Every country in the world has at some time or other produced diabolically cruel villains who, under one cloak or another, religion for choice, have perpetrated horrible excesses and gratified their love for blood. Yet very often these men have been great and brainy ones. Europe has produced Tilly, Alva, Torquemada, Cæsar Borgia, and many others. England has produced Cromwell and Judge Jeffreys; India, Nana Sahib; and New Zealand in like manner produced Te Kooti. Some of these men were of aristocratic birth, but others, such as Tilly, Cromwell and Te Kooti, springing from the lower middle class, had first to make their names before they could perpetrate the crimes their souls lusted for. A number of Maori prisoners had been taken in the successful action at Waerenga-a-Hika, which followed upon the atrocious murder of the Rev. Mr Volkner by the Hau Haus. Now these prisoners should either have been killed or, at all events, should have been well taken care of, as on two previous occasions Maori prisoners had successfully made daring escapes, one of which is worth recording. About one hundred and fifty Maoris, prisoners of war, among whom were a few women and children, had been confined on board an old timber ship anchored far out in Wellington Harbour. They were well fed, kindly treated, and seemed well satisfied with their lot, being allowed access to the upper deck during the day, where they talked and laughed with their guard, a detachment of the 50th Regiment, while during the night they had comfortable quarters on the lower deck, all the hatchways being shut up and strictly guarded. The old bow-port of the ship, however, had been forgotten or overlooked, and one very dark, stormy night the Maoris, who had discovered it, forced it open, when every man, woman and child slid noiselessly into the rough, shark-infested water, and swam for the shore, nearly two miles distant, where most of them landed in safety and disappeared into the bush, nor was their escape found out till next morning when the hatches were opened to serve out breakfast. The New Zealand Government therefore determined to place the prisoners taken at Waerenga-a-Hika in a place from which they could not swim ashore, and so deported two hundred of them to the Chatham Islands, but, being of a frugal mind, they committed these two hundred fanatical, ferocious and able-bodied warriors to the care of a worn-out old officer and fifteen decrepit invalided veterans, nor did they consider it worth the expense to arm the white settlers on the island. Verily the Government were wanting in common-sense, though their cheese-paring parsimony might be worthy of a present-date Radical.