The Bill, gentlemen, is not a Bill of spoliation as it has been described; it is not a Bill to destroy titles, but rather to bestow titles on persons who at present have none, and who cannot get any but from the Crown. It is not a Bill to take away any man's _tenementum_, but to give him a _tenementum_, provided he can show that he has a fair and equitable claim to it, though not indeed a _tenementum_ to any one in the lands which were purchased, or pretended to be purchased, after the issue of my proclamation and in defiance of it, for not one acre of such land shall any one ever acquire under it. Nor is it, gentlemen, a Bill to give Her Majesty any power that she does not already possess; for her power to disallow these titles is vested in her by virtue of her prerogative, and of that principle of English law which derives all landed property from the gift of the Crown. Her Majesty's prerogative in this matter is about to be exercised, not for the love of power, not for the lust of patronage, but for the good of her subjects, for which alone it is given to her; and the exercise of it in this case will be an additional proof that the prerogative is what it was elegantly described to be in the course of the pleadings in the Grenada case, of which we have heard so much, the _decus et tutamen regni_, the grace, the ornament, the safeguard, not _regis_, of the King, but _regni_, of the realm. I have not heard one reasonable and disinterested person object to the main purpose of this Bill. Of all the witnesses examined before the Committee of the House of Lords in 1838, no one was so wild as to say that all purchases from the natives of New Zealand were to be acknowledged; no one pretended, because the Narraganset Indians sold Connecticut, as we have been told they did, for a certain number of old coats and pairs of breeches, or because they sold Rhode Island (as I find they did), for a pair of spectacles, that therefore Her Majesty is bound to acknowledge as valid purchases of a similar nature in New Zealand. The witnesses to whom I have alluded all considered the New Zealanders as minors, or as wards of Chancery, incapable of managing their own affairs, and therefore entitled to the same protection as the law of England affords to persons under similar or analogous circumstances. To set aside a bargain on the ground of fraud, or of the incapacity of one of the parties to understand the nature of it, or his legal inability to execute it, is a proceeding certainly not unknown to the law of England; nor is it in any way contrary to the spirit of equity. The injustice would be in confirming any such bargain; there would indeed be no excuse for Her Majesty's advisers, if, by the exercise of her prerogative, she were to confirm lands to persons who pretend to have purchased them at the rate of 400 acres for a penny; for that is, as near as I can calculate it, the price paid by Mr.