There was, too, on the part of England, and it was strongly expressed in the British parliament, a determination to secure, as far as possible, not only the safety but the independence of the natives under their old chiefs, and to leave them in possession of their ancient usages and forms of government. In fact, the authority of queen Victoria was to be that of a mild protectorate rather than an absolute sovereignty. The chiefs were to acknowledge the supremacy of the crown as represented in the governor. To him, and not as heretofore to the field of battle, with its horrors and cannibalism, were their disputes to be referred; and in all doubtful questions English law, its maxims and analogies, were to be held supreme. Upon these easy terms the most fastidious will find little to blame in our annexation of New Zealand. The Maories did not exceed, it was computed, one hundred thousand souls. Suppose they had been twice that number, still they could scarcely be said to _occupy_ the whole of an island of the size of Ireland, and quite as fruitful. There was still room for a vast influx of Europeans, leaving to the natives wide tracts of land far beyond their wants, either for tillage or the chase, or for a nomad wandering life, had this been the habit of the Maories. And when the threatened seizure by France is thrown into the scale, few Protestants, of whatever nation they may be, will hesitate to admit that the conduct of England in this instance was both wise and just. The Maories in general accepted this new state of things with satisfaction. Those of them who resided on the coast and in the neighbourhood of the Bay of Islands saw that the aggression of the colonists was restrained, and that their own safety was secured. Further in the interior, where the want of an English protectorate was less felt, heart-burnings occurred, fomented, as usual, by designing men, and aggravated by the occasional outrage of individuals. Some of the tribes resisted, and a war broke out, though happily neither bloody nor of long duration, in which the Maories maintained the reputation of their native valour, even against English regiments. Nor was it till the year 1849 that the peace of the island and the supremacy of the English crown were perfectly restored and asserted.