the colony absolute power to annex new territory, but only to open up the way by negotiations, and when arrangements were completed they would be submitted for approval to the Imperial Government.
It is a strange coincidence that on the very day on which Sir George Grey and other members of the New Zealand Parliament met to discuss the scheme of his Bill, Mr. Gladstone announced in the House of Commons that Great Britain had decided to follow a policy almost exactly the same as that which the Bill sketched.
The islands themselves were anxious for federation. Fiji, especially, wished to be attached to New Zealand. The European inhabitants of that group were unanimous in their desire for political connection. They believed that their country should be a part of the “Dominion of Australasia.” Many of them were originally New Zealand colonists, and still looked on New Zealand as their home, and it was their ambition to throw in their lot with the colony, which, although notoriously at loggerheads with itself, was making a good fight in the battle of life.
Sir George Grey’s Bill passed both Houses of the Legislature, and it may still be found among the statutes, but it has never received the royal assent, and has never been put into operation. In his romantic language, Grey said that New Zealand had been ordained by Nature to be the future Queen of the Pacific. He saw nothing to rob her of her position except gross failure to attend to the duties Providence placed before her. He introduced again the famous unborn millions and the great nation that he saw coming in the distance, prosperous, powerful, and unconquerable. “These are great islands, capable of carrying more than thirty millions of European inhabitants, situated in a very large ocean, separated by such vast tracts of sea from other countries that it seems almost impossible for a army strong enough to do much injury to be sent against it. Within our shores there are strongholds of a most extraordinary kind. The Maoris have shown us in the past how to use those strongholds. They could make it impossible for an army to penetrate into this country and hold it for any length of time. I look upon New Zealand as being absolutely unconquerable. I
