.

The founder of the Colony now comes on the scene. It was time he came.
The Islands were neither to fall into the hands of the French nor
remain the happy hunting-ground of promiscuous adventurers. But the
fate which ordained that Edward Gibbon Wakefield should save them from
these alternatives interposed in the way of the great colonizer
a series of difficulties from which any mind less untiring and
resourceful than his must have recoiled. The hour had come and the
man. Yet few bystanders could have thought either the hour propitious
or the man promising. The word colony was not in favour when William
the Fourth came to the throne. It was associated with memories of
defeat and humiliation in America, and with discontent and mutterings
of rebellion in Canada. Australia was scarcely more than an expensive
convict station. Against the West Indian planters the crusade of
Wilberforce was in full progress, and the very name of "plantation"
had an evil savour. South Africa promised little but the plentiful
race troubles, which indeed came. The timid apathy of the Colonial
Office was no more than the reflex of the dead indifference of the
nation. None but a man of genius could have breathed life into it.
Fortunately the genius appeared.

Though the name of Gibbon Wakefield will probably be remembered as
long as the history of Australia and New Zealand is read, the man
himself was, during most of his active career, under a cloud. The
abduction of an heiress--a mad freak for which he paid by imprisonment
and disgrace--deprived him of the hope of ordinary public distinction.
For many years he had to work masked--had to pour forth his views
in anonymous tracts and letters, had to make pawns of dull men
with respectable names. This and more he learned to do. He found
information and ideas for personages who had neither, and became an
adept at pulling strings and manipulating mediocrities. All things to
all men, plausible to the old, magnetic to the young, persuasive among
the intellectual, impressive to the weak-minded, Gibbon Wakefield was
always more than the mere clever, selfish schemer which many thought
him. Just as his fresh face and bluff British manner concealed the
subtle mind ever spinning webs and weaving plans, so, behind and above
all his plots and dodging, was the high dream and ideal to which
he was faithful, and which redeemed his life. He saw, and made the
commonplace people about him see, that colonization was