5

ment when tliey could not find it elsewhere. The suffering consequent upon such a proceeding may be imagined, but can hardly be overstated ; and yet there was at that time no hindrance from any quarter to the occupation of the soil, and the same area of country now supports in affluence a population nearly three times as great as at the period referred to. Surely, then, the destitution which prevailed, and the genera;] failure, must be mainly attributable to defects in the system adopted, or in other words, to the proceedings of the Company itself and its Agents. At the Settlement of New Plymouth there was also a great amount of misery and destitution among the Company's labourers. It may be sought to charge this upon the acts of the Government; but the letters of the Company's Agent are before the world, in which he details to his superiors how, regardless of the sufferings of the laborers, he endeavoured to evade the fulfilment of a legal contract by sending the men great distances into the country, which, however, did not prevent them from returning upon him in want and wretchedness. Your Committee, after passing in review the conduct, the engagements, and the position generally of the New Zealand Company prior to the arrangement entered into between it and Lord Grey in the year 1847, have felt themselves fully justified in concluding that the statement of their losses made at that time was exaggerated, and that the failure of their enterprise, with the consequences flowing out of that failure are mainly to be charged to the acts and neglects of the Company itself. Turningnow to the arrangement of 1847, your Committee find that in April of that year, the date of the Company's Colonisation Act being the 23rd July of the same year, the New Zealand Company addressed the Secretary of the Colonies, and after stating the grounds upon which the Company rested its claim to compensation at the hands of Government, proposed for his acceptance as an alternative " either the payment of a sum of £250,000, together with the addition which might be decided on as the amount of loss alluded to above as not yet estimated, leaving the Company's engagements to be satisfied out of these sums and the proceeds of its lands, or the transfer to the Government of the 1,073,000 acres of land to which the Company has at present a right, together with an obligation to satisfy the engagements of the Company as above stated in this country and New Zealand." What these liabilities were is to be gathered from a preceding paragraph, in which it is stated— " These liabilities consist of the sum which the Company owes to the purchasers of its lands, of other sums owed by it to the Government and other parties, and of the paid up capital of the shareholders with interest thereon as above computed." It is to be observed that no intimation is here given to the Secretary of State that the amount of the Company's land was liable to serious diminution to meet claims and contracts for the delivery of land at that time unsatisfied, Lord Grey's reply to that letter exhibits clearly his view of the nature of the transaction upon which he was entering :— " The liabilities to third parties consist of the sum which the Company owes to the purchasers of its lands; of other sums owed by it to the Government and other parties ; and of the paid up capital of the shareholders with interest thereon as above computed." " The liabilities to third parties," he writes, " will be none but those to which the Company shall, with the assent of the Government have subjected itself during the same period, together with what Lord Grey is assured can only be some small amount of debt, which may possibly be found due to the Nelson settlers, or a settlement of some accounts of which the balance cannot, at present be exactly ascertained." Lord Grey's views are still further exhibited in Mr, Stephen's letter to Mr. Trevelyan, dated May 6th, 1847- In that letter the Lords of the Trea-