FITZGERALD AND WAKEFIELD

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29264, 23 July 1960, Page 10

FITZGERALD AND WAKEFIELD

Animosity Between Leaders [By CECIL and CELIA MANSON} The rift between James Edward Fitz Gerald, Canterbury’s first Superintendent, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, which had appeared when both , men were working for the New Zealand Company in London, widened and gaped when Wakefield came to New Zealand. Fanny, Fitz Gerald’s wife, loathed Wakefield. She was still young, attractive and pretty, and to her the older Wakefield must have seemed a ponderous, heavy-jowled monster breathing ill-will. Charlotte • Godley wrote of Fanny at this time: “I like her so much. She is such a good-natured, merry little thing—just what you may call a schoolgirl. She sings I really beautifully. I scarcely ever heard anyone say their words so well. And she sings and understands French, Italian, German and Russian.” Fanny did not restrain herself in writing about her enemy: “We have no doubt of James gaining his election, but I suppose Jemingham Wakefield (Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s son) will have the audacity to oppose him. I fear his horrible father is * coming down here. “I practise my music two hours every day.”

The final clash came in Auckland in 1854, where the representatives of the provinces were meeting to form New Zealand’s first responsible government. They chose for the honour of being New Zealand’s first Premier, the man who, of all those gathered there, was the most loved and respected, James Edward Fitz Gerald. ’The presence in th. Assembly of Edward Gibbon Wakefield was most unfortunate for Fitz Gerald. Their characters were at opposite ‘ poles—the one open, sometimes too forthright, who won his support by appeal to the heart and the conscience; the other, also

an idealist and also stirred by pity •for the unfortunate, who by long habit achieved his ends by planning and pulling strings behind the scenes. And Fitz Gerald hated

political scheming. The Premiership lasted only a very short time, scarcely two months for, partly at least because ■ot Wakefield's secret manoeuvres, the first Parliament was more or less a fiasco. Fitz Gerald laid much ot the blame on Wakefield. "I have known the honourable for many years,” he said •bitterly to the Assembly, referring to Wakefield, "and I will not shrink from stating the opinion I have formed of him. I believe “that no man or body of men has •ever been connected for any length of time with him in public ’life without being thoroughly ■damaged in reputation, in personal character, and even in pocket. I .say this deliberately, and I wish the expression to be placed on Tecord.”

> Plea For Maoris • Fitz Gerald was never Premier again, but as a member of Parliament he made history by his eloquence in causes which touched Jiis heart. The most famous of his speeches was that in which he pleaded, 'hfter 18 months of the war in Taranaki, for justice for the Maori people. The sympathy for the distressed, which had so moved him in Ireland, now stirred his heart for the Maoris. "No speech,” said Sir Robert Stout many years later, “ever moved the House as Jhis did.” • Fitz Gerald begged for a ceasefire. “The present state of things cannot last" he said. “The condition of the colony is not one of peace; it is a state of armed and suspicious neutrality. If you do not quickly absorb the King movement into your own Government you will come into collision with it and once light up again the torch of war in these islands, and these feeble, artificial institutions you are now building will be swept away like houses of paper in the fiames. Tribe bfter tribe will be drawn into ihe struggle and you will make it a war of races. Of course you Jvill conquer, but it will be a conquest of the tomb. • “Two or three years of war Jvill eradicate every particle of civilisation from the native mind and will elicit all the fiercest instincts of his old savage nature. The tribes, broken up. without Social and military organisation, will be scattered throughout the country in bands of merciless banditti. The conflagration of Taranaki will be lighted up again In every border of the colony, and in self-preservation you will tie compelled, as other nations have been compelled before, to hunt the miserable native from haunt tn haunt till he is destroyed like a- beast of the forest. ■ "I am here tonight to appeal against so miserable, so inhuman • consummation. • “We are here this evening Standing on the threshold of the future, holding the issues of peace and war. of life and death in pur hands. I see some honourable friends around me whose counsels I must, ever respect and whose fried courage we all admire, who will tell me that you cannot govern this race until you have conquered them. • “I reply in the words which |he great poet has placed in the mouth of the great Cardinal. Id the hands of men entirely great. Jhe pen is mighter than the sword. Take away the sword. States may tie saved without it.’ s' “I know well that evil days may enme when the sacred inheritance J>f light and truth which God lias given to a nation may only be saved by an appeal to the last

ordeal of nations—trial by war. But I know, too, how great is the crime which rests on the souls of those who, for any less vital cause or for any less dire necessity, precipitate that fatal issue. I grudge not the glory of those who have achieved the deliverance of a people or the triumph of a cause by any sacrifice of human life or human happiness; but I claim a higher glory for those who, in reliance on a law more powerful than that of force . . . have led nations by paths of peaceful prosperity to the fruition of an enduring civilisation. “I claim a higher glory for those who, standing on the principle of human power, have striven to imitate the government of Him who ‘taketh up the simple out of the dust and lifteth the poor out of the mire.’ “And I claim the highest glory of all for that man who has most thoroughly penetrated that deepest and loftiest mystery in the art of human government, the ‘gentleness that maketh great.’ A Moving Appeal “I have stood beside a lonely mound in which lies buried the last remnant of a tribe which fell, men, women and children, before the tomahawks of their ancient foes. I sometimes shudder to think that my son may stand beside a similar monument—the work of our bands—and blush with the ignominy of feeling that, after all, the memorial of the Christ lawgiver is but copied from that ot the cannibal and the ’ savage. I appeal to the House tonight to inaugurate a policy of courageous and munificent justice. “I have a right to appeal to you as citizens of that nation which, deaf to the predictions of the sorid and the timid, dared to give liberty to her slaves. “I appeal to you tonight in your sphere to perform an act of kindred greatness. I appeal to you not only on behalf of the ancienf race whose destinies are hanging in the balance, but on behalf of your own sons and sons’ sons. For I venture to predict that, in virtue of that mysterious law of our being by which great deeds once done become incorporated into the life and soul of a people, enriching the source from whence flows through all the ages the inspiration to noble thoughts and the incitement to generous , actions—l venture to predict that among the traditions of that great nation which will one day rule these islands and the foundations of which we are now laying, the most cherished and the most honoured will be that wise, bold and generous policy which gave the Magna Carta of their liberties to the Maori people.”

Auditor-General “The Press," which Fitz Gerald had fbunded proved a constant financial burden to him, and it was ‘the pressure of those worries which led him, almost unwillingly to accept the post of AuditorGeneral, which he held for the last 30 years of his life. Miss Geraldine Fitz Gerald, his daughter, who died only recently, always insisted that no picture of her father was true which did not give prominence to the influence of her mother upon him and his career. It was Fitz Gerald’s wife more conscious of the expenses which 13 children involved, who : insisted that he should accept. “Thirteen little impediments to a political career” Fitz Gerald labelled his family. As he grew older, stories of Fitz Gerald's absentmindedness began to accumulate. For a dinner given in his honour he arrived at the wrong time on the wrong day and at the wrong hotel. On another occasion he came home later than usual, explaining to his wife that he had met Mrs X and had had a most interesting conversation with her. Fanny replied calmly, “It must have at least been a revealing one." “Why?” he asked. “Because she’s been dead three years,” she answered. Conversation at the Fitz Gerald dinner party, as Miss Geraldine Fitz Gerald and many others well remembered, was always sparkling and witty. An invitation to dinner at the house on top of Clyde Cliff as it was then called, overlooking Oriental Bay and Wellington Harbour, was one which none would willingly refuse. To the end. Fitz Gerald remained a deep thinker, philosopher and scholar. There seemed no end to the range of his thought If. for instanee. he had been listened to by our Victorian “town-planners” New Zealand towns might have developed as things of beauty, rather than so many eyesores. In : an article on city architecture in , “The Press” in the 1860’s he pleaded. “It is a mistake greater . than most of us suppose, to negi lect individually and nationally . the study of this principle of , beauty, for the reception and enjoyment of which we are speci- . ally adapted bv our nature.” Gladstone was a friend of FitzGerald’S' and they corresponded > regularly on philosophy and the classics. In fact, Gladstone duoted from one of Fitz Gerald’s writings in his famous speech on Home Rule for Ireland.

Orator, poet, artist, financier, statesman, essayist and philosopher. ' Fitz Gerald was, as Sir Robert Stout once pointed out all of these thing*. But as he neared his last days, like most

great men, he felt that his work had been in vain. To Alfred Domett, a friend of Robert Browning, and New Zealand’s poet-premier, he wrote; 1 when Domett had just published in London his long epic poem. “Ranulf and Amohia” “How I envy you. My life seems wasted. I toil on amidst figures, trying to build . . . and feeling that I am building houses of sand between high and low water mark. Not by night, but in broad daylight, devils come and sow tares among my wheat and go their way. However, the world goes round without our moving it. Perhaps we are all unconsciously sowing seeds which will one day sprout.

“We are both getting old, my friend, and have nearly done our work. ' ‘I .warmed both hands before the fire of life: It sinks, and I am ready to depart.’

“Goodbye, old man; we shall never meet again in this world. If in another, I shall know you, . . . you and not another.” Social Justice

Fitz Gerald was 78 when he died. His grave and the graves of his family, so many of whom died tragically young, are in an overgrown corner of the old Bolton Street cemetery, Wellington. He was one of our - greatest public men, but we pay scant attention to his memory. For his day he was considered politically advanced, a “radical.” He was burning with love of his fellow men and longing for the days of social justice to come. “I look forward,” he said, “to the day when the words ‘upon my honour as a gentleman’ will be replaced by the phrase ‘upon my hdnoiir as a man.’ ” In the memorable inaugural address' which, at the age of 75, he gave to the Wellington Citizens’ Institute!, he said, “For my own part, T| cannot but hold, that- of all the words which have ever been written-by human hand or spoken by human voice, the most valuable, the most precious of all the records of the past, those which have exercised the largest influence on the destinies of the human race and may yet exercise an influence more extensive than the boldest visionary can imagine, are those two charters qf human rights and human duties . . . the first which claims to have descended from the mountain mists of Sinai and laid the foundations of the law; the second which was spoken on a mountain in Galilee and taught. ‘Love is the fulfilling of the law.’” ' , .