THE NATIVE LAND PURCHASE DEPARTMENT.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 6, Issue 1, 29 June 1865, Page 1

THE NATIVE LAND PURCHASE DEPARTMENT.

[From the Canterbury Press.J No one step which Mr Weld’s Government has taken is so thronghly cheering as a proclamation which we published a day or two ago, putting a final end to the Native Land Purchase Department, and cancelling all commissions under it. Few of our readers who are not well acquainted with the Native question in all its bearing, have any idea of how great a revolution has been thus effected by a sweep of the pea. We can safely say we never met a single man immediately acquainted with the natives of the North, and not in some way connected with the Government, who did not agree that in the procedings of that fatal and secret department has lain the germ of all the calamities which have fallen on the Colony. In one form or the other every dispute with the natives from the massacre of the Wairau downwards, has had its origin more or less in the dealings with the natives for land. Bnt it has not been in the bargains themselves that the evil has lain. It has lain in this—that there has been no overruling authority to stand between buyer and seller—no open Court in which a case could be heard with all the formalities of a legal tribunal, and all that satisfaction and confidence which such an open trial invariably engenders. The agents of the Native Land Purchase Department wandered about the country talking to a chief here and a tribe there, and so, by the exercise of a not unskilful ’“but pernicious diplomacy, obtaining the consent of the interested parties to the disposal of property. In Renata’s celebrated letter to the Superintendent of Hawke’s Bay, this is the very first of bis complaints, and it has beenrepresented to the Government again and , again by the missionaries and others, that the native mind was being kept in a state of perpetual excitement and suspicion by this irritating element constantly circulating amongst them. It has not un frequently been the case that the Government has been dragged into the feuds of the natives themselves by these means. A chief has quarrelled with a neighboring tribe with whom a piece of territory was in dispute; to revenge himself, he has gone off to the Government and offered them the disputed land. We have the best authority for saying—and had that enquiry which was moved for in the Assembly into the Waitara purchase ever taken place, it would we believe, have been proved —that the origin of the offer of the Waitara to the Government was in a private and personal quarrel between two of the natives. But the same thing happened more than once, and so the Government has been compelled to offend one chief by refusing to purchase, or to engage in a conflict with the other as to his title to the land. In the acquisition of land, the Government, instead of being the presiding authority—representing the Queen as the fountain of justice to see right done between man and man—-has descended itself in the market and higgled for land—itself at once the purchaser and the sole judge whether to purchase was alid.

But even so—even if it were right that the Government should purchase the land in the name of the Crown—and there had been any court of law for the trial of right and wrong in such disputes, even then justice might have been done. But the same policy which degraded the Governor into a land jobber, drove the Queen’s judges from the justice seat. Under a miserable fiction of law—a fiction humiliating to the law'—the Courts were debarred from hearing any case in which the title to native property w r as involved ; and the native, already disgusted at the presence of the land agent where he had expected to find the representative of Sovereignty, found those gates of justice which stand open to the meanest of Englishmen, impenetrably barred against him. Finally —last sad scene of all—he fell beneath the bayonets of our soldiers, for rebellion against a Sovereign whom he had only known in the character of a land shark, and for disobedience to a law the doors of whose temples we had slammed in his face.

One part of this system of folly has been for ever destroyed ; and those who remember that speech by Mr Mantell in 1862, on the Native Lands Act, in which he described the real nature of the process of purchasing native lands—and he spoke with authority, for he had bought more land from the natives than any other Commisssioner—those who remember his startling revelations on that occasion, may well suppose that under his guidance at the Native Office the system had a poor chance of life. It will be an honorable memorial to him that his name attests the proclamation which is the death warrant of the land purchase system. But the work is only half done. The Sovereign power of the country, in the person of a Land Purchase Commissioner, will, it is true, no longer sit by the bush camp fire, or lounge amongst the whares of a Maori pa, chaffering with half-clad damsels, —Government. in plain prose, will no longer pure: ase the lands; but let it not therefore be imagined that lands will not therefore be bought. Nay, so soon as these troubles are over, we venture to predict that there will be more land transactions between private individuals of the European race and the natives, than some of us have any idea of. Is it possible, is it conceivable that such a commerce can go on without fatal disputes, so long as the Supreme Court of the Colony is ousted of its jurisdiction between the parties ? If it were a miserable thing before that such should be the case, it wall be doubly dangerous now. Nay, we go so far as to say, that unless the Government had made up its mind to restore the Supreme Court to the plenitude of its authority over all property within these islands, the policy of opening the free trade in land, and the dismissal of the troops, would have been the work of madmen. But the able men who guide the fortunes of the Colony at this critical period, have, we are sure, foreseen this conclusion as early as we have ourselves. Step by step, we doubt not, they will progress in the path they have chosen—to carry out into a reality the policy proclaimed by the resolutions unanimously passed by the House of Representatives in 1862—“ That in the adoption of any policy, or the passing of any laws affecting the native race, this House will keep before it, as its highest object, the entire amalgamation of all her Majesty’s subjects in New Zealand into one united people. That this House recognises the right of all her Majesty’s subjects of whatever race within this Colony, to a full and equal enjoyment of civil and political privileges.”