CORRESPONDENCE.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume III, Issue 163, 26 February 1864, Page 2

CORRESPONDENCE.

1o the Editor of the Hawke's Bay Times.

Sir, —To that early settler ia this fine Province, who standing on some eminence overlooking the lovely lands by which he was surrounded, the idea must very naturally have occurred that such great advantages—sucn wonderful diversity of wood, water, and fine grass lands, —must be under a special ordinance of nature eminently fitted for the habitation of a great people. Vast tracts of fertile plains, backed by grand ranges of

well-grass(il lulls, gives evidence indisputable that HawKe’s Bay, in spite of the power of petty cliques, will some day be teeming with inhabitants,’ and resounding to the hum of industry, just as it now is teeming with fourfooted life, and resounding to the sonorous fichos of their many varied languages. “I see a column of slow-rising smoko O’ertop the wood which skirts the wild, A vagabond and useless race there eat Their miserable meal.” Thus said or sung that divine and pureminded Cowper, when soliloquising in his rambles in the green lanes and fields of Old England ; and how often must those lines have recurred to the memory as one watched the “ column of slow-rising smoke” indicating that not far off might be found by the curious in such matters, a Maori pah. Yet while we now, in the day of the decline and rapid extinction of the aborigines of these islands, delight to point the finger of scorn at them and call them anything but gentlemen, we must not forget that the time was once, when but for them, we should have had great difficulty in penetrating into the wilds of these Islands. Often has the sight of the “ column of slow-rising smoke” been hailed by the weary and hungry traveller with a gusto of anticipation of rest and food that is hardly conceivable by the modern lounger in well-stocked and comfortably tended homestead or road-side inn. It may seem unfortunate to the newly-ar-rived settler in New Zealand, that that miserable heap of rotting timber and decaying thatch, surrounded by a dilapidated and ruinous fence, or what was once intended to be a fence, is all that remains of a large village, which echoed the merry song and joyous laugh of youth, and the sententious wisdom of age. That there beneath the spreading branches of that magnificent willow, under the now ruined roof of that tumble-dowh whare, the subject of peace and war —the question of life and death—has often, and but too often, been solemnly discussed. There hundreds of doughty warriors strutted about and admired their tattooed, painted, and befeathered persons. From out of that ruinous fence issued to the bloody fight, and still more bloody sacrifice, thousands of brave men, beautiful women, and innocent children. But so it is, the face of the country is changed, and the inhabitants thereof are as a tale that is told. In the miserable squalid wretch who impudently tegs a.piece of tobacco we can hardly fancy that we see the descendent of the mighty Maui or the bloody Ropuru. But thus it it is with these New Zealanders, and so it lias ever been with savage races with whom we have come in contact. They perish from the face of the earth before the advance of civilization as the vegetation withers before the blasting influences of the terrible sirocco. In this particular case of the New Zealander, much of the difficulties which we have had to contend with are to be laid to the door of that overweening desire to appear actuated •in our dealings with them by the most scrupulous desire to act fairly towards them, and, in fact, rather to err on the side of excessive leniency than to be found wanting on the score of forbearance. It is hardly necessary to say, that however well-meant our intentions in these particulars might have been, they have clearly and signally failed. No savage race has any ideas of kindness. Love, except sexual love, kindness, affection, have no equivalent forms of expression in their language. High and pure-minded poets have translated love ditties of the Maories, but they have found it almost impossible to render into the English for polite ears, language, the very mildest form of which is lewd and licentious. We are now fighting a furious fight with a people whom we have nurtured and cherished as some rare exotic or choice plant of great value, with a people who have been most carefully nurtured in the art of civilization, and have particularly profited ly the art of war. Firmness and a show of determination in our early dealings with those Natives would have saved us the ruinous consequences of this bloody, prolonged, and disastrous war, which is dragging the whole Island into the bottomless pit of taxation, and the Native race to sure and certain destruction. A New Zealander. Country Districts, 15th February, 1864.