tell me, Mr. Jackson, what all the trouble in the north has
been about," Wilfrid asked that evening, "for I have not been able to
find out from the papers?"

"It is a complicated question, Wilfrid. When New Zealand was first
colonized the natives were very friendly. The early settlers confidently
pushed forward into the heart of native districts, bought tracts of land
from the chiefs, and settled there. Government purchased large blocks of
land, cut off by intervening native territory from the main settlements,
and sold this land to settlers without a suspicion that they were
thereby dooming them to ruin. The settlers were mostly small farmers,
living in rough wooden houses scattered about the country, and
surrounded by a few fields; the adjoining land is usually fern or forest
held by the natives. They fenced their fields, and turned their cattle,
horses, and sheep at large in the open country outside these fences,
paying rent to the natives for the privilege of doing so.

"This led to innumerable quarrels. The native plantations of wheat,
potatoes, or maize are seldom fenced in, and the cattle of the settlers
sometimes committed much devastation among them; for the Maori fields
were often situated at long distances from their villages, and the
cattle might, therefore, be days in their patches before they were found
out. On the other hand, the gaunt long-legged Maori pigs, which wander
over the country picking up their own living, were constantly getting
through the settlers' fences, rooting up their potatoes, and doing all
sorts of damage.

"In these cases the settlers always had the worst of the quarrel. They
either had no weapons, or, being isolated in the midst of the natives,
dared not use them; while the Maoris, well armed and numerous, would
come down waving their tomahawks and pointing their guns, and the
settlers, however much in the right, were forced to give way. The
natural result was that the colonists were continually smarting under a
sense of wrong, while the Maoris grew insolent and contemptuous, and
were filled with an overweening confidence in their own powers, the
result of the patience and enforced submission of the settlers. The
authority of the queen over the natives has always been a purely nominal
one. There was indeed a treaty signed acknowledging her government, but
as none of the chiefs put their name to this, and the men who signed
were persons of inferior rank with no authority whatever t