THE PARTNERSHIP OF H. G.-S. AND T. J. S. 227 



favoured minors who had inherited the big shares ; still extra mystifica- 

 tion and trouble was caused by the habit of many of the natives 

 appearing in legal documents by other names than those borne in 

 private life, their spoor being lost then, even to the bloodhounds of the 

 law. If we did not personally love our hundred or so brace of landlords, 

 at least we hated that they should die. "There's poor old So-and-so 

 gone," one of us would exclaim sentimentally. " Yes, and a score more 

 blessed grantees to deal with," would rejoin the other, who did the native 

 work. Stuart did the native work, though, of course, I was there as with 

 Cuningham over the station books to see that everything was done in a 

 sound and proper business way. 



Nevertheless, such as it was, our new lease gave us time ; bankers 

 may have looked askance at the imperfect document, lawyers wagged 

 their solemn heads over it. It was what was known in legal phrase- 

 ology as " a good holding title " ; that is, it offered to the holder if 

 blackmailed and blackmail was always a possibility a fighting chance. 

 With a little ill-will on the part of a single Maori, with a little backing 

 from an unscrupulous white man, each native nonconformist might have 

 stocked the run with sheep up to the value of his share in itself an 

 unsettled problem, for no share was individualised, each one of them 

 could have put sheep on to the station with the right to shift them 

 at any time anywhere. The station, it is true, might have called on 

 these men to fence off their shares ; it might have called, like the 

 prophets of Baal, on their false gods, and with equally negative results. 

 Between procrastination of native law-courts, dilatory habits of natives, 

 rascality of low-class whites, sheep-farming on native lands which, 

 after all, is not a crime against the community could have been made 

 impossible. As a matter of fact none of these problematic disasters did 

 happen. I will not say that throughout the period during which such 

 conditions prevailed, no cases occurred of attempted personation and 

 fraud, but I can truly say they could be counted on the fingers of 

 one hand. As in warfare so in business, the Ngai-Tatara were a fine 

 straight lot of men. 



The landlord and tenant system is antiquated, absurd, and unsound, 

 for the man who tills the land should own the land ; yet as it did 

 actually exist on Tutira, owners and occupiers met on fairly even terms, 

 the former, indeed, getting his lands improved without having to pay 

 compensation, but the latter, the lease once signed, becoming in his 



