When large numbers of British subjects have established themselves in distant regions, inhabited only by barbarous tribes, it is impossible for Her Majesty's Government to leave them exposed without protection to the dangers which their own rashness may draw down upon them, or to allow them to exercise, without control, and perhaps to abuse the power which their superior civilisation gives them over the rude natives of the soil. Hence every new establishment of this kind involves a new demand upon the naval and military resources of the Empire, but the undue anticipation of such demands must occasion a very heavy burden upon the nation, and it therefore follows that the enterprises of colonisation should only be entered upon with the sanction and under the authority of the Government. On this ground and on this ground alone the British Government was justified in calling a halt in the irregular settlement of New Zealand, and if a mistake was made it was not in that the Government now interposed their authority,[174] but in that they had not asserted their rights at a much earlier period. In support of this portion of his argument Sir George Gipps quoted the opinions of four of the most eminent lawyers in England of that day, Mr. William Burgh, Mr. Thomas Pemberton, Sir William Follett, and Dr. Lushington. He was even uncharitable enough to use against the New Zealand Company the opinion of their own legal adviser, Sergeant Wilde, the crushing nature of these authorities completely breaking down the pretensions of his opponents. "I leave the Honourable Members of this Council," declared Sir George, "to say whether they will take the law from the authorities which I have produced or from the learned gentlemen who have been heard at their table; remembering, moreover, that the former were giving their opinions against their clients, the latter arguing, as they were bound to do, in favour of them." Sir George also claimed for the British Government the right to intervene in New Zealand affairs, so far as land titles were concerned, on the ground of its immediate contiguity to the colony of New South Wales, in support of which claim he quoted an opinion expressed by a Committee of the House of Commons in 1837, and in further appeal he might have advanced the fact that in the previous fifty years Great Britain had expended no less a sum than £8,000,000 upon colonisation in the South Pacific, a fact which was surely substantial enough to create the peculiar rights which are inseparably associated with those intimate relations which grow out of neighbourhood. Finally, he thus summarised the powers which were sought for in his measure and those which it did not seek: