MILK PUNCH AND THE NATIVE OFFICE.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume III, Issue 161, 12 February 1864, Page 2

MILK PUNCH AND THE NATIVE OFFICE.

[From the Daily Southern Cross, February 3/J In another column will be found a letter which ought to prove interesting toevery reader of this paper, from the Clerk of the House of Representatives. In its present form this letter professes to be a vindication of the Native Office from charges made against it of late by ourselves. We are glad of this vindication, and accept it as the best that could be said on behalf of the Native Office. We do not repeat the exclamation of the Chal-

dean sage, world-famed for patience under Oh, that mine enemy had written a hook!” rather out of consideration for the person to whom the. somewhat ungracious task has fallen of putting forth defence, than because we can look with favourable eyes upon the Native Office, or regard the patient endurance of its countlees wrongs and abuses by this community as unworthy of Job. To Englishmen it is proverbially an unpleasant task to strike the fallen and unresisting ; and men of all races can feel the unpleasantness of being obliged to hit a feather-bed. We had begun to fear that the Native Office, never proverbial for its manly front, was about to adopt the school stratagem of the cowardly, and drop helpless and unresisting at the first attack. We have to thank the Colonial Secretary and Major Campbell, therefore, for the opportunity their conduct in the matter has given us of recurring to the subject with a trifle more of light thrown upon our path than before. Dark enough it still is without doubt, and is likely to continue so long as a single pigeon-hole or dark cupboard remains unransacked in the Native Office. Where a commodity is precious, however, we are thankful even for small quantities, and light upon the Native Office expenditure is to the New Zealand public, whether it is yet fully aware of the fact or not, of about the value of diamond dust. The case stands thus: Some weeks ago we brought a list of accusations against the Native Office, one of which was that in their accounts appeared a sum for “ milk punch.” Now, we would have it fully understood that we instanced “milk punch,” not from any hard-hearted indisposition to allow a Native Office official to indulge in the fine flow of his naturally warm and extensive sympathies towards his Maori friends. Could these feelings have found an adequate vent in unlimited supplies of pantaloons, we should not have mentioned the circumstance. Could dispensing any amount of shoe leather aud gold-laced caps have filled the aching void in the heart of a Native Secretary, we should have looked on, perhaps regretfully, but still indulgently. But it was because of the two-fold aspect of “ milk punch,” whether viewed as a direct infringement of the law, or in its more comical aspect as a great advance in native civilization, that we produced it as an instance. The letter before us, however, proceeds remorselessly to deprive us of our instance, and to its authority we bow. The natives, it would appear, had not “milk punch.” What they did have is not so very clear at first sight. For although from the letter of Major Campbell it would seem that Mr. M’Lean’s native visitors drank nearly <£lo worth of milk during the Kohimarama Conference, a sum which would allow them about sixty or seventy quarts a-piece, we are in a position to explain that this is hardly correct. Pure milk may have its charms for the native mind and palate, but unless when developed into “ milk punch,” we very much doubt our native friends’ so greedy consumption of the wholesome beverage. In this case they assuredly were content with less. By some remarkable, and to our unsophisticated minds unaccountable process, the sum of two pounds some odd shillings, which represented, we believe, Mr. Hay’s bill for milk, was mixed up with another six pouuds some odd shillings representing the labor of a man cook engaged to supply the Kohimarama Conference, or some part of it, with creature comforts, in the position of cook, or perhaps cook and footman. This compound sum was, it now appears, subjected to a certain culinary process in the recesses of the Native Office, and at last made its appearance on the table of the House of Representatives, in the mild and wholly unobjectionable form of a Bill of ,£9 7s. for milk supplied to natives! Had this been its last appearance, all would have been well. Retributive justice, however, in the shape of some one “ with more wit than discretion,” still pursued the item of expenditure. Principally expended on a cook, it had once been cooked already, and now for a second and more fatal time it underwent the process again and finally emerged, not in the wholly innocent form of a milk account, not even in the little more objectionable shape of wages to a man cook (and footman) for the native chiefs in Parliament assembled—Bellamy’s in fact, —but in the horribly abrupt, startling, and grotesque form of “ milk punch for natives.” From such a chapter of accidents many useful lessons might, no doubt, be profitably drawn. To some minds it may appear that the idea of an English man-cook, even if he be not required to wear plush of thefr native Prince ship’s'peculiar colours, has in it several grave defects; to others, the moral may seem rather to point to the oidginal manipulation of the accounts in the I Native Office ;

and to a third, who has a taste for( morals, such as are to be found in the pages of the Ingoldsby Legends, the warning may seem to be wholly directed against the clumsiness which put it in the power of “-some person with more wit than discretion” to expose the whole affair. To our own mind, it has but one significancy. It merely adds one more to the many evidences, which pass upon us day by day, that of all the sores that afflict New Zealand’s body politic, the Native Office and its administration have been, and are, the most hopeless of cure, by any means but amputation of the part afflicted. Let no one imagine that the discovery of the interesting fact that the milk punch item was not caused by the supply of that article to the natives, but rather was enabled to appear in the Journals of the House, through what we must take leave to term at the least an iugenious’system of bookkeeping, has | altered our opinion one jot. We are not shocked, for we had fully believed that such practices were part of the Native Office traditions. We are not pleased to find the administration better than we fancied, because a little milk punch once supplied, was only presented by us to the public as the representative of much rum punch which has been over and over again supplied in defiance of all law, of all ‘good sense, of allj - . humanity. The Native Office may never have been guilty of milk punch: but it has been' guilty of a hundred crimes heinous, without the redeeming feature of its comicality. Again we repeat that the whole affair only repeats one monotonous warning to our minds. To talk of re-organization and reform is the merest weakness. Re-organization may be good when there is an inherent excellency or an inherent necessity in the thing to be re-organized; but in the Native Office is neither. Reform is an admirable thing when anything desirable remains to be put in a fresh shape ; we venture to deny that any such thing exists in the Native Office. Too hopelessly corrupt for re-organization, too utterly useless for reformation, it is the duty of Government to sweep it away at once and for ever.