the Church ot England settlement, however appears to have been abandoned, and we think very wisely too. Sectarian settlements should be studiously avoided. If a Scotch settlament had been formed at Otakou, and a Church of England settlement at the Wyderop, the New Zealand Company, would in all probability, when the lands in these settlements had become a drug in the market, pander to the appetites of the publie by trying to establish Protestant Irish and Catholic Irish settlements, the result of which might tell seriously on the conks of the Hibernian settlers. The Church of England settlement, however, if not abandoned, is postponed, and therefore it ought to have been a primary consideration with the New Zealand Company to have placed the Scotch settlement, as near as circumstances would have allowed, to the settlements already formed ; and the assimilation of the climate of Otakou to that of the Highlands ought to have had no weight with the Company in determining the question, more particularly as the advantages deriveable from being located in the Wyderop Valley, so near to Port Nicholson would more than compensate for the isolated position in which the settlers will be placed at Otakou. We will admit, that at Otakou the settlers are not so likely to be molested by the natives, as at the oilier settlements, since the return shows that the middle island is much more thinly peopled than the northern; and from the fact of the aborigines being of a more peaceable diaposition in the neighbourhood of Otakou than in the northern island, they may avoid collision with the natives. Still, disturbances may arise, blood may be shed, and from the distance of Otakou from Cook's Straits ami Auckland, the settlers may all be massacred before assistance could by any possibility arrive. If on the contrary, the settlement had been formed at the Wyderop Valley, the new settlement and Wellington would hive afforded a mutual protection, and the scukr& r.t Port Nicholson who have been ruined by the neglect and u.difl'erenee with which they have bteii treated by the Company, might have had some piospeet btfure them of retrieving their shattered fortunes. The destruction and dispersion of the pretty village of Wangaiiui, situated on. the coast, about midway

I bplween Wellington and New Plymouth, after a gtrng* I glbg exUtaoce of six 01 seven years, ought to have operated strongly on the minds of the dimeters of the New Zealand Company in their selection of a site for the Scotch settlement. The presence of troops, and the organization of a militia at Wellington, had no effect of curbing Ranghiabta's thurst lor blood, and this uncomptumieitig and cruel chief has been the means of driving away every settler from Wanganui, a settlement formerly characterised as the Italian garden of New Zealand, in which corn was produced, mills were beingerecierf, aod to which regular coarters traded ; but whose only occupants at present are troops waiting for an opportunity to capture the chief to whom all this mischief is attributed. But the placing Otakou so far from Cook's Struts is not the only cause.of which the Settlers in Wellington and Nelson have to complain. Announcements in the January London papers would lead us to the inference that the communication from London to Otakau is to be direct. Now in the justice of the settlers in Cook's Strains we mutt look upon this arrangement aB a great hardship to them. Vessels arrive so irregularly acd so seldom from England diregtj that the Company should heve permitted these vessels to have touched at Port Nicholson of Nelson, or both, and landed the mails on her way to Otakou. The distance would hardly if at all have been increased, and the advantages of the merchants of Wellington and Nelsan should have been disregarded. They would then have had their consignments direct instead j of running the risk of transhipment at Otakou with ' the'eontingencies of a voyage in a small coasting vessel from thence to Cook's Straits. The interest of the mercantile community already established ought to have been consulted ; and this circumstance alone is a single act of injustice on the part of the Company, shewing as it does that they are offering every inducement to emigrate to Otakou at the expence of their other settlements. That the New Zealand Company should ever have found people so easily duped as the emigrants who have preceded to Otakou have been, is a matter of astonishment to us, after the innumerable exposures of their imbecile and ineffective system of colonization. The delusion practised in England by the Company, upon the public, cannot last much longer. It may exist until the loan with the Company has received from the Government has exausted, and then ij is to be hoped that all further assistance from the Governmeut will be refused ; and that the colonization of New Zealand will be transferred to hands more capable of conducting its management tbat the haughty Directors of Broad-street Buildings.— Sydney Herald.