Hawke's Bay Times. Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri. MONDAY, JULY 18, 1870.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 16, Issue 805, 18 July 1870, Page 2

Hawke's Bay Times. Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri. MONDAY, JULY 18, 1870.

Sir George Bowen has unquestionably become celebrated as a writer of despatches. These documents — generally dry enough in their way—his Excellency contrives to make somewhat interesting reading from the abundance of the materials he incorporate* into their composition, collected from his varied store of general and particularly histoiical knowledge. An outbreak of rebellious Maoris always affords opportunity to his Excellency to draw a comparison between it arid similar events in ancient and modern history The highlands of New Zealand for. cibly recall to his mind those of Scotland; the Maori suggests the Celt; and the various tribes and htipus, the Scottish clans. In fact, he bestows the latter term upon the natives, and glibly writes of the various "clans 1 ' of the Maori-, as though that was a term recognized and understood among the colonists as applicable to the Maoris, instead of being a simple idea of his own. Amongst the parliamentary papers recently to hand we have a number of his Excellency's despatches, a perusal of which has elicited the above rem arks. Even w b en treating of no particular raid or act of rebel lion on the part of the natives, but of the insurrection as a he finds scope for comparison, and leaving Scotland for the present, he takes us to India, and shows —at least to his own satisfaction —that similar causes led to revolt, both in the case of the troops of Oude and the tribes of New Zealand. His Excellency gives three main caiiaes in each case, as follow : THE INDIAN REBELLION, THE MAORI WAR. 1. Religious and ua? 1. The Hauhau fanatitional fanaticism. cisra and the king movement, 2. A reduction in the %, The removal of the number of Eugiish troops troops from New Zeain India, land before the submission of the rebels, or any peace ratified with them. 3. The annexation of 3, Confiscation (?) of the territories of the a small portion of the King of Oude. rebels'land. —He adds, as another coincidence,. what is perhaps new to most of us : < ;l The lily fills the same place in the t

mysterious proclamations of the Maori king, as the lotus filled in the missives of some of the native princes of Hindostan." Leaving these interesting fancies he is irresistibly called back to his favorite analogy between the Maoris and the Highlanders; and as for

once the correspondence between the cases is sufficiently striking, we are tempted to extract the passage : In my Despatch No. 116, by this mail, I attempted a descripMon of my visit to the Maori camp near Wanganui on the 17th ultimo, but I shonld have drawn a much fuller and more vivid picture of what I saw there, and especially of the 'meeting between Colonel Whitmore and the Maori chiefs, if I had simply quoted the following [from Macaulay] describing the Highlanders under Bundee :—"All that was left to the Commander under whom these potentates (the Highland chiefs) condescended to serve, was to argue with them, to supplicate them, to flatter them, to bribe them; and it was only during a short time that any human skill could preserve harmony by these means, for every chief thought himself entitled to peculiar observance, and it was therefore impossible to pay marked court to any one without disobliging the rest. The General found himself merely the president of a congress of petty kings. Hi was perpetually called upon to hear and to compose disputes about pedigrees, about preccde,nce,fabout the division of spoil. His decision, be it what it might, must offend somebody. At any moment he might hear that his right wing had fired on his centre iu pursuance of some quarrel 200 yours old ; or that a whole battalion had matched back to its native glen because another battalion had been put in the post of honor."

Our leaders will, we think, admit the above is not a bad picture of the friendly native forces which our Government has fully supplied with arms and ammunition, without any guarantee —for it would be impossible to obtain such—that the "jealousies of precedence and pedigree" which exist among these " petty kings," or some "quarrel two hundred years old," shall not induce one "clan" to make v>ar upon another—or, what is more to the purpose, turn our arms against ourselves.