but he was eventually left without further molestation, and the Colony thenceforward enjoyed comparative peace.

In June, 1869, Mr. William Fox became Premier, having Mr. Vogel associated with him as Colonial Treasurer. The exhausting war had acutely injured the Colony, and the strain upon its resources had been long and almost incessant. Mr. Vogel, in the Session of 1870, initiated a new policy, which he based on the belief that the native difficulty could be more readily combated by the construction of roads and railways, and by the augmentation of the British population through an influx of immigrants, rather than by the old methods of settlement and provincial government; and he maintained that the entire Colony would be beneficially affected by the stimulating influence of the money borrowed to carry out the new policy. At this time the Constitution practically created by Sir George Grey in 1852, was still in operation, though not without occasional friction. Under this measure the Colony was really a confederation of vestry-officered settlements. The system worked fairly well under the conditions which had developed side by side with isolated coastal colonisation, undertaken by divergent interests, but its great troubles were questions of ways and means. The provinces had to struggle along as best they could on the driblets of revenue that might be spared by the Central Government; but, under the fearful exactions of an exhausting war, there was very little money to spare to furnish forth even driblets of revenue. In order, therefore, to provide the needy provinces with a sure source from which to raise funds, they had, from their initiation, been given the virtual control of the Crown lands within their borders, and the profits accruing therefrom. Of course, here was an inequality of endowment that led to innumerable jealousies and much heart-burning. In the South Island, save in Maori-afflicted Nelson, land was high-priced; in the war-torn North Island, low-priced; and the revenues of the various provincial districts were relatively large or meagre, according to geographical situation. Already, in 1870, the Central Government and the Provincial Government owed about £7,250,000 between them. In the case of the former a large amount of money consisted of a war debt; but the Provinces had, at any rate, expended a great deal-especially in Canterbury and Otago-on public works, and in rendering efficient their system of colonisation. Julius Vogel came forward with a proposition to centralise expenditure on a vast and continuous scheme of public works and immigration with the aid of borrowed money. His scheme for borrowing from six to ten millions of money, to be expended on defence, immigration, roads, railways, the purchase and settlement of land, and public works generally, was almost unanimously adopted, and the Colony entered upon its new financial career with hardly a dissentient voice. The Provinces did not, however, with wisdom equal to that of its author, adopt also the saving clause of his great policy, to wit: that the cost of railways should be recouped from a public estate created out of the Crown lands through which the lines should pass. Here selfishness of a provincial type

Sir

stepped in. It enabled the Provinces to retain their control of Crown lands for another five years; but it crippled the public works policy of Vogel, and made its originator a determined opponent of Provincial Government-which he overthrew some five or six years later with the help of the immigrants who were, as one result of his policy, pouring into the country in their hundreds, and who ridiculed the idea that a country containing some five hundred thousand inhabitants, shouldrequire nine governments in addition to its general Assembly, when the mighty nation that they had just left could manage much more efficiently with only one. Mr. Vogel's policy, however, certainly worked wonders. At the end of the year 1870 New Zealand contained a white population of 248,000, a number representing a threefold increase since the beginning of the Taranaki war in 1860. The revenue at that date was £464,000; during the succeeding ten years it had expanded to £1,384,000. Exports and imports showed a corresponding growth; and land under cultivation, sheep, and horned cattle had increased seven-fold. From the initiation of the Vogel proposals, and their acceptance by the General Assembly in August, 1870, to October, 1877, the administration remained in the hands of the same party, though with seven different Ministerial combinations, which occasioned a nominal, though not a real change, in the successive Governments. Of this period the following facts are noteworthy: --In 1870 the public debt amounted to £7,840,000, or some £31 per white inhabitant; in 1877 it had risen to £20,700,000, or £50 per white inhabitant; but the borrowed money had, among other things, enabled the Government to construct over a thousand miles of railway, besides introducing, by State aid, thousands of immigrants, though many came to the Colony without such assistance.

In the meantime quietness reigned in the native districts; the price of wool had risen; gold was being discovered right and left; and the Colony was advancing with rapid strides. The Maori troubles, too, were all but over. For three years Te Kooti had been a hunted fugitive. In the year 1870 the chase was left almost exclusively to the natives themselves, under Ropata, Topia, Henare Tomoana, and Kepa Te Rangi-hiwi-nui. Ropata and Major Kemp (Kepa) drove him from district to district backwards and forwards, across and across the island. Again and again he escaped, and again and again the hue and cry was raised at his heels. He fled through the country lying behind the Bay of Plenty to the almost impenetrable forests south of Opotiki, where his " pa" of Maraetahi was besieged in March, 1870, by 400 friendlies under Kepa, Topia, and Wi Kingi. After a desperate action, in which the arch-rebel escaped barely with his life, his assailants captured his stronghold, recovered 218 of his captives, and took prisoners thirty-five men and seventy-six women and children. Of his followers eighteen were killed. Te Kooti tirelessly, vengefully pursued, now crept, now crawled, now feverishly raced, from lair to lair in the solitude of the forest or in the mountain fastnesses with a little band of some score adherents,

every party he got together being successively scattered. His wife was captured. He was himself shot in the hand. Often and often were his hunters within a few yards of their quarry. In his wild flight from justice and vengeance he was forced to scale snow-clad mountains, to wade the freezing waters of torrents that swept the gorges, to carve and slash a pathway through the tangled growth of the living jungle. But it seemed that he bore a charmed life; he always evaded the supreme humiliation of capture. In the wild territory of the savage Uriweri tribes Te Kooti lost his equally bloodthirsty companion, Kereopa-the murderer and mutilator of the Rev. S. C. Volkner, done to death by the fanatical Hau-Haus at Opotiki. Kereopa, when captured, was most unceremoniously hanged, and the Lutheran missionary, in some small manner, avenged. Emaciated with hunger, feverish with thirst, worn out through want of sleep for fear of capture while he rested, in hourly terror of his indefatigable foe, Ropata, and left with hardly a single follower, Te Kooti betook himself, as a last refuge, to the King country, and there found sanctuary in 1872. He was eventually pardoned, and for some twenty years lived a quiet life, after the hunters had abandoned the chase, dying in peace, if not in sanctity. He often expressed a wish to visit Poverty Bay, the scene of his chief atrocity; but the stern hostility of the settlers caused the Government to forbid his doing so.

The chief interest of the wars between the two races, now brought to a termination by Te Kooti's absolute suppression as a factor in rebellion, lies not in the numerical importance of the men engaged in them, so much as in their racial significance, individual heroism, and the peculiar picturesqueness of the arena of conflict. It is, perhaps, true, that there is something surprising in the fact that mobs of illarmed and partially-disciplined savages, often outnumbered by three and four to one, sometimes by as many as ten to one, met and repeatedly defeated army corps of the best armed, best drilled, and best disciplined soldiers of Europe; but it must be remembered that the tactics observed in Maori warfare puzzled and baffled soldiers accustomed to march in column and to charge in line, and that the New Zealand natives were, at least, masters in the art of fortification. One who has given the subject no small attention considers that out of the many engagements which took place between the years 1843 and 1870 (excluding the massacre at Poverty Bay), thirty-seven may be classed as of the first importance. Out of these the British arms sustained defeat of an unmistakable character nine times; while the tenth encounter, that of Okaihau, was indecisive. Of twenty-seven victories, those of Rangiriri and Orakau were dearly won. In the double fight at Nukumaru the loss of the British was greater than that of the enemy, and in the assault on the "pa" of Waireka Hill most of the troops had retreated, and heard of the British success only from a distance. Six of the successes were wholly, or nearly wholly, the work of Maori auxiliaries. For the ten years, 1860-70, the cost in lives to the British may be

estimated at 800; to the defeated Maoris at 1,800. There were besides. on both sides, thousands of wounded-very many British-and numerous deaths from the attendant horrors of warfare, such as disease, overcrowding, exposure, hardships and famine.

The native difficulty was, however, melting away with a rapid diminution of the race itself. In 1869 the Maori affairs passed into the hands of a really capable Minister for Native Affairs, the Hon. (afterwards Sir) Donald McLean, who, from the beginning of 1869 to the end of 1876, took almost absolute control of the Government policy in its dealings with and direction of Maori questions. To the great influence of this man with the “ friendlies," the colonists largely owed the Maori aid, so actively exercised against Te Kooti in the suppression of the Hau-Hau fanatics. But McLean made his real mark, not as a Minister for War, but as a man who placed a permanent peace between the two races on a true basis. For native service he paid liberally by skilful and profitable land purchase, by paying the respect which their position demanded to the chiefs, and by tact with the people and easy indulgence of their childishness. The wild Ureweris and touchy natives of the interior of the King country he did not molest. Elsewhere his influence was all predominant, and in consequence of his excellent management the Maoris, after the war, proved fairly amenable to civilised usage and British legal methods.

The numerous gold discoveries which had been made were not without a decided influence upon the new era of prosperity opening before the Colony. In 1861 gold had been discovered in the provincial district of Otago, at a time (the period of the Waitara war) when the European population did not number more than some 80,000. But rumours of the presence of the precious metal in the mountains and gullies of the South Island had long been persistent. From 1857 to 1860 some £150,000 worth had been won in the province of Nelson. In the winter of 1861 Gabriel Read, while prospecting in a gully at Taupeka, discovered convincing evidence of a good alluvial field, and dug out with a common butcher's knife, in the space of ten hours, about £25 worth. After sinking hole after hole, for some distance along the line of his discovery, and striking "finds" of gold in all, Read wrote to Sir John Richardson, the Superintendent of the province, and apprised him of his success. For this he was afterwards paid a reward of £1,000. Upon receipt of the news, half the population of Dunedin dashed away to the scene of the "rush." For some years following, the province of Otago became the theatre of "rush" upon "rush," though the physical characteristics of this part of South Island rendered travelling of any kind a matter of the greatest difficulty. The mountains were bleak and treeless, and the obtaining of fuel an impossibility. Nevertheless, thousands poured into the province, though the snows and famine of the winter months drove not a few back again to the warmer coast. In 1863 the export of gold from the Otago fields had risen to more than £2,000,000.

The fields of Otago were in the full tide of their fame and attractiveness when rich "finds" were reported in the west coast districts of the province of Canterbury. Gold had long been known to exist in the wild gorges and well nigh impassable river-beds of this romantic and impenetrable region, but the difficulties of winning it were great indeed. Government surveyors who had been sent to explore the country for the precious metal had been drowned in the ice-cold mountain streams, or had returned to the settlements worn out and famished. In 1864 a man named Albert Hunt had found payable gold in the Greenstone Creek. He was subsequently branded as an impostor, and compelled to fly for his life by a mob of disappointed and maddened diggers. Nevertheless, after events proved the truth of his story. In 1865 hundreds of diggers flocked to the province of Westland, and, braving incredible difficulties, and suffering hardships innumerable, penetrated to every gold-bearing spot on the West Coast. Many lives were lost, but still the quest went on. Much gold was won, and as freely spent. Provisions fetched astonishing prices. For a ton of flour £150 had been paid, and candles were considered cheap at a shilling each. For years, however, returns were so good that £10 per week was regarded as only a fair outlay for the most primitive of food and necessaries. The gold exported from the West Coast of the South Island in 1866 was valued at £2,140,000.

Quickly on the heels of rich "finds" in the southern provinces of Nelson, Otago, Canterbury and Westland, came news of magnificent discoveries at the Thames and in the Coromandel Peninsula, situated on the east coast, in the province of Auckland. They were not alluvial goldfields, but quartz reefs, and thus differed from the workings in the South Island. The exploitation of the auriferous deposits of the Auckland province was long delayed by the successive wars between the settlers and the natives. When such exploitation became possible, the ground-landlords rendered profitable mining problematical by insisting upon high-priced prospecting permits; and it cost the miners as much as £1 per man for the right to seek for gold whose existence was merely guessed at. This short-sighted policy put off the opening up of the Ohinemuri Gold-field until 1875, though years before this the shores of the Hauraki Gulf had been worked with system and profit. The gold fields of New Zealand are, however, no longer exploited by individual effort. To-day so many costly scientific and mechanical processes are called into requisition to win the precious metal from its matrix, that capital is required, and the combined effort of companies necessitated. The approximate gold yield of the Colony up to date is set down at the value of £59,160,000

One singular and noteworthy characteristic of the gold-fever days in New Zealand was the orderly and law-abiding manner in which the search for the precious metal was conducted. There was little extravagance or excess, few riots--such dual encounters only as are common in