E—No. 9 See. III.

None of the Magistrates or officers of the King, except the soldiers, receive auy fixed salaries. One effect of this is that no man has any sense of responsibility for what he does. Everybody undertakes his duties spontaneously, and considers himself at liberty to throw them up whenever it suits him to do so. There is no power that can make officials, any more than other people, do their duty ; it is absolute irresponsibility. It is quite impossible to fix the blame of misgovernment or of any public injustice upon any individual, or any definite number of individuals; if the Runanga of Ngaruawahia found itself getting into a mess, the members of it would all quietly withdraw, and the Council would simply cease to exist. As a scheme for dissipating all feeling whatsoever of liability to be called in question for anything that may happen, the " King movement" is inimitable. (5.) Seceders from the King. In the Maori kingdom, there are numbers of persons highly dissatisfied with the present state of things ; many are bold enough to declare their dissatisfaction publicly; and some even go so far as openly to profess loyalty to the Queen. There is great variety in the motives by which such feelings and conduct are prompted. In the first place it is evident that in the conduct of affairs somebody must be continually being affronted. Patene's zeal in carrying out the King's law, especially in the matter of keeping European Magistrates out of the district, met with blame instead of praise, and he is thereby justly offended. There are others whose proposals have been slighted, whose advice has been neglected, or who have got the worst in some internal dispute, who thereupon become seceders. Whaitere of Hangatikei has left the King because bigamy is tolerated ; Ngatiwhauroa declared itself loyal because it lost the Paetai eels. All the discontented suppose themselves to have a very strong personal interest in declaring themselves upon our side, and that loyalty has a marketable value. Minorities exist in all societies—there are twenty causes which may make a certain set ready to oppose anything whatever which the majority may propose ; if others are for the King, they are for the Queen ; if others are for war, they are for peace. All such minorities among the Natives are at the present time vehemently loyal; they obtrude their loyalty upon the officers of Government, and cry out for Assessors, Policemen, and Heads of Runangas ; some of them go to town and pass themselves off as important men, to try what they can get; KarakaTaniwha'sson, the friend and pupil of Whakapaukai, and a boy who would be under the birch in a healthy civilized society, applied to be made an Assessor, declaring that he hud been admitted to the presence of the Governor and had been promised that office. They desire iu fact to engross to themselves all the advantages and all the salaries that can be given to their districts. It is most imprudent to yield to the demands of such men. They will be loyal from sheer opposition without payment, and to give them all that is to be gained by loyalty at once destroys the hope of converting the majority. Lastly, there are many who are sincerely convinced of the impossibility of attaining by the "King movement" those benefits which they once hoped for. They have tried an experiment, and have the good sense to see that it has failed. I know many men who belong to this class, and 1 believe their number to be increasing. It is possible that some of them may be influenced partly by the hope of a Government post, but it is only one motive and not the sole motive. Whether this class will ever increase so much as to be able to break up the alliance, it is impossible to say ; there' is not the slightest prospect of its being able to do so at present. The King's party is not likely to attempt to prevent by force the secession of any tribe. Even in Waikato some have made their profession of loyalty without calling forth any hostility; of course the distant tribes can do just what they please. But the King's Natives are resolved not to part with the land of the seceders; that is still considered to be under the King's " maua;" and any attempt to sell it would be sure to evoke strong hostility. Of course this right would only be asserted in cases where the King's Natives supposed themselves to have the power to enforce it. III.— Of the Chief Difficulty in Native affairs. It will be readily understood from the above facts, in what the chief danger to the peace of the Colony from the " King movement" lies. The Maori King is kept up by a feeling of distrust and opposition to the English Government; but it is the existence of this distrust, not its manifestation in the form of the Maori King, that is dangerous. Even if the Maori King had never been thought of, the moment that a question arose which brought the interests of one race into prominent antagonism with those of the other, some sort of organization must have been invented to give unity to the Maori side: it is hardly possible that anything could have been invented weaker than the King. As it was, the King, being already in existence, was seized upon for the purpose, and has grown to his present dimensions and formidable aspect subsequently to, and I believe in consequence of, the Taranaki war. This danger is a formidable one, but would not be removed by the destruction of the King, though his being voluntarily abandoned by the Maoris would be a sign that it had ceased to exist. To secure safety, we must cure the disease, not stop its symptoms; we must remove the distrust, not Matutaera. To attempt to restore peace and fellowship to the two races by putting down the King by force, would be as absurd as the conduct of the captain who broke his weather-glass that he might escape the storm. But there is a danger, which is a very much more serious and permanent source of peril to the Colony than that one the symptom whereof is the Maori King—it is the utter lawlessness and anarchy of the Native population of New Zealand. If the reports which appear in the public

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REPORTS OF OFFICERS: