,046 AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



working and winning its way among the Maoris. The spirit of nationality and federal 

 unity was asserting itself. It was conceived in the purest intentions, and was shaped 

 by the loftiest motives. The chiefs saw that, concurrently with the decline of their 

 niana or authority, their people were imbibing the worst vices of the Europeans. 

 Drunkenness and its concomitant evils were becoming alarmingly prevalent, tribal dis- 

 sensions were frequent, the land was rapidly slipping from their relaxed grasp, and 

 though . in the eye of the law they were said to be equal with their European fellow- 

 subjects of the Queen, they were, in reality, looked down upon as an inferior and 

 subjugated race, and treated by many of the settlers with contumely. The flowing tide 

 of immigration threatened to .engulf them, the privilege of the franchise was, to all 

 intents and purposes, withheld from them, and their petitions for the interdiction of the 

 liquor traffic in purely Maori districts produced no tangible result. True, an Ordinance 

 was at last passed making the sale of strong' drink to natives a misdemeanour, but it 

 was so openly and flagrantly evaded that, from the very outset, it proved inoperative. 

 The neutrality observed by the Government during the internecine warfare on the west 

 coast, brought about by the unwise action of one of its own officers, was not by any 

 means a solitary evidence that, in the face of contrary professions, there was one law 

 for the Pakcha and another for the Maori. The natives were apt and shrewd enough 

 to mark these things, and to make logical deductions from them. Their best men 

 pondered the matter, and gradually came to a conclusion to set up some form of 

 Government of their own that should exist side by side with the authority of the Queen, 

 bind the two races together in brotherly love, and allow them to advance pari passu. 



As long back as 1853 the movement was beginning to take form. In that year a 

 chief named Matene Te Whiwhi fused its hitherto inchoate elements; and, setting out 

 from Otaki with several other leading chiefs, he visited Taupo and Rotorua to obtain the 

 consent of the more powerful tribes to the appointment of a king, and the constitution 

 of some kind of recognized Government in the central parts of the North Island, 

 where the white man had not yet penetrated. Jealousy of his own assumed pretensions 

 to the kingly dignity defeated the success of the Otaki chief's project. Te Heu Heu, 

 the great Taupo chief, whose authority had never been brought into collision with that 

 of the distant European, and who was determined to brook no rival in his own domain, 

 declined to associate himself with the movement. At Maketu and Rotorua it failed to 

 evoke enthusiasm. The time was hardly ripe for it, and the rnnana, or conference, of 

 chiefs, met to consider the proposal, issued the following letter to the tribes : " Listen 

 all men : The house of New Zealand is one ; the rafters on one side are the Pakeha ; 

 those on the other, the Maori ; the ridge-pole on which both rest is God. Let there- 

 fore the house be one. This is all !" Still, the necessity of some mode of Government 

 in the districts inhabited almost exclusively by themselves, if they were not to be 

 abandoned to complete anarchy, pressed itself more and more upon the minds of the 

 leading Maoris. Even the European settlers could not deny the force of the contention. 



So entirely was the extensive and populous Waikato District neglected, that the 

 Rev. Mr. Ashwell, a missionary stationed at Taupiri, stated before a Committee of the 

 New Zealand House of Representatives, that during nineteen years prior to the "king 

 movement " he could not remember more than three or four visits to the Waikato by 



