Trouble on the Plains.

Patea Mail, Volume VI, Issue 542, 6 July 1880, Page 2

Trouble on the Plains.

More trouble is reported from Parihaka. The reports are probably exaggerated, but so far as we a> e informed'they amount 'to a fresh assertion of native right to certain land over which the Government road has been made. We have a lively suspicion thar this fencing and ploughing is a cunning manoeuvre for extorting blackmail from the Government. Te Whiti, and his shrewd lieutenant Tohu, are trying to oxtort compensation for permitting the Government to make a road through the Parihaka country. One report says that 300 natives sec out from Parihaka on Thursday to dig up the. land for sowing grain along the Government road, half-a-milo south of the Pungarehu camp. They tinned over the soil and then sowed wheat. That done, they put up a fence across the Government road, and returned to Parihaka, having ex* ecuted their day’s mission. They had sown another patch of land adjoining the road on the previous. Monday, but made no attempt then to bar the road with a fence. Some of the chiefs had spoken to Colonel Roberts after Monday’s sowing, asking to have their crop protected by a fence across the road to keep out the cattle ami horses, or at least for a gate to be put up. Colonel Roberts could not make terms with them, but he understood that they would confer with him again. Instead of doing this the chiefs sent out a swarm of natives on the Thursday, and they did the sowing and then barred the passage by fencing the road. This is their idea- of keeping off tiespassers. Where is this fencing to end, and how do the Government propose to stop it amicably ? The period for native sowing is the period for renewing last year’s trouble about ploughing. This year it takes the practical form of fencing. The whole thing resolves itself into a question of black mail. The Government have been squeezed so often by native cunning and stolid opposition to Ministers, that there is now a plain issue before the colony. Either the Government must assert their right to make a road through their own territory, or they must buy that right by improper concession to native exaction. If they do the latter in this case, they will have to repeat the process many times under various conditions, but always as the result of being afraid to piJ their foot down.