In the case of inhabited countries the condition of occupation is no less exacting. It is, however, hedged about by the additional restriction that before occupation can take place the right to settle must be ceded by the inhabitants. Had the point ever become one of national importance as between ourselves and France, Britain might have pleaded that her occupation was at least as far advanced as that of her rival. She might have pointed to her Missionaries, her traders, and her whalers as evidences of an irregular settlement by no means inconsiderable. But whatever importance British jurists may have attached to such a form of occupation in the settlement of an international dispute, it cannot be denied that it loses much of its value from the fact that the settlement was irregular, and that British Ministers would have been put in the anomalous position of calling to their aid a condition of society which had arisen, not with the sanction of the Crown, but in spite of the Crown. If these views be founded on the principles of justice, it will be seen that it is a popular fallacy to suppose that Britain acquired any rights of sovereignty in, or over New Zealand by virtue of Cook's discovery. Her position in 1770 was much less absolute than that, and whatever rights she had then acquired she subsequently proceeded to abrogate. In 1817 commenced a period of renunciation during which successive British Governments appeared only too anxious to absolve themselves from all further colonial responsibilities. Not only by neglect, but by direct Act and Ordinance did they repudiate the claim to New Zealand which their predecessors had been laboriously building up through all these years. These Acts of repudiation were specifically enumerated by Lord John Russell in the memorandum which he prepared for Lord Palmerston in reply to the protest of the New Zealand Company against the views on sovereignty adopted by Lord Normanby in his instructions to Captain Hobson, and it was the known abrogation in these statutes of whatever claim Britain may have had to New Zealand that led to the Declaration of Maori Independence in 1835.