OUR FUTURE PROSPECTS.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 13, Issue 662, 8 March 1869, Page 2

OUR FUTURE PROSPECTS.

(Communicated.) The murders at Taranaki, it seems, were not the commencement of a local outbreak—they were the act of a foreign tribe. It is a serious feature in the case that that tribe was the Ngatimaniapoto, and that the murders have taken place so near the great meeting convened by the King for the present month. But nothing which has as yet transpired causes reasonable people to .suspect the loyalty of the Taranaki natives themselves, The danger is, however, that the exasperation of the settlers, added to the instinct of self-preserva-tion we now feel, will, now that the troops are removed, cause them to confound the friendly tribes with these murderers, and thus increase the number of their enemies. All the settlements from Wanganui—nay, from Rangitikei, or e\en Wei lington—along the West Coast are untenable by peaceful settlers in times of war, and anything short of extermination of the natives will not make them so. We are not prepared to undertake that responsibility, but we must understand that there is another which we must accept or abide the consequences. There is the safety of our own countrymen to be provided for. Unlike our own open coast, the districts on the West are cursed with a black edge, and their fair grazing and arable lands at a distance of from three to four miles parallel to the sea. If settlers are to inhabit the strip of land which intervenes between the almost endless and pathless fores* and the beach, they can hereafter only do so with their rifles in their hands. We hope for the best from Col. Whitraore's opeiations. Some part, and not an inconsiderable one, has already been recovered of the district we had lost. But supposing these operations, as we pray, may end in recovering it all and inflicting a punishment on Titokowaru no less condign than that inflicted on Te Kooti—what then ? Why the force will be disbanded, settlers return to their farms, and after awhile the Maoris will break out again. An other year will again be lost in collecting, training, and weeding the troops, and once more the country will bleed in its pocket and suffer in its character by tke reverses to which the State exposes us. Have we on the East Coast, too, no dark clouds looming in the distance 1 Where are the 2000 and odd arms so sagaciously placed and left in the hands of the East Coast natives? Who can insure us against those arms being turned against us hereafter, as so many have been already ? The North Island cannot with safety for the next twenty years dispense with a trained force, and we much fear if the present Government is replaced by another after a dissolution,

la South Island confederacy will be formed of representatives pledged to 'oppose, who will leave us to weather the storms of the future by ourselves.