XI. Mr. Busby, formerly British Resident at New Zealand.—1860.

I have read much of "manorial" and "seignorial right," of "tribal right," and even of "feudal right," in relation to the Maori tenure of land. Persons use these expressions with ideas more or less distinct attached to them, taking it for granted that corresponding ideas exist in the minds of the Maoris. The Rev. Mr. Hobbs lately showed that the words "mana" and "rangatira," which are the words in the Maori language supposed to represent the ideas of right and of authority, represent no such ideas in the minds of the Maoris. In fact, the ideas must exist before words to represent them are called into existence. I question whether many of the Maoris are better informed on such points now than they were at the time of the Treaty of Waitangi, but it is very certain that at that time no Maori entertained the idea of a "right" existing in one party which implied an obligation upon all otter parties to respect it: no one conceived the idea of authority carrying with it the corresponding obligation of obedience. Such rights and obligations are the creation of law, and cannot subsist without it. The Maoris had no law but the law of the strongest.

It is certain that the Maoris had no fixed rule to guide them in the disposal of their land. It was a commodity to which no exchangeable value had ever been attached—a transaction for which no precedent existed; and, as in other things, the weak were overborne by the strong and impudent. Those who, according to our rules of lineal descent from the common progenitor, ought to have had most to say in the matter, had often the least. This shocks our ideas of right, but it came as a matter of course to them. Nevertheless there are ideas attached to the possession of land which may well be called instinctive. When a man has felled the forest, and fenced in and cultivated a portion of land, he has established a right against all other persons, which is at once felt to be as natural as that of a man page 24to his own children, and is precedent of all law. And great injustice may be done to individuals who hold such a possession if they are prevented from selling it by a supposition that what we call a superior right exists in some other person, that right being nothing more, in the minds of the Maoris, than the exercise of an arbitrary power by those who have strength and arrogance enough to assume it.—[Letter in "Southern Cross" Newspaper, July, 1860.]