"... I will thank you to return me what number of native young men there are employed from your station on the sabbath in visiting the natives, I mean the numbers who occasionally visit their countrymen and instruct them. What schools there are at the station, and who are the teachers? Have you an infant school, or a school for men and boys? a school for women? What do they learn? Do they learn to read and write? Do they understand figures? Have they renounced generally their former superstitions? At what period of the day do they attend school? Have they any meeting in the week-days for prayer and religious instruction? Do they appear to have any views of the Lord Jesus Christ as a Saviour? Any information you can give me, along with your brethren, will be very acceptable to the lovers of the gospel in New South Wales." "SAMUEL MARSDEN." On one point only he met with no success. He had not yet quite abandoned the pleasing dream of a Maori nation, united under one chief; a Christian people, governed by a code of native law. Tahiti naturally encouraged these bright visions, and seemed to show how easily they might be realized. There, for ten years past, under king Pomare, the wondrous spectacle had been presented to the world of a whole people, under the guidance of their king, rejecting idolatry, and with it all the base usages of savage life, and working out their own national regeneration; framing a Tahitian code of law on the sound principles of Christian jurisprudence, and cordially adopting it. Why should not a similar state of things be brought about in New Zealand? The instrumental agency in both islands was the same; namely, that of Christian missionaries, chiefly, if not entirely, English Christians, who carried with them, it might be supposed, to both islands the same reverence for order, and with it the same love of liberty. Were the Maories an inferior race, compared with the aborigines of the Tahitian group? On the contrary, the difference was rather in favour of the Maori; he was the more athletic, and consequently the more vigorous in his mental development; indeed, upon the whole, he stands unapproached by any other tribe of man uncivilized and in a state of nature; unless we go back to the heroic ages and find his equal amongst ancient Greeks at the dawning of their somewhat fabulous history. Yet the project failed; and Mr. Marsden was now obliged mournfully to admit that New Zealand's only hope lay in her annexation to the British crown. The two causes of the failure of these otherwise reasonable expectations are to be found, no doubt, first, in the circumstances of the Maori tribes, and secondly, in the pernicious effects produced by European traders and settlers.