At Te Ranga was the last stand made by the Maori for the possession of the lands of his forefathers. No more might he roam whither he would by river and mountain, by lake, shore, or forest stream. The white man's axe rang ceaselessly in his ancient woodlands; the white man's fields, his crops and fences, raised barriers to free untrammelled wanderings from sea to sea. Only in allotted districts, marked out by the white surveyor, would he be permitted to live out his life. Even there, the white man's school, the white man's church, the white man's policeman, would be always with him. In the place of the chief who administered justice and delivered sentence without remonstrance, without appeal, there sat the white man's magistrate, hearing evidence which he did not always understand, fining and imprisoning for offences against laws of which they had neither experience nor comprehension. This was the state of matters to which the Maori nation had come in the opinion of the older men of the tribes, and not a few of the younger warriors who had never quite given in their adhesion to the rule of the stranger. Haughty and tameless as a race, showing by a thousand instances their preference for death before dishonour, such was their state of feeling at this time, that had there been any other land available, they would probably have trooped away in one great migration like the Moors out of Spain, there to learn to forget their hopes and fears, their triumphs and their despair, far from the snow-crowned ranges, the rushing rivers, the fertile valleys, and fire-breathing mountains of their own loved land. On the whole, perhaps, it was as well for them, and by no means to the injury of the usurping pakeha, that the ever-girdling sea forbade a national exodus. Stern foe as the Briton has ever been while the fighting lasts, he is the most just and merciful of the world's conquerors. Of the great Roman, when the sandals of his legions trod over the prostrate peoples of the inhabited earth, it is recorded that he permitted them such personal and civic liberty as they had rarely enjoyed under their own rulers. Still, the privilege and boast of uttering the magical words, _Civis Romanus sum_, had to be paid for largely, as in the Apostle Paul's case. More liberal still, the Briton presents his beaten foe with the priceless gift of his equal laws, his equal suffrage. The ægis is thenceforth held over him, as of a blood-brother and a peer, a citizen of that world-wide empire scarce arrested by the poles, which rules and guards by its laws so large a proportion of the inhabitants of our planet. * * * * *