WITHDRAWAL OF THE TROOPS.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 5, Issue 270, 26 May 1865, Page 3

WITHDRAWAL OF THE TROOPS.

fFrom the New Zealand Serald, May 9.] In the hour of our greatest need, when goaded and irritated by a feeble and imbecile war policy, tribe after tribe hae been allowed to drift, or has been driven into rebellion—at a time when New Zealand is about to enter on the most dangerous phasis of the present struggle—at such a moment the Imperial Government has decided on the virtual abandonment of the colony to its fate by the withdrawal of one-half the troops now serving in New Zealand. Britain has saved £Buo,ooo on the army estimates for the present year by this and other reductions. To do so she has abandoned a colony, which, by her own mismanagement alone, and by no fault of its own, has been brought into this state of embarrassment, of more than embarrassment, of actual danger. The Maori, and not without cause, has looked upon himself so far as the victor in the present struggle. The withdrawal of one half the troops will be received by him, as it is in fact, an avowal of defeat on the part of the mother country. If her men have not been ignominiously routed and slaughtered in battle, the Government of the country they servo has, nevertheless, been forced to withdraw from the contest worsted and dispirited. A few days will serve to spread this announcement like wild-fire throughout the island —to strengthen and embolden those rebels in arms and to convince the warerers of the time having arrived when they may safely throw in their weight against us. This action of the Imperial Government is what the craftier portion of the Maoris, such as Thompson and others, have been waiting for. We may now expect to know the nature of the struggle in which we are to be involved. # • # * # * «

The 40th, 43rd, 65th, J 68th, and 70th regiments, and a portion of the Medici Staff, are ordered home. With these regiments, and with the assistance of the colonists to more than an -equal extent, General Cameron has been unable to quell the insurrection now raging. The withdrawal of those regiments will not merely weaken the hands of the General to the extent of so many men, but will strengthen the hands of the rebels by the addition of thousands to their ranks. The Northern natives have not been employed for months past in the manufacture of cartridges for nothing. The time has at length arrived when all disaffected natives may with safety embrace, what is after all in the innermost heart of every Maori the national cause, the extermination of the pakeha. The Maori " will find himself mistaken after all, The withdrawal of the troops is the death-knell of the race, Britain, when with an overflowing treasury she reckoned the lives and safely of her colonists at less value than the fact of being able to cut down her army estimates, was in reality abandoning both races .to their fiate —the one to heavy loss of. property and life, the other to utter annihilation. The removal of the troops will be to throw upon the settlers the settlement, of a struggle which the miserable mismanagement of the Imperial Go vernment has brought about. We cannot afford to meet the enemy as he has been accustomed to be met If the necessity of protecting our lives and property be forced upon us, then, for the sal-

vation of our bare existence, our object will be to reduce his numbers as speedily as possible. Is it to drive the settlers to their own destruction, that the Imperial Government is aiming ? Is this to be the result of years of studied attempts to save the aboriginal race of New Zealand from the fate which has befallen all other races in the history of colonization ? If the mother country values the lives of some sixty or seventy thousand Europeans in the Northern Island at next to nothing, if it be quite en regie that missionaries should be hung and disembowelled while yet alive, and their quivering hearts be eaten, their very blood be lapped up by the savage crowd around—have they no bowels of mercy for the “ noble savage ?” Will the British people leave the two races, goaded to desperation, exasperated to fury to fight like Bo msny gladiators in the arena, until the contest cease only with the death of the combatants ? Shall it be said that a powerful nation like England withdrew dispirited and cowed from a contest which a French General and army would have satisfactorily settled years ago and that the contest which she was fearful of continuing and unwilling to prosecute, was thrust by her perforce upon a handful of settlers in no way concerned with the origin and cause of the struggle. Bead by such a glossary, (he neutral position maintained by Britain in Continental disputes, her patient endurance of American insult, and professed friendship of France in all situations will bear other construction than that of arising from the feeling of colossal strength which once the nation could boast. Britain leaves the New Zealand war as legacy to the colonists. We must take the matter into our own hands. It is the last resourse we would have hoped to adopt, but it will have been one which British pusillanimity and Maori aggression will have forced upon us.