ficult. He
convened a great meeting on Oct. 23, 1862, at Peria, to discuss the
Waitara and other grievances. It began with solemn evensong, and on the
following Sunday morning Tamihana himself preached an eloquent sermon
from the text, "Behold, how good and joyful a thing it is, brethren, to
dwell together in unity." In fervid language he urged the cessation of
all inter-tribal quarrels, and the unification of the race under the
king's flag. Bishop Selwyn was present, and in the afternoon preached
from the same text on the need for a still larger unity, which should
embrace both nations under the flag of the Queen. Tamihana was touched
by this appeal, and made another attempt to induce Rangitaake to submit
his claim to arbitration. The chief refused, and the king-maker was
driven to the conviction that his power was beginning to decline. It was
passing into the hands of the more violent Rewi, who longed for war with
the pakeha as keenly as some of the Taranaki settlers longed for war
with the Maori.

To understand the positions of the king party and of the colonists, it
is necessary to form a picture of the frontier line. From Ngaruawahia,
the Maori king's capital, the River Waikato flows northward till it
reaches a point not much more than 40 miles from Auckland. Here it takes
a sudden turn to the westward. Its previous course may be compared to
the upright stem of the letter T: from this point it forms the left arm
of the cross. The right arm of the T is supplied by the smaller River
Mangatawhiri, which here falls into the Waikato. The cross of the T
extended from the western sea almost to the Hauraki Gulf, and divided
the country of the "king" from that of the white man. It was quite near
enough to the capital to fill the Aucklanders with anxiety, and on one
occasion, when a few turbulent spirits broke through the boundary, the
settlers on the Manukau left their homes in alarm.

Sir George Grey was genuinely anxious to avoid war, but he tried to cow
the Maoris by driving a military road from Auckland to a point just
outside the frontier line, by depositing bridging material upon the bank
of the Mangatawhiri, and by sending a war steamer up the Waikato. In the
early part of 1863 he endeavoured to deal justly with the Waitara
difficulty by holding an enquiry into Te Rangitaake's claims over the
block. It was found that the chief's rights were valid, as Martin and
Selwyn had all along maintained, and the governor at on