transactions were certain at the best to cause confusion, ill-feeling, and trouble, and indeed did so.  Some legally-constituted authority was clearly wanted to deal with them.  Otherwise armed strife between the warlike Maoris and adventurers claiming their lands was inevitable.  Before Marsden’s death in 1838 both he and his ablest lieutenant, Henry Williams, had come to see that the only hope for the country and the natives lay in annexation and the strong hand of England.

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Chapter IX

THE DREAMS OF GIBBON WAKEFIELD

  Twin are the gates of sleep:  through that of Horn,
  Swift shadows winged, the shapes of truth are borne. 
  Fair wrought the Ivory gate gleams white anigh,
  But false the dreams dark gods despatch thereby.

The founder of the Colony now comes on the scene.  It was time he came.  The Islands were neither to fall into the hands of the French nor remain the happy hunting-ground of promiscuous adventurers.  But the fate which ordained that Edward Gibbon Wakefield should save them from these alternatives interposed in the way of the great colonizer a series of difficulties from which any mind less untiring and resourceful than his must have recoiled.  The hour had come and the man.  Yet few bystanders could have thought either the hour propitious or the man promising.  The word colony was not in favour when William the Fourth came to the throne.  It was associated with memories of defeat and humiliation in America, and with discontent and mutterings of rebellion in Canada.  Australia was scarcely more than an expensive convict station.  Against the West Indian planters the crusade of Wilberforce was in full progress, and the very name of “plantation” had an evil savour.  South Africa promised little but the plentiful race troubles, which indeed came.  The timid apathy of the Colonial Office was no more than the reflex of the dead indifference of the nation.  None but a man of genius could have breathed life into it.  Fortunately the genius appeared.

Though the name of Gibbon Wakefield will probably be remembered as long as the history of Australia and New Zealand is read, the man himself was, during most of his active career, under a cloud.  The abduction of an heiress—­a mad freak for which he paid by imprisonment and disgrace—­deprived him of the hope of ordinary public distinction.  For many years he had to work masked—­had to pour forth his views in anonymous tracts and letters, had to make pawns of dull men with respectable names.  This and more he learned to do.  He found information and ideas for personages who had neither, and became an adept at pulling strings and manipulating mediocrities.  All things to all men, plausible to the old, magnetic to the young, persuasive among the intellectual, impressive to the weak-minded, Gibbon Wakefield was always more than the mere clever, selfish schemer which many thought