PATEA MAIL PUBLISHED Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1880. THE NATIVE CRISIS.

Patea Mail, Volume VI, Issue 535, 19 June 1880, Page 2

PATEA MAIL PUBLISHED Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1880. THE NATIVE CRISIS.

The Parihaka prophet is again conferring with his “ people.” Te Whiti is not an exact counterpart of Elija in the wilderness, fed by compassionate ravens, for his supplies have come from birds of another feather; but the Maori imagination is much impressed by the sufferings and the exploits of Bible heroes ; and Te Whiti, prophet and high priest, would be a hero to himself, if not to his people. What he says and what he advises, at the present meeting, will have potent influence with the tribes along this coast; The native crisis is at hand. The policy of the leading chiefs will have shown itself'at this meeting on the 17th. Our news from Parihaka is not yet to hand, and we can only speculate. This much may be said, that the chiefs, the majority of them, are not now in a fight-

ing mood ; and though it is not clear whether Te VVliiti is content to accept the new position which railways and roadmaking must force upon him. as leader of a race doomed to slow extinction, yet the signs are all in that direction. We are Informed, on authority, that Te Whiti has, since the last meeting, been ordering the members of his tribe to discontinue the building of wharcs on that part of the Confiscated Land which the Commission recommend to be held by the Government. This is a sign that the large grants recommended by the Commissioners to be given to Te Whiti arc acceptable as far as they go. A sugar policy ought to bo sweet to the recipients, if not to those who provide the sugar. Te Whiti is smacking his lips over the official sugar; but pabulum of this kind is apt to create a false appetite, which cannot be satisfied. Our opinion is that To Whiti ■would obtain, under the Commission, what he is not entitled to. Any right he may have had is acquired only by recent occupation, at a time when occupation of Confiscated Land was a breach of the law. Ho is being rewarded for having set the law at defiance ; and that he was ever permitted to do so is a standing monument of the political incapacity of our governing politicians. Their’s is a policy of hand-to-mouth: it takes no note of consequential liability in the future for things done or left undone in the present. We are now paying for this bungling by a double process of exhaustion ; lor the colonists had first to spend money and shed blood in capturing or trying to capture notorious raurdererSj who had killed harmless settlors that had done no wrong to the native race, and now the colonists are paying a second time by the land being taken out of control, and most of it handed over to natives who represent and include the very murderers whose atrocities brought on the war. The natives are being rewarded for murder, rapine, and rebellion. The colonists are being punished for risking their lives as volunteer soldiers to save the colony from annihilation. And this is what politicians call political wisdom ! It is for exercising this wisdom in our behalf that wo pay them handsome salaries. A new set of political leaders are much wanted in New Zealand, to lift its affairs above the reach of the wretched scheming of land rings, railway rings, and pakeha-Maori rings.