OUR LOCKED-UP NATIVE LANDS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 458, 11 May 1909, Page 2

OUR LOCKED-UP NATIVE LANDS.

The native land question, which is more or less in the air at present, is dealt with in a lucid article in the current number of The Citizen. With regard to the policy of Mr Carroll, the writer points out that in 1900 even the power of the Crown to purchase was abolished by Act of Patliamenl. He adds: “ Consider this fora moment! One loiulh of the land in the North Island was made inalienable from one-fourteenth of its population, inalienable to a people who in a few years would not even be onefourteenth or even one-fortieth of the population, but must become an insignificant fraction, a people who had never really occupied the laud thus entailed to them.” The right of purchase was in a measure restored in 1905, but for the most part the native lands “ lie silent and sullen across the heart of the North Island, denying opportunity to settlement, depriving the country of trade and commerce, growing more desirable and more valuable every day by the labour and the enterprise and the expenditure of the European. And the law of the Dominion sustains the tribal claims which make the situation possible, and formulates the absurd pretension that the future of a million Europeans to be as tenants of a few thousand Maoris.”