9M ADVENTURE IN NEW ZEALAND. Chap. X. 
this benefit a dead letter by artificial means, and then 
declared that no regard had been paid to the interests 
of the natives in the selection of their Reserves, which 
were incapable of producing revenue. 
At this very time the newspaper edited by the Crown 
Prosecutor began its career, by a series of articles ex- 
actly in this strain. Only a few months before, this 
partisan of the Government had addressed a letter, un- 
known to any one in the colony, to the Society for the 
Protection of Aborigines in London, all in the same 
strain. He even very speciously pretended to review 
the actual Reserves, and to prove that they were of no 
value to the natives. But he prudently sent this 
letter to London ; and it could only be contradicted 
in almost every statement when it returned to the 
colony, just like Governor Hobson's calumnies, six- 
teen months afterwards. 
This argument was a very discordant chorus to the 
song so constantly poured into Mr. Halswell's ears by 
the Colonial Secretary, in words displaying the most 
vulgar suspicion and the most fictitious carefulness 
against abuse, by which he was instructed neither to 
locate natives on the Reserves nor to let them to White 
men on any terms that would be accepted. 
It is useless for me to describe the position of the 
Native Reserves actually chosen ; since no one, without 
being on the spot, can appreciate their value. But I 
can most distinctly assert, that the 110 town sections 
of 1 acre each, and the 22 country sections of 100 
acres each, in the immediate neighbourhood of Port 
Nicholson, are of far more than average value as ap- 
plicable to the purposes of the White man. I will add, 
that if barren rock were to cover all the land but those 
2310 acres, and the 500 natives in Port Nicholson 
were left to live upon them, a large proportion of their 
