The Treaty of Waitangi; or, how New Zealand became a British Colony. Buick Thomas Lindsay

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to say 'If you relinquish your rights of sovereignty we will put in our claim, we stand next,' or the Dutch may say so. I do not know which visited the country first, but I cannot see on what principle we could interfere with the French or Dutch unless we contend that we had some disposal over the sovereignty of the Islands. The question, however, has been waived in the Bill; we suppose the New Zealanders and not Great Britain to be in possession of the right of sovereignty, and we propose accordingly that a purchase should be made of the sovereignty as well as the fee simple of the land. We have some precedents for this. I do not know whether it is of consequence to bring forward precedents, but even at a late period a purchase of this kind has been made; Sir Stafford Canning took possession in 1815 of Singapore; it was at that time in possession of the Malays, the subjects of the Sultan of Jahore. In 1825 he found, I think, some inconvenience arising from the Sultan's claims, and the English bought the Domain of the Sultan for a sum of money, and so clear was the understanding about it, that the Sultan made some reservations; some exceptional laws, as they are called in this Bill, were made. There was a clause that the Sultan's slaves should not be emancipated, and certain lands were reserved and became entailed property and inalienable. When Penn purchased Pennsylvania he no doubt understood he purchased the sovereignty as well as the fee simple of the land, for I can conceive no one mad enough to found a colony in the midst of barbarians without securing the colonists against their interference as sovereigns. Vattel certainly speaks of Penn's treaty as if he understood him to have purchased the sovereign rights as well as the fee simple. These are precedents which may not be considered as carrying any great authority. The question has not been very much discussed; it has been taken for granted, and I think with reason, that the savage is in a state of pupilage, and must be treated as we treat children. The only principle which it is important to maintain is this: If you go into a country at all inhabited by savages and take possession of their land and become sovereigns of it, you infringe their rights if you do not consider their benefit as well as your own. If you were treating with a child you would not infringe the rights of that child simply by acting and deciding for him, but you would infringe his rights if you acted and decided for your benefit and not his. So with respect to savages; they are compared with civilised men, like children. They are of themselves incapable of acquiring the arts and habits of civilised life; unless some interference that amongst civilised men would be considered unjust, takes place, they never can, by themselves, rise to that higher condition. The injustice to be deprecated is that of seeking our own benefit solely and not theirs; and with respect to the New Zealanders our purchase of the sovereignty of their country ought not to be represented as being the same kind of bargain as if the French, for instance, were bargained with to cede the sovereignty over any portion of their territory. When the French ceded their sovereign rights over Martinique, Guadaloupe, and the Mauritius, they strictly ceded all their sovereign rights; but in the present instance what is meant by the cession of sovereignty amounts to this – that we purchase the right to participate in the sovereignty with them; we do not wish to exclude them, but pay them a price to partake in the sovereignty with them. Of course, in the first instance, the civilised man will be the only sovereign, but that is because he only will be fit and capable of exercising sovereign rights. As the savage advances in civilisation he will come in for his share; and I see no reason, as soon as the New Zealander is capable of it, against his being Chief Justice, Governor, or Bishop, or holding any other office. It is not therefore that we take the sovereignty from him; we purchase the right of participating with him in the sovereignty, and by so doing we enable him to become Sovereign of the country, which he is not at present."

      In the meantime the Government had unmistakably demonstrated their intention not to recognise the Company, and with all hope of political patronage gone the Company saw no reason why they should spare the Government. There was now in their opinion no possible room to doubt that the sovereignty over New Zealand rested in Great Britain, and that the Colonial Department was betraying a national trust in conceding any rights to the natives, thereby opening the door to foreign intervention. They first showered their protests against this supposed surrender of a national asset upon the Colonial Office, but when they discovered themselves ignored in this direction they turned with renewed complaint to the Foreign Minister. "We are assured," they wrote to him, on November 7, 1839, "that this question of the sovereignty of New Zealand engages the attention of various commercial bodies and a large portion of the public press in France; that the sovereignty in England is denied; that the French Government is urged either to join in that denial, by protesting against the colonisation of the Islands by England, or to claim an equal right with England to plant settlements there. We are not without fear that some such protest or claim should be admitted by your Lordship's Department, as it appears to have been admitted by the Colonial Department. It appears that the agitation of this question in France has been produced by the publication of a Minute of the British Treasury made at the instance of the Colonial Department (July 19), and also of an extract of certain instructions recently given by that Department to Captain Hobson, – two documents by which the Crown of England seems to repudiate the sovereignty of New Zealand. The apparent repudiation consists of an acknowledgment of sovereignty in the native chiefs from whom Captain Hobson is instructed to procure, if possible, a cession to Her Majesty. It is this acknowledgment, according to all our information, which has given occasion to the pretensions now urged in France.43 That which England, it is contended, instructs her officer to procure, if possible, she admits she does not possess, and she thereby admits the right of France either to obtain sovereign jurisdiction in New Zealand, by the means which Captain Hobson is instructed to employ, or if France should prefer that course, to sustain the independent sovereignty of the natives. The argument appears conclusive. It becomes very important, therefore, if it is of great importance to England, to prevent the establishment of a French power in the midst of the English colonies of Australasia that your Lordship should be made aware of the acts of the British Crown which lead to a conclusion directly at variance from that which may be drawn from the said minute and instructions."

      The Company's nominal44 advocate on this occasion was their Deputy-Governor, Mr. Somes, who apparently possessed a faculty for stating strongly a weak case; and in the course of this letter to Lord Palmerston he taxed his ability to show that the right of sovereignty in New Zealand had vested in Britain since the discovery of the Islands by Captain Cook; that it had been confirmed by numerous diplomatic acts in all the years since then, and could not now be abandoned on the mere whim of a Minister.

      During the course of his trenchant review of the position Mr. Somes declared that the sovereignty of England in New Zealand had been over and over again asserted and exercised. Whether it could be subsequently abandoned by such documents as the Treasury Minute and instructions was a question in constitutional and international law on which his Lordship was of course far more competent to judge than they could pretend to be. But that there was recently a British sovereignty either to maintain or to abandon the Company had no sort of doubt. He pointed out that in the year 1769, Captain Cook, acting under a commission from the Crown of England, took possession of the Islands of New Zealand, in the name of His Majesty, George III. This act was performed in the most formal manner, and was published to the world. "We are not aware," he wrote, "that it was ever questioned by any foreign power. It constituted sovereignty by possession. The Law of Nations, we believe, recognises no other mode of assuming dominion in a country, of which the inhabitants are so barbarous as to be ignorant of the meaning of the word sovereignty, and therefore incapable of ceding sovereign rights. This was the case with the New Zealanders, from whom it would have been impossible for Captain Cook to have obtained, except in mockery of truth, a British sovereignty by cession. Sovereignty by possession is that which the British Crown maintains in a large portion of its foreign dependencies. In this year, 1787, a Royal Commission was granted to Captain Philip appointing him in pursuance of the British sovereignty in possession, which had previously been established by Captain Cook, "Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief in and over the territory of New South Wales and its dependencies." This territory was described in the commission as "Extending from Cape York, latitude 11° 37´ south, to the South Cape, latitude 43° 30´ south, and inland to the westward as far as 135° east longitude, comprehending all the Islands adjacent in the Pacific Ocean, within the latitudes of the above-named capes." This is the Act by which the Crown first assumed СКАЧАТЬ