When honour is in the scale, it outweighs money.

Yet had Captain Hobson been able to conceive what was entailed in the piecemeal purchase of a country held under tribal ownership, it is difficult to think that he would have signed the Treaty without hesitation.

He could not, of course, imagine that he was giving legal force to a system under which the buying of a block of land would involve years of bargaining even when a majority of its owners wished to sell; that the ascertainment of a title would mean tedious and costly examination by courts of experts of a labyrinth of strange and conflicting barbaric customs; that land might be paid for again and again, and yet be declared unsold; that an almost empty wilderness might be bought first from its handful of occupants, then from the conquerors who had laid it waste, and yet after all be reclaimed by returned slaves or fugitives who had quitted it years before, and who had been paid for the land on which they had been living during their absence.

Governor Hobson could not foresee that cases would occur in which the whole purchase money of broad lands would be swallowed up in the costs of sale, or that a greedy tribe of expert middlemen would in days to come bleed Maori and settler alike.
Yet it would have been but reasonable for the Colonial Office to exert itself to palliate the effects of the staggering blows it thus dealt the pioneer colonists of New Zealand.

They were not all land-sharks; most of them were nothing of the sort.