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As a result, they were less informed, and often took it for granted that Maori extinction was
inevitable. And as they no longer questioned this belief the way earlier Enlightenment and
Romantic thinkers did, since it coincided with an actual fall in Maori numbers, no-one predicted a
better outcome. Instead they either agreed with the status quo or implied as much. In the end, the
Germanic perspective from the late 1870s and 1880s reveals a shift in angle, in which the
negative aspects at times define the general slant of the accounts as much as the positive, without,
generally speaking, fully tarnishing the overall image.
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