SOME REASONS WHY.

King Country Chronicle, Volume I, Issue 20, 8 March 1907, Page 3

SOME REASONS WHY.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —When two parties bargain and agree to certain conditions and sign a deed embodying their agreements, that document is prima facie evidence that two parties did so agree. This is no legal fiction, and no man with one scruple of common sense would repudiate such stamped and signed agreement. If these assumptions are incorrect, and it is legally and honourably possible for one side to ignore and repudiate his engagement as set forth in the said signed, stamped and witnessed agreement, why do men commit the idiotcy to write agreements at all ? And why is the first party, which by quibble or finesse seeks to evade his responsibility stigmatised by our law courts and ordinary moral codes as a scoundrel, and unworthy of the confidence of decent honest men ? These are questions which demand straight out answers, about which there will be ambiguous hairsplittings when laid before a Supreme Court Judge for sentence! If then it is expedient that such agreements be complied with in ordinary commerce, may not the same obligations be exacted when the contracting parties are two independent nations ? By what epithets but those of loathing and contumely should the first infractor of national engagements be defined ? And by what else than public execration should the party be pelted, when, by the aid of main force, he wantonly sets aside such agreements as " worn threadbare," " time worn agreement," but retains it to terrorise the weaker party into compliance with his distorted interpretations of their mutual stipulations ; and further imposes restrictions and exacts conditions, not mentioned in the deed of agreement at all! Permit me, sir, to assure you that the Treaty of Waitangi, until it be mutually cancelled by Maori as well as Pakeha, is to us, who appeal for its restitutions, no mere catalogue of items ; it stands to us for a symbol of National Honour! To us its nonobservance is a degradation of the " flag which braved a thousand years, the battle and the breeze "! We look upon its contravention as a desecration of the memory of our beloved, lamented Queen Victoria ! And despite the implied ridicule of your leader of the Ist inst, that our appeal to the national conscience that the intention and inviolability of that treaty be re-instated is so much " flowery eloquence squandered by academical reformers," it will remain with us a personal sentiment, neither anti nor philo-Maori, but a stone-cold fact that here we are at the parting of the ways to rectitude or dishonour! Will no one understand that the correct procedure under these conditions is to say to the Maori: " Friend, from this day out you are endowed with all the rights and privileges of a British subject. You can take your land to the highest bidder for sale or lease, subject to one supervision that you retain sufficient for your sustenance, and subject to our wise land restrictions as to area, to prevent the aggregation of too large estates. We abolish the idiotic separate Maori representation. You shall exercise a vote of local option. Your landless, which by a diabolically wicked confiscation we have pauperised, shall be provided for out of the public estate ; and all illegal restrictions with which we had hitherto hampered your progress shall be removed. In short, you are a free member of the British Nation. Come, therefore, and help me to burn this treaty which is no longer needed." This course would be in accordance with the actions of men to whom the printing of bibles and building churches was no cover for hypocrisy and treaty sacrilege. Not the mummeries of tepid Laodiceans, but tokens of a Nation's progress in probity and honour! Do.you for one moment believe the Maori would reject the boon and refuse the companionship of his Pakeha friend ? My knowledge of the Maori is not of yesterday, but of a life time, and I assure my readers that by this alone can the Pakeha-Maori gordian knot be untied. —I am, etc., W.B,