BORDER WARFARE.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 13, Issue 649, 21 January 1869, Page 4

BORDER WARFARE.

(Jioadou Con'cspbaiTcnt Wellington Incleponfont) London, Nov. 6, 1838. The various engagements with the Jebeis have attracted a certain amount of attention from the and from the public, but the news has not pro duced auy sensation or uneasiness. These incidents are looked upon as inevitable iu the present state of colonial life. It is not unnatural that the natives who bad the hardihood to will stand the colonists when backed up by an army of more than 10,000 men, to say nothing of the volunteers and ir regular levies should, now that there is no standing army cr other permanent force of any importance to overawe them, feel their courage rise once mere to try conclusions with the Pa fcehas—minus the British regulars, and minus their great enemy, General Cameron. I use this expression 'great enemy' advisedly, and I think 1 ought to have made use of the superlative degree—for the General was, as far as in him lay, the greatest enemy of the native race. Had ho only conducted the expedition under his command with judicious zeal, and without any reference to private political opinions —had he distributed his forces in todies of 500 or 1000 men each, and made them to converge simultaneously from various points upon the principal entrenchments of the Maoris in the Waikato and other districts, and had lie succeeded as he was " bound " to do, in giving his native "friends" a jolly good drubbing (us schoolboys say) the lesson would never have been for gotten by them. It would have been a "caution" to them, and they would have " caved in" for the future. Iu stead of this, the General allowed the Maoris to set us at defiance for years, until they got hold of the idea that a ft blackfellow" was as good as a white man any day, and for fighting purposes rather better. The late enterprises appear to be some of the natural fruits of the Cameron "policy." And now this " policy," or system of tactics, will have to be replaced by a new one —such as General Chute carried out for a short time, until he, too, quarrelled with the authorities—and this time there will be no General Cameron to the fore or to the "front" to shield the natives from the retribution which their wanton outbreaks must bring upon them. There will be no colonial office this time to interfere with tir action of " Responsible Ministers,' 1 who will take their own course accordingly. The general feeling and opinion in England is' that the ratio of the na tive population—or rather of the dis affected portion of them—to the colo nists is so small that you must be abhto hold your own against any possibh number of warriors they could brL'<_ into the field. It was generally expected ia England that, as soon as tin British troops were withdrawn from your colony, you would replace them by a small regular army of your own *—but this appears to have been done only to a very limited extent. I don't know even if this little nucleus of an army which you possess has been furnished with breech-loaders? If not i' is a bad policy and false economy. A man armed with the modern weapon js as good as three men with the old muzzle-loader—a fact which was very forcibly proved more than two years ago at the battle of Sadowa, when the Austrians were knocked over by the Prussians like so many rabbits in a warren—simply because one side was armed with a breech-loader, and the other was not. I remember well drawing the attention of your readers very strongly to this fact, and recommending that your colonial forces should at once be furnished with this new weapon. The War Office authorities at once perceived the necessity of introducing the breech-loader into the British army, and they set to work ai once upon the " conversion" of the old muzzle loaders—which, I believe, was effected at a cost of about .15s each. With the exception of the rifles used by the Volunteers, I believe tint there are now none that are " unconverted." Not many months ago I saw, in the Tower of London, upwards ol 50,000 of these converted weapons — all fit for use. The Volunteers, too, will have them in due course. It is satisfactory to find by the latest dates from your colony that you are " getting up the steam" to have a brush \yith your old enemies in case of necessity, and that you are opening re-

craiting offices ia various districts—a measura which it seems to us here and a*, a distance should have beea adopted loner since. How would it answer to have a force, a stmding force of 5,000 men, all well drilled and thoroughly trained, like the Royal Irish Constabulary —one half of them to be always on active service and full pay, and the other half t) be on the reserved lis! and on half pay, but to be liable to be called out at a moment's nonce ? Something of thi? kind will most likely have to be done if the Maoris cannot be subjected to law and order by easier .neaiiS, The force here contemplated would be available for civil as well as military purposes, and would probably be renewed every five years —unless where " time expired men" preferred to re-engage. But you are not the • uily people in the world just now who have to ope with the " noble savage." By the latest accounts to hand from the United States we learn that "riots and murders (in connection with the approaching presidential elections) are the burdens of all the intelligence from the South, while a new crop of Indian atrocities has startled us from the West. The fact has suddenly become apparent that the few thousand troops now composing the military force oi the United States are too small a body either to maintain a military government in the South or to keep the Indians in order on the frontiers, and that they are u'.terly unable to perform both tasks at the same time.'"' [t appears that General Sherman has i snail army of 7000 men under his command for the purpose of maintaining order alon.<jf a frontier of some ilnusands of miles—but that this force is totally inadequate, and the following extract from a letter which he has lately addressed to a Delegate to Con .jress from Wyoming territory, will afford your readers some idea of the difficulties which a famous American officer finds in dealing with the lied Indi.-'iis with an inefficient force : •' Tiro regular army is provided by Congress, and but a small portion oi it is assigned to my command. With this small force I am required to protect the two railroads, the Missouri river, the various stage routes, amount ing iu the aggregate to over B'JOO miles of travelled road, besides the incidental protection of tens of thousands of miles of frontier se;dements. Each of these settlements exaggerates it-

>\vn importance, and appeals for helj> fiora Minnesota to Arkansas, and from Montana to New Mexico. Were I to mvint ten men where a hundred are called for our little army would be so scattered as to be of no use. Willi hi: small force in the last two years, [ have done as much as any reasonable man could hope for, and if any nan be incredulous let him enlist in my company, and ho will soon find ou; if he don't earn his pay. As to the frontier settlements, I have again and again warned the governors and the people that until this Indian mattei was concluded their people should not sprean out so much. Their isolated farms, with horses and cattle, are to., tempting to hungry and savage Ljands of Indians ; if, however, they will not be restrained by motives of prudence, the people should, as they used to do in Ohio, Kentucky, Inva, and Mis scuri, make their settlements in groups, with block-houses and sod-forts, so that when the savage comes they raaj rally and defend themselves and theit stock. It is a physical impossibility for the small army kind Congress maintains, with yearly threats of further reductions, to guard the exposed settlements of Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. These states and territories must, by organising their people into a sort of militia, be prepared to defend their exposed settlements, and to follow up and destroy the bands of marauding Indians and horse thieves, both red and white, that now infest them and carry on a profitable busi ness. The arm} cannot do it any more than we can catch all the thieves and pickpockets in our cities." These are the words and the practical advice of one of the most distinguished gtneials in the late American wai—a man who has seen service in every form. Scattered over the territories and frontier districts above enumerated, there are upwards of a quarter of a million of Indians of various tribes who are continually quitting the reservations allotted to them by treaty, and to

which they are bound to confine themselves, and are constantly making raids upon their neighboring settlements—for purposes of plundersometimes they, follow the example of the Maoris, and lie in ambuscade to surprise waggon trains going to the West. Then they rob and murder indiscriminately and scalp their victims.