3

acres as the Company should be proved to have expended pounds sterling upon purchase of lands, emigration, and other beneficial public works. But, when the result of the enquiry of the Land Claims Commission came to be known, the Comgany appears to have taken up this position, that it was the duty of the Government to put them in possession of the land awarded in virtue of their expenditure, without reference to the validity of their assumed purchases. Upon this subject your Committee beg to make the following remark:—That the British Government, in assuming the sovereignty of these islands with the concurrence of a great proportion of the Native Chiefs had engaged to respect the rights of the Natives in the land; and however questionable the policy of this agreement may have appeared to persons living at a distance from the Colony, the circumstances of the Natives—their views of right in relation to land—their number, possession of arms, courage and skill in war, and knowledge of the country, together with the comparative ease with which they could subsist in the wilderness—rendered impracticable, except at a sacrifice against which the whole Christianity and common sense of Britain would have protested, the application of any other principle than that of purchase to the transactions by which land for colonizing purposes was to be acquired in New Zealand. The letter of the Secretary of the Company to Lord Grey, dated 23rd of April, 1847, if read with reference to the views just laid down by your Committee, would not, it is presumed, have been accepted by Lord Grey as a document establishing on the part of the New Zealand Company a large claim to compensation at the hands of the British Government. In that letter, the whole losses of the Company and the failure of its colonising enterprises are attributed exclusively to the conduct of the Government both in England and in the Colony. Without seeking to justify in all points the conduct of the Government, your Committee consider themselves warranted in asserting that the Company's losses were mainly attributable to its own proceedings, characterised as these were in many respects by rashness and maladministration. Your Committee will not offer any remarks upon the four distinct breaches of agreement alleged against the Government by the New Zealand Company; not because they have not formed their opinion with regard to the justice of these, but because the evidence of the case is to be found in printed documents, accessible as well to inquirers in the mother country as to the colonists of New Zealand; and for this reason as well, that they have already laid down a principle which, if kept in view, must establish this conclusion, that without means and power which they did not possess, it would have been impossible for the Governors of New Zealand to do that which the New Zealand Company complained that they did not do, viz., put them in possession of the land they claimed. They will only further allude to some statements contained in the Company's letter of grievances which appear to them disingenuous and which., as residents in the Colony, and cognizant of the facts, they feel themselves in a position to contradict. The Company charges upon the Local Gouernment the massacre of the Wairau —the misery and destitution of its labourers —and the crime of having, by unjust and ill-judged proceedings, "involved first the Northern and then the Southern districts in insurrection and bloodshed." These different statements appear to your Committee unfounded. It is with great pain and reluctance that your Committee refer to the melancholy affair at W airau in 1843, nor is it with the smallest intention ot casting any reflection upon the memories of the men who fell there, whom they believe to hare been men of high and generous character, and actuated