The Patea Mail. (Published Wednesdays and Saturdays.) WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 1879.

Patea Mail, Volume V, Issue 432, 4 June 1879, Page 2

The Patea Mail. (Published Wednesdays and Saturdays.) WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 1879.

It is remarkable how opinion and feeling respecting the Maori difficulty fluctuates from day to day ; how easily hopes arc raised, and how soon scattered. There is something humiliating, and strongly indicative of helplessness in the womanish, hopeful and eager trust with which the assurances of savages that they will not hurt us are listened to. A set of deluded wretches, at the bidding of an insolent fanatic, commit offences which would cost Europeans their liberty for years to come, and there is at once, not a resolve to punish them, but a fear of greater offences. Some of the offenders condescend to tell us that they will not take part in murdering ns, and there is at once a feeling of relief, not exactly of gratitude, but certainly of gladness. In this—one of the finest colonies in the British Empire a mere handful of natives are suffered to be independent, to break the law and defy its vengeance, to promise peace and threaten war, to give their ultimatums and insult our representatives, and, on the whole, to treat the subjects of Queen Victoria in the most insulting, or still worse, intolerably condescending manner. in the colony of Victoria there have for months past been a little band of lawless men, with the aid a few sympathisers, defying the whole country. One man, who helped the police to find the bodies of some men that these ruffians had murdered, had been so horribly threatened in anonymous letters, that the Government resolved to buy his property and let him leave the district. Now what would Victorians, and indeed the world, say if the Government assured of the colonists that the future intentions the Kellys’ were peaceable, or that they would be “ proceeded against in tbe Supreme Court ?” Or what would bo said if the assasins were subsidised to keep the peace ? This would certainly be impossible. There is a force pursuing those four desperadoes as great as the whole force under arms at Opunako and VYaihi. Where is the difference between the case of Victoria and that of New Zealand ? She deals with four corn-stalks, we with ! four hundred Maoris or so; she will assert the dignity of her laws at any cost, we allow our lowest class to bo above law; her law-breakers aie fugitives, and dare not show their faces except when prepared to fight, our law-breakers walk about our streets, drink in our hotels, buy in onr shops, and sell in our markets. The Kellys have a reward on their heads, but the Maoris are sacred things, and must not bo molested in their crime, but left to continue it day after day, till the law, with its usual delay, makes its impotent voice heard. It is the arm of the law, and not its voice, that is required. There are several natives engaged in ploughing np a settler’s land, blit they must not be stopped, they will be “ proceeded against.” Why on earth are not these rascals seized, whipped, and banished to Stewart’s Island ? Certainly to let them proceed is an unnecessary humiliation to the colony, and at the same time strips the European, as far as Maoris are concerned, of the last vestige of authority. There is no doubt as to the fact of their trespassing, and that in an almost unheard of manner. Why then are they not arrested ? Is it usual to “ proceed” against a man before he is caught? Will it be easier to arrest them when sentence has gone forth, and they are on the alert, and begin to be regarded as martyrs by their countrymen, than it is now, while the trespass is in progress ? These are questions that the Government should answer to the humiliated colony.