Chap. XIX. CAPTAIN FITZROY'S DECISION. 325 
firmation or denial, and no witnesses on either side 
having been heard. Captain Fitzroy resolved himself 
into a judicial character, and proceeded to make some 
show of coming to a judgment, which there can be no 
doubt that he had in fact reduced to words before the 
pretended inquiry. 
No matter whether his decision were right or 
wrong, he was guilty of a breach of the law, without 
having the apology of conforming to the customs of 
the New Zealand chiefs ; and still less with any pre- 
tence of taking an effectual and straightforward way of 
getting at the truth, and giving a just decision. If he 
had decided that the savages were in the wrong, and 
had taken upon himself to order their apprehension 
and execution for the crime, equally without the in- 
tervention of those forms of our law which are revered 
for their even-handed justice, he would have been 
equally culpable in the highest degree. Indeed, when 
he told the natives that on first hearing of the affair 
at Sydney, he intended to visit them with war and ex- 
termination, he was guilty of great injustice; and 
taught them to believe the question to be one of race 
against race, and not of law against lawlessness. It 
was giving them a strange notion of English law, to 
inspire them with the belief that an English Governor 
would regard it as his duty to lay waste the pas and 
take the lives of a large body of Her Majesty's sub- 
jects because two of their number had committed a 
crime. 
He avoided this injustice only to refuse all redress 
to that portion of the community whose habitual 
obedience to law rendered it probable that it would 
submit with the greater tranquillity to his injustice. 
For his unconstitutional conduct at TVmkanae was 
but a weak subterfuge for avoiding the necessity of 
