Chap. II. SECRET CALUMNIES. 41 
down, and then argue that the injured party ought to 
be deserted, and considered an inferior, because of his 
forcible degradation. So a despot might decree that 
the principal London market should be held on Dart- 
moor, and then complain that the porters of Covent 
Garden were placed at the mercy of the wealthy orange- 
dealers of London by the difficulty of communication 
with the uninhabited heath. 
His Excellency knew that this string of despatches 
could not have met the eyes of the Cook's Strait 
settlers. He was probably confident that this secret 
and ungenerous vilification of his subjects, in order to 
serve a band of hungry and unprincipled flatterers, or 
to justify his own penchant for founding cities in a 
peculiar way, would never return round the world to 
stand side by side with his open expressions of concilia- 
tion and harmony. Thus he had been able to profess 
sympathy and friendly intentions towards those whom 
he had calumniated. He would hardly have been 
willing to present himself at Wellington at all, could 
he have predicted the public distribution of his un- 
manly aspersions against the inhabitants and their 
location. 
The rule of the Colonial Office, which provides that 
a colonial Governor shall be enabled to send home his 
defence together with the accusation made against him 
by his subjects, does not provide that colonists shall be 
enabled to send home their refutation together with the 
calumnies heaped upon them by their legal protector. 
Thus the Governor of New Zealand could safely 
write to the Colonial Office in order to disparage, in 
the most unmeasured terms, a community of some 
thousand Englishmen, and immediately afterwards ar- 
rive to meet them " clothed in power and dignity." 
