FAMOUS SPEECH.

Manawatu Herald, Volume L, Issue 3958, 20 June 1929, Page 4

FAMOUS SPEECH.

THE MAORIS’ MAGNA CARTA. ORATORY IN PARLIAMENT. LIBERTIES OE NATIVE RACE. The anniversary of the granting of 'iMagna Carta, which occurred 714 years ago on Monday, recalls the famous speech delivered in the New Zealand Parliament by James Edward Fitzgerald in 1862 on the granting of Magna Carta rights to the Maori people. In the opinion of many, it deserves to ranlk with the finest examples of oratory in the language, and has been described by Sir Robert Stout as “perhaps the ablest and most eloquent speech that was ever delivered in the New Zealand Parliament, or in any Parliament.”

(Fitzgerald’s first connection with New Zealand was his appointment as emigration agent to the Canterbury Association in London in 1849. He landed a.t Lyttelton at the end of the following year and became the first Superintendent of (Canterbury, being elected to the first New Zealand Parliament in 1854 as member for Lyttelton. . He quickly established himself as a statesman, financier, philosopher and orator of the first rank, became Premier in the short-lived Ministry of 1854, was afterwards Native Minister and for many subsequent years held the offilee of Comptroller-General. STATE OF ARMED NEUTRALITY. As a leader of the Peace Party in (the House, Fitzgerald became famed for his impassioned advocacy of a, policy of reconciliation toward the Maoris, and it was he who introduced and had carried the Native Rights Act, 1865, the Magna Carta of Maori liberties, which provided that every person of the Maori race in the colony should be deemed a natural-born subject of the Queen. It was in defence of the Maori race that he delivered the memorable speech of 1862. “The present state of things cannot last,” he said. “The condition of tho colony is not one of peace; it is a state of armed and suspicious neutrality. If you do not quickly absorb this king movement into your own Government, you will come into collision with it, and, once light up again the torch of (war in these islands, and these feeble and artificial institutions you are now building up will be swept away like bouses of paper in the flames. Tjribe after tribe will be drajwn into the struggle, and you will make it a war of races. Of Course, you will conquer, but it will be the conquest of the tomb.

“TAKE AWAY THE SWORD.” “Tws or three years of war will eradicate every particle of civilisation from the native mind, and will elicit all the fiercest instincts of his old savage nature. The bribes, broken up, without social or military organisation, will be scattered through tho country in bands of merciless banditti. The conflagration of Taranaki will be lighted up again in every border of the colony; and in self-preservation you will be compelled —as other nations have been compelled before —to hunt the miserable native from haunt to haunt until he is destroyed like the beasts of the forest. “I am here to-night to appeal against so miserable, so inhuman a consummation. We are here this evening standing on the threshold of the future, holding the issues of peace and wai’, of life and death, in our hands. I see some honourable friends round me whose counsels I must ever respect, and whose tried coujrage we all admire, who will tell me that you cannot govern this race until you have conquered them. I reply, in the words which the poet has placed in the mouth of the great cardinal, ‘ln the hands of men entirely great the pen is mightier than the sword. Take away the sword 1 States may be, saved without it.’

CRIME OF PRECIPITATING WIAR. “I know well that evil days may come when the sacred inheritance of light and truth, which God has given to a nation to hold and to transmit, may only he saved by an appeal to the last ordeal of nations —the trial by war; but I know, too, how great the crime which rests on the souls of those who, for any less vital cause or for any less dire necessity, precipitate that fatal issue. “I grudge not the glory of those who have achieved the deliverance of a people or the triumph of a cause by auy sacrifice of human life or human happiness; but I claim a higher glory for those who, in reliance on a law more powerful than that of force, and wielding spells more mighty than the sword, have led the nations by paths of peaceful prosperity to the fruition of an c-nduring civilisation. I claim a higher glory for those; who, standing on the pinnacle of human power, have striven to imitate the government of Him who ’taketh up the simple out of the dust, and lifteth the poor out of the .mire/ And I claim the highest glory of all for that man who has most thoroughly penetrated that deepest and loftiest mystery in the art of human government, ‘the gentleness that maketh great.’ “AN ACT OF KINDRED GREATNESS.” “I have stood beside a lonely mound in which lies buried the last remnant of a tribe .which fell—men, women and children —before the tomahawks of their ancient foes; and I sometimes shudder to think that my son, too, may stand beside a similar monument—the work of cur hands —and blush with the ignominy of feeling that, after all, the memorial of the Christian laiw-

giver is but coined from that of the cannibal and the savage. “I appeal to the House to-night to inaugurate a policy of courageous and munificent justice. I have o. right to appeal to you as citizens of that nation which, deaf to the predictions of the sordid and the timid, dajred to give liberty to her slaves. I appeal to you tonight in your sphere to perform an act of kindred greatness. I appeal to you nut only on behalf of the ancient race whose destinies are hanging in the balance, but also on behalf of your own sons and your sons’ sons, for I venture to predict that, in virtue of that mysterious law of our being by which great deeds once done become incorporated into the life and soul of a people, enriching the source from whence flows through all the ages the inspiration to noble thoughts and the incitement to generous actions —I venture to predict that among the traditions of that great nation which will one day rule these islands, and the foundations of which we are now laying, the most cherished and the most honoured policy which gave the Magna Carta of their liberties to the Maori people.”