their land, which would then be either given to military settlers or sold to defray the costs of war. The government published notices of the terms for granting land in the Omata area to military settlers in July, and a month later for land in the Waikato area, even though no legislation for the confiscations yet existed. In August 1863, just three weeks after the invasion of the Waikato began, Attorney-General Frederick Whitaker and Defence Minister Thomas Russell sent Governor Grey a memorandum signed by Premier Alfred Domett, claiming that the Waikato, the most powerful Māori tribe, was planning to drive out or destroy Europeans and establish a native kingdom. They argued that the security of the colony demanded that Māori aggression needed to be punished and proposed that an armed population be recruited from the goldfields of Otago and Australia and settled on land taken from the "enemy". Whitaker and Russell, leading Auckland financiers, speculators and lawyers, were the most powerful men in the ministry and stood to make a substantial fortune if Māori south of Auckland could be moved from their land. Grey, who had recently returned from a term as Governor of the Cape Colony in South Africa, where the military settlement of Xhosa land had been undertaken, embraced the idea and in a dispatch to the Colonial Office a month later set out details of the plan, repeating the claim that Māori planned the wholesale destruction of some European settlements. The proposal was to place 5000 military settlers on the Waikato and Taranaki frontiers, each holding a 20 hectare farm on military tenure. Grey attempted to allay potential misgivings in the Colonial Office by pointing out that there were only 3355 Māori living on 200,000 hectares of fertile land in the Waikato, and of this they had cultivated just 6000 hectares. He proposed making roads throughout the land to link the military settlements and towns and estimated the entire cost to be £3.5 million. The funds would be raised with a loan from the Bank of New Zealand, which Defence Minister Russell had founded, and from which both he and Attorney-General Whitaker hoped to profit. Security for the loan would be provided by the profits expected from the sale of confiscated land to new immigrants. By October the scheme had grown again, with the number of military settlers in Taranaki, Waikato and other areas now pegged