57

A.—3a.

vessel of war who called for them might select the best; and the senior officer on this station nearly two years since requested the captain of any man-of-war who passed to remove the best figures for the purpose of being taken to England. I have, &c, The Eight Hon. Earl Grey, &o. G. Grey. P.S.—I think it right further to call your Lordship's attention to a statement made in the appendix to Dr. Dorset's letter, which might lead to the belief that the Native chief Te Puni had not been justly encouraged by the Government, and that Te Eauparaha had not been punished sufficiently. It would perhaps be impossible to show that a Native chief had been sufficiently encouraged by the Government. I can only state that between Te Puni and myself the most friendly intercourse has always existed, and that I believe the old man regards me with greater feelings of personal esteem and affection than he does any other European in New Zealand. With regard to the punishment inflicted on Te Eauparaha, I enclose for your Lordship's information, in the original language, with translations of them by Mr. Domett, the Colonial Secretary, two Maori laments for the capture of Te Eauparaha, which will not only show the light in which the Natives regarded the punishment inflicted on him, but will also exhibit the martial spirit and feeling of the Native race which can compose such songs, and chant them as they do throughout the entire country, over the whole of which they spread in a very few weeks.—G. G.

Enclosure 1 in No. 27. Mr. Dorset to the Eight Hon. Earl Grey. My Lord, — Wellington, New Zealand, Bth October, 1850. It is little more than a year since I had the honour to forward to your Lordship, through the local Government, a series of resolutions passed by the Settlers' Constitutional Association of Wellington, in which Sir George Grey's despatches to your Lordship, assigning reasons for the postponement of self-government in this colony, were examined and replied to. We then endeavoured to convince your Lordship, by a train of argument which we hope was not altogether inconclusive and by an array of facts of which we have seen no refutation, that the reasons assigned by Sir George for such postponement were futile, his statements untrustworthy, and the course proposed by him inexpedient. We have more recently been made acquainted with his subsequent despatch to yourself of the 22nd March, 1849, which has reached us through the medium of the " Further Parliamentary Papers for 1850," among which it is printed, as is also your Lordship's reply expressive of your concurrence in Sir George's views. That despatch has created great dissatisfaction among the colonists in this part of the Islands [I have never previously heard of this discontent. —G. G.], involving them as it does in groundless imputations very injurious to their character, while it exhibits a disingenuousness in argument and recklessness of assertion which when exposed must, we conceive, convince your Lordship that Sir George has addressed himself to the subject more in the heated temper of a partisan than with the cool judgment which we should expect in one who was officially tendering advice to the British Government, and on whose counsel depended the bondage or liberty of the entire colony. 2. It appears from his own statement that the despatch in question was written by Sir George before the petition to Parliament which induced him to write it had been seen by him, and while he was entirely unacquainted with its details. We will not dispute this statement, although the petition had been printed in the colonial newspapers nearly a month before the date of his despatch, and had, we presume, been seen by those who informed him of its existence, and who, it might reasonably be supposed, would have informed him of its contents. Nor will we enlarge on the want of dignity exhibited by him in his attempting, before he had seen the petition, to disparage those from whom it emanated, and to forestall its contents, of which he professed ignorance. [I in no way whatever either desired or attempted to disparage those from whom it emanated. The arguments I used were general ones, and had no relation to those which the petition might have contained.—G.G.] But we may be permitted to observe that such a course was not indicative of much confidence in the force of argument used by him in his previous despatches of November and February, nor in the goodness of his cause. Nor if, as he states, he had in his contemplation when he wrote those earlier despatches the facts contained in that under comment, do we understand why he omitted them from the former laboured and most carefully-written documents. We are inclined rather to attribute their subsequent appearance to that feeling which induces one fighting a desperate battle to aim at his adversary any blow with any weapon which he may be able to snatch in the heat of the contest, without considering whether the one or the other is consistent with the rules of honourable combat. 3. We regret to observe in the despatch under consideration several passages which appear to have been written with no other intention than that of misleading your Lordship, and which, though they ' evince some ingenuity and cleverness, are entirely unworthy of an officer filling a high appointment and enjoying the confidence of Her Majesty's Ministers. Sir George's cue appears to have been so to confuse the circumstances and statistics of the two provinces as to oppose to a petition, emanating from the southern only, all the objections which could be found to exist in either, and, by jumbling the whole together, to make it appear in many parts as if what belonged to the North solely really had application to the South also, and in the South specially. He confounds the boundaries and extent of the several provinces; leaves out whole settlements when it suits his argument, and again inserts whole settlements where properly they have no place ; at one time referring, with every appearance of precision, to authentic returns, at another contenting himself with vague generalities and loose guesses; while the whole is so ingeniously put together that we defy any person not personally and minutely acquainted with the colony to detect the fallacy of the argument or avoid falling into the snare set for his understanding. [These remarks are all replied to in the despatch which accompanied this memorial.] 4. In the 4th paragraph of Sir George's despatch he writes, "In the southern half of the Northern Island—that is, in the Province of New Munster —the number of European males above twenty-one years of age, exclusive of the military, is 1,657," &c. Now this, we submit, can only be B—A. 3a.