MAORI TOHUNGAS. Pakeha Frauds Run Them Close.

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 217, 27 August 1904, Page 6

MAORI TOHUNGAS. Pakeha Frauds Run Them Close.

INSIDE and outside Parliament the, Maori tohunga has been getting a bad time lately. He is going to be suppressed, or several people will know the reason why. The Maoris, or those of them who believe m tohungas, pour buckets of watei on the heads of their patients, and aio heathens The pakeha who pours buckets of patent medicine inside the patient isn t a heathen, but he gets there just the same We are so wonderfully enlightened that we know exactly what to do' with the native health, and we know it is extremely wrong foi Maori fakus to fatten on the ignorance and supeistition of their own people We'll have it stopped. see if we don't. * • » The pure white fakirs, who fatten, on the intelligence of the pakeha, nourish like docks both here .md elsewhere m this highly intellectual country. The country is seething with beauty specialists, fortune-tell-ers, psychometrists, and "Madames" of one kind and another A person who can think up a real smart name for a new liver mixture will persuade thousands of persons— not heathens — that they are sick A howling fraud will come to Wellington with a chariot, a brass band, a pair of forceps, a stock of coloured water, and unlimited cheek. He will be patronised by the most intelligent pakehas, and he won't be run in for being a bigger robber than all the tohungas who ever threw cold water over a person suffering from pneumonia. * * • Maoris are so credulous. It ia their ignorance that makes them so. Pakehas are not credulous. They are so intelligent. A practical joker was able to persuade two out of every three people he met in Wellington a week or two ago that a second earthquake was about to take place. At frequent intervals a religious maniac is able to get a host of followers to go> along with him to the nearest hill, and wait for the end of the world If Maoris believe their prophets, we laugh. Poor, ignorant heathen ' * » * To speak plainly, the white thimble-rigger of to-day, the threecard man, the "healer," the "prophet," the fortune-teller, and all the rest of the people who hate work, have just as fair a field to work as they had when grandpa, was a boy. Of course, we want to purge the country of tohungas, who are killing off the Maoris, but, while we are sweeping' the native fraud out, we ought to include the army of white adventurers, which is daily growing. * # * We are so aj)t to arrange the morals of the other fellow We want to Christianise the Chinaman, and civilise the Maori, forgetting that, on the whole, we ourselves hang on to our pathetic little tin gods, and worship them with great reverence And Wellington doctors will tell you tales aboiit the astounding ignorance pakehas show of the commonest laws of health. * * * , Many a man would rather take oceans of potions than fresh air, and somebody's soap and aloes pills than exercise. It is because we are go intelligent. We don't die suddenly like the Maori with the lung trouble, who is alternately baked and frozen, but it says a great deal for the good old strain from which we come that we endure a long course of poisoning better than any people on earth, and are as easily gulled by smoothtongued frauds as the persons we affect to regard as benighted heathen.