Chap. XVII. INDEPENDENCE OF NEW ZEALAND. 445 
agricultural tastes as missionaries at length defeated 
its own object, when they were no longer under the 
careful supervision of a wise and disinterested director. 
These men, calculated to be excellent colonists, became 
enraptured with the fertile soil and productive climate ; 
and selfishness of a pardonable nature began to mingle 
with their actions when they became private owners 
of land, in order to provide a maintenance for their 
large families of children. As these carpenters, shoe- 
makers, and schoolmasters, too, were left alone with- 
out a man of superior intelligence to guide the working 
of their efforts on the social as well as the spiritual 
state of a nation, they gradually learned to neglect 
the respect due to the institution of chieftainship, 
and to rejoice, to an unchristian degree, in the influ- 
ence and power which they had themselves acquired. 
At length they proposed to found an independent 
state, of which they themselves should be the prime 
rulers and legislators. And their teaching, while it 
equalized all beneath the Book, gradually abandoned 
the coincident lessons of civilization. On the 16th of 
November 1831, the letter from thirteen chiefs of the 
Bay of Islands to King William the Fourth, to vrhich 
I have before adverted, was transmitted by the Rev. 
W. Yate, then Chairman of the Mission, to Lord 
Goderich. It prayed for the protection of the British 
Crown against the neighbouring tribes, and against 
lawless British subjects. In answer to this letter, Mr. 
Busby was appointed as British Resident, and de- 
spatched to the Bay of Islands in 1833, by Sir Richard 
Bourke, then Governor of New South Wales, It 
appears, both from his own letters and from his in- 
structions, that he was accredited to the missionaries ; 
and he writes his opinion, that " unless a defined and 
" specific share in the government of the country be 
" allotted to the missionaries, the British Government 
