Respecting the cession of the sovereignty to the Crown by the aborigines without a reciprocal guarantee to them of the perfect enjoyment of their territorial rights, I do not hesitate to say, such a proposition would not for a moment have been entertained by the natives, who, during the whole proceedings of the Government at the first establishment of the colony, manifested a feeling of great anxiety and mistrust in regard to the security of their lands. Of this I could produce many instances did space permit, but will content myself with noticing that the Church and Wesleyan Missionaries possessing, as they deservedly did before the assumption of sovereignty by Her Majesty, the unlimited confidence of the natives, incurred by their aiding the local Government to effect the peaceable establishment of the colony, the suspicion of the aborigines, who frequently upbraided the Missionaries with having deceived them, saying, "Your Queen will serve us as she has done the black fellows of New South Wales; our lands will be taken from us, and we shall become slaves." How then could the colony have been founded with the free and intelligent consent of the native owners of the soil, on any other terms than those laid down by the Treaty of Waitangi, viewed in the light in which it has always been understood and acted on by the local Government. With these and many similar pieces of unimpeachable evidence did the Committee press upon the Colonial Secretary the conviction that their reading and understanding of the treaty was the only one which its "large words," as Lord Stanley had termed them, would bear. Earl Grey relied upon the astute pen of Mr. Herman Merivale, his new Under-Secretary to release him from the horns of the dilemma upon which the cold reasoning of the Committee had impaled him. This he did by referring the memorialists back to an obscure phrase in the Royal Instructions, which provided that no native claim to land would be recognised unless the title had previously been acknowledged and ascertained, "by some act of the Executive Government of New Zealand as then constituted or by the adjudication of some court of competent jurisdiction." The Treaty of Waitangi was now admitted, and even asserted by the Under-Secretary to be "unquestionably an act of the Executive Government," and therefore it followed that nothing that was guaranteed by the treaty was imperilled by the Instructions. With a wealth of argument upon phases of the issue which were not directly raised by the Memorial,[190] Mr. Merivale was at least able to assure the Committee that the Government intended and always had intended to recognise the treaty, as they believed, in the same sense in which the Committee recognised it. "They recognise it in both its essential stipulations, the one securing to those native tribes, of which the chiefs have signed the treaty, a title to those lands which they