than another decade, and led, as late as 1880, to interference by the natives with road making in some of this lost land of theirs in Taranaki.  There, round a prophet named Te Whiti, flocked numbers of natives sore with a sense of injustice.  Though Te Whiti was as pacific as eccentric, the Government, swayed by the alarm and irritation thus aroused, took the extreme step of pouring into his village of Parihaka an overwhelming armed force.  Then, after reading the Riot Act to a passive and orderly crowd of men, women and children, they proceeded to make wholesale arrests, to evict the villagers and to destroy houses and crops.  Public opinion, which had conjured up the phantom of an imminent native rising, supported the proceeding.  There was no such danger, for the natives were virtually not supplied with arms, and the writer is one of a minority of New Zealanders who thinks that our neglect to make the reserves put us in the wrong in the affair.  However, as the breaking up of Parihaka was at last followed up by an honourable and liberal settlement of the long-delayed Reserves question, it may be classed as the last of the long series of native alarms.  There will be no more Maori wars.  Unfortunately, it has become a question whether in a hundred years there will be any more Maoris.  They were perhaps, seventy thousand when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed; they and the half-castes can scarcely muster forty-three thousand now.

Chapter XVIII

GOLD-DIGGERS AND GUM-DIGGERS

  “Fortune, they say, flies from us:  she but wheels
  Like the fleet sea-bird round the fowler’s skiff,
  Lost in the mist one moment, and the next
  Brushing the white sail with a whiter wing
  As if to court the aim.  Experience watches,
  And has her on the turn.”

When the Waitara war broke out the white population did not number more than seventy-five thousand.  When Te Kooti was chased into the King Country it had grown to nearly four times that sum, in the face of debt, doubt, and the paralyzing effects of war.  A great ally of settlement had come upon the scene.  In 1861 profitable goldfields were discovered in Otago.  The little Free Church colony, which in thirteen years had scarcely increased to that number of thousands, was thunderstruck at the news.  For years there had been rumours of gold in the river beds and amongst the mountains of the South Island.  From 1857 to 1860 about L150,000 had been won in Nelson.  In 1858, a certain Asiatic, Edward Peters, known to his familiars as Black Pete, who had somehow wandered from his native Bombay through Australia to Otago, had struck gold there; and in March, 1861, there was a rush to a short-lived goldfield at the Lindis, another spot in that province.  But it was not until the winter of that year that the prospector, Gabriel Read, found in a gully at Tuapeka the indubitable signs of a good alluvial field.  Digging with a butcher’s