THE QUESTION OF FRANCHISE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume I, Issue 37, 5 July 1907, Page 3

THE QUESTION OF FRANCHISE.

[l.'v W.B. Kuiti.J Not to unduly extend the. sketch in which I purpose to indicate how the Rohc Potae (circumscribed area) became a prohibited district, dates, and names of persons will be omitted; and I would recommend lovers of such statistics to search the Parliamentary reports of that day. In the bad old days it was an unrebuked time-hallowed expedient when Land Courts sat to investigate tiller, and one Maori was prepjred to sell, and his brother was not, for that unspeakably unclean thing, the Government's Land Purchase Commissioner's pilot fish, or advance agent, to befuddle the refractory with chemical rum, or such other brain-dulling mixtures, speediest to reduce the objector to a neutral, and later, physical wreck : j poisons which, had they kilicd outright, would have been merciful, but instead created a thirst for more, until the poor victim was maddened to stake his vital soul to obtain it; and in lieu of that soul, signed away vast tracts of his patrimony for a mere pittance per acre that he might acquire the wherewithal to quench and continue the degrading debauch. The Government knew this; knew also that without this process recalcitrant objectors might indefinitely delay a purchase it had courted, and therefore connived at it by permitting its continuance. Also the Maori knew it; and to his general credit, be it said, that he refused to be tempted. Here I speak from personal knowledge, and of cases, where this ghoulish reptile was ejected from the pah with a pack of dogs at his heels, sooled on by indignant " barbarians " (?) Even now I feel good that I witnessed the contumelious ejection. Up to the early eighties the Rohe Potae remained a region where the Queen's writ issued at par value of waste paper; and the Pakeha who crossed its borders did so at his personal peril. And as furthermore the

most suitable road and rail route to

south lay through the forbidden territory, it was suddenly remembered that no sovereign State could tolerate the indignity that its writs should be barred. It also remembered the long series of expensive warlike fiascos before it achieved a dominance in other parts, and hence sought to attain by negotiation where it had signally failed in war. After many tedious and protracted overtures, alluring promises, and enticing assurances that neither his liberties, lands, nor customs should be encroached upon,

the Maori consented with certain reservations that road and rail passage might cross. Later —and also after much meretricious tinsel and word-paint—he agreed that those of

his tribe who wished to sell land might do so; but that where the Land Court sat to investigate and apportion titles, that unspeakably

ghoulish miscreant, the chemical rum and poison purveyor, should be legally and rigidly excluded. Here then in limine we have the skeleton upon which that per-fervid idolator with a solitary inspiration : The

prohibitionist has been ever since

covering adipose of his unskilled manufacture, and under the specious pretence of a love for the

Maori—and in a minor degree—the Pakeha has, assiduously disseminated

the hallucinations that ethics and morality are only possible by following his narrow runnel which he has magnified into a mighty Mississippi,

whereon argosies laden with other creations of his amateur brain will enrich the world, satisfy man, and cure all the tribulations of life. For there is no limit to the horizon of this dauntless explorer, who steers by a compass, and calculates his position among" parallels and meridians, by altitudes and chronometric logarithms which Nature emphatically asserts, do not exist until we have reached the chaos of madness, interference, and unrest to-day, at which even the temperate advocate of his creed re-

volts with -disgust, and which has emboldened me to fearlessly protest against and resist. Both my time and space are exhausted, and other aspects of this subject must await a more convenient season.