Your humble Petitioners express with much concern their conviction that unless Your Majesty's fostering care be extended towards them, they can only anticipate that both Your Majesty's subjects and also the aborigines of this land will be liable in an increased degree to murders, robberies, and every kind of evil. Your Petitioners would observe that it has been considered that the confederate tribes of New Zealand were competent to enact laws for the proper Government of this land, whereby protection would be afforded in all cases of necessity; but experience evidently shows that in the infant state of the country this cannot be accomplished or expected. It is acknowledged by the chiefs themselves to be impracticable. Your Petitioners therefore feel persuaded that considerable time must elapse before the chiefs of this land can be capable of exercising the duties of an independent Government. Your Petitioners would therefore pray that Your Majesty may graciously regard the peculiarity of their situation, and afford that relief which may appear most expedient to Your Majesty. Relying upon Your Majesty's wisdom and clemency we shall ever pray Almighty God to behold with favour and preserve our Gracious Sovereign. [1] On one occasion when Lord John Russell was asked by a French Diplomat how much of Australia Britain claimed, he promptly replied, "The whole of it." [2] As indicating the state into which society had fallen it may be mentioned that one Master of a trading vessel who had no muskets to sell, gave a chief a packet of corrosive sublimate wherewith to destroy his enemies. To correct this condition of affairs a proclamation was published in the New South Wales Government _Gazette_ in 1814 appointing the Rev. Mr. Kendall and the chiefs, Ruatara, Hongi and Korokoro, Magistrates at the Bay of Islands, for the purpose of suppressing outrages. This authority was subsequently revoked as being illegal. [3] "The Rev. Mr. Kendall has received a commission to act as a Magistrate, but it does not appear that he possesses the means of rendering effective assistance to the natives against the oppressions of the crews of European vessels, and of controlling in any degree the intercourse that subsists between them."--Commissioner Bigge to Earl Bathurst, 1823. [4] This practice was prohibited by the Governor of New South Wales by Proclamation, on November 9, 1814. [5] Edward Doyle underwent the extreme penalty of the law at Sydney for a burglary committed at the Bay of Islands on June 18, 1836, the sentence being imposed under a statute of George IV. [6] The Wesleyan mission in New Zealand originated in a visit made to this country in the year 1819 by the Rev. Mr. Leigh, a missionary of the Wesleyan Society then stationed in New South Wales. He made the visit for the benefit of his health on the recommendation of the Rev. Mr. Marsden.