After the demand for arms was supplied, came a perfect furore for iron tools, instruments of husbandry, clothing, and all kinds of pakeha manufactures. These things having been quite beyond their means while they were supplying themselves with arms, they were in the most extreme want of them, particularly iron tools. A few years ago the madness ran upon horses and cattle; and now young New Zealand believes in nothing but money, and they are continually tormenting themselves with plans to acquire it in large sums at once, without the trouble of slow and saving industry, which, as applied to the accumulation of money, they neither approve of nor understand; nor will they ever, as a people, take this mode till convinced that money, like everything else of value, can only be procured as a rule by giving full value for it, either in labour or the produce of labour. Here I am, I find, again before my story. Right down to the present time talking of "young New Zealand," and within a hair's-breadth of settling "the Maori difficulty" without having been paid for it, which would have been a great oversight, and contrary to the customs of New Zealand. I must go back. There were in the old times two great institutions, which reigned with iron rod in Maori land--the _Tapu_ and the _Muru_. Pakehas who knew no better, called the _muru_ simply "robbery," because the word _muru_, in its common signification, means to plunder. But I speak of the regular legalized and established system of plundering as penalty for offences, which in a rough way resembled our law by which a man is obliged to pay "damages." Great abuses had, however, crept into this system--so great, indeed, as to render the retention of any sort of moveable property almost an impossibility, and to, in a great measure, discourage the inclination to labour for its acquisition. These great inconveniences were, however, met, or in some degree softened, by an expedient of a peculiarly Maori nature, which I shall by-and-by explain. The offences for which people were plundered were sometimes of a nature which, to a _mere_ pakeha, would seem curious. A man's child fell in the fire and was almost burnt to death. The father was immediately plundered to an extent that almost left him without the means of subsistence: fishing nets, canoes, pigs, provisions--all went. His canoe upset, and he and all his family narrowly escaped drowning--some were, perhaps, drowned. He was immediately robbed, and well pummelled with a club into the bargain, if he was not good at the science of self-defence--the club part of the ceremony being always fairly administered one against one, and after fair warning given to defend himself. He might be clearing some land for potatoes, burning off the fern, and the fire spreads farther than he intended, and gets into a _wahi tapu_ or burial-ground. No matter whether any one has been buried in it or no for the last hundred years, he is tremendously robbed.