Old New Zealand

In the good old times of Conquest and Colonization (I like to be particular about my dates and places), the civilized nations of the day followed a simple policy in regard to the savage races with whom they came in contact, which may be roughly described as going their own way, and punishing the natives if they didn't conform to it, without troubling themselves much about what the aforesaid natives thought or felt on the subject. If they understood the meaning of it so much the better for them, if they did not it could not be helped. Holding themselves to be morally and intellectually far superior to the savages, they maintained that it was the savage's business to understand and conform to their notions, and not their business to regard the savage's. As for giving savages the rights of civilized men it was seldom thought of; savages were to be treated as such.

I do not exactly know when this sort of native policy was first practised, but I know that it has lasted, with modifications, even to our day, and is to be seen in full working order in more than one part of the globe.

And let me remark (pace the Philanthropists) that it is not always the unwisest or cruellest policy that can be followed, for this reason, that it is simple, consistent, and easily understood. The man or the nation that consistently follows its own path, turning aside for no consideration, soon becomes at least thoroughly known if not intelligently understood. And misconceptions and misunderstandings are the most fruitful of all causes of bloodshed between civilized and savage races.

Let me confess, moreover, that there have been moments when I have felt certain carnal hankerings after that same old native policy. When, for instance, I had just left the French colony of New Caledonia, where amicable relations with the natives were preserved, and the country made as safe as Italy from end to end by the simple expedient of regularly and invariably executing a certain number of natives for every white man that they disposed of, without much inquiry into the motives of the murderers; and had returned to New Zealand to hear of a most lively massacre at Poverty Bay, perpetrated by three hundred Maori gentlemen, very well up in their Old Testaments and extremely practical in the use of the New, who having satisfied the more pressing demands of their appetite upon the field of their exploit, had shown the sacred light of civilization that was burning within them by potting the remainder of the corpses in tins and sending them as presents to their friends in the country, and had then departed to the mountains, filled with the comfortable conviction that nothing worse than imprisonment would follow the improbable event of their capture, that after a year or two of most enjoyable skirmishing the matter would be allowed to drop, and that they would most of them go to their graves well-honoured and unhung.