ceded all their sovereign rights; but in the present instance what is meant by the cession of sovereignty amounts to this--that we purchase the right to participate in the sovereignty with them; we do not wish to exclude them, but pay them a price to partake in the sovereignty with them. Of course, in the first instance, the civilised man will be the only sovereign, but that is because he only will be fit and capable of exercising sovereign rights. As the savage advances in civilisation he will come in for his share; and I see no reason, as soon as the New Zealander is capable of it, against his being Chief Justice, Governor, or Bishop, or holding any other office. It is not therefore that we take the sovereignty from him; we purchase the right of participating with him in the sovereignty, and by so doing we enable him to become Sovereign of the country, which he is not at present." In the meantime the Government had unmistakably demonstrated their intention not to recognise the Company, and with all hope of political patronage gone the Company saw no reason why they should spare the Government. There was now in their opinion no possible room to doubt that the sovereignty over New Zealand rested in Great Britain, and that the Colonial Department was betraying a national trust in conceding any rights to the natives, thereby opening the door to foreign intervention. They first showered their protests against this supposed surrender of a national asset upon the Colonial Office, but when they discovered themselves ignored in this direction they turned with renewed complaint to the Foreign Minister. "We are assured," they wrote to him, on November 7, 1839, "that this question of the sovereignty of New Zealand engages the attention of various commercial bodies and a large portion of the public press in France; that the sovereignty in England is denied; that the French Government is urged either to join in that denial, by protesting against the colonisation of the Islands by England, or to claim an equal right with England to plant settlements there. We are not without fear that some such protest or claim should be admitted by your Lordship's Department, as it appears to have been admitted by the Colonial Department. It appears that the agitation of this question in France has been produced by the publication of a Minute of the British Treasury made at the instance of the Colonial Department (July 19), and also of an extract of certain instructions recently given by that Department to Captain Hobson,--two documents by which the Crown of England seems to repudiate the sovereignty of New Zealand. The apparent repudiation consists of an acknowledgment of sovereignty in the native chiefs from whom Captain Hobson is instructed to procure, if possible, a cession to Her Majesty. It is this acknowledgment, according to all our information, which has given occasion to the pretensions now urged in