The Patea Mail. Established 1875. FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 1883. THE MAHUKI REBELLION.

Patea Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 1018, 6 April 1883, Page 2

The Patea Mail. Established 1875. FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 1883. THE MAHUKI REBELLION.

♦ The little tin-pot Mahuki rebellion in the King country a few days ago has very soon come to grief,, and has not lasted a week, thanks to the usual energy of Mr Bryce and the effect of the irresistible logic of facts on the Maori mind. The taper of Maori kingship has burnt out, giving out only a very small sputter of noise and smoke. All the rpore important chiefs, such as Rewi, Wahanui, and other's, Te Eooti even incltided, declined to take part in a hopeless contest, and it is likely that the surveying party of the North Island Eailway will henceforth be allowed to go on their business without further obstruction, and that probably within two or three years there will be a railway line actually in working order right through the native territory northwards. The Hereward le Wake or Kosciusko of expiring Maoridom does not seem to have been a grand specimen of a great soldier statesman propping up a falling country. Mahuki, as far as we can learn, is not a person of any ability or position, being only one of the numerous, ignorant and fanatical loafers who used to attend the Parihaka meetings of Te Whiti and Tobu, and whose motto lias been the Atua and Te Whiti. While he W- r B simply unaware that the Atua and Te Whiti were very small potatoes, the delusion of their being very great cards was harmless enough, but when he attempted to stop a Government surveying party and imprisoned, chained up, and starved two of their number, the matter became too much for a joke, and he soon found himself in gaol for his pains, where he will probably not be treated with any mystery as a great state prisoner, but only as a bumptious larrikin. Probably his will be the last attempt to unsettle the already settled Native question. And a very satisfactory settlement too. It has been apparently a final and decisive one, and yet, notwithstanding the averments of pudding-headed Bishop Snters, and over smart Sydney Taiwhanga’s and gullible English philanthropists, the Maori has been treated with more justice and consideration than any other half savage or wholly savage Native has met with before. Indeed, when the true history of the settlement of New Zealand has been written it will bo strange, indeed, if one of the grandest things in connection with it is not acknowledged to bo the justice and moderation displayed by the colonists long after they possessed overwhelming force. We have not robbed the natives of their lands, but paid for them ; wo have made immense improvements in the value of their lands by onr roads, bridges, and harbours, and wo have not even taxed them ; we have made them members of our Parliament, and allowed the vote of each Maori member to count for just the same as the vote of a European, notwithstanding the difference in the intrinsic value of the two. Let those who know anything of the settlement of the English in India, the Dutch

in Cape Colony, the Russians in the Caucasus, the French in Algeria, mark the difference, and they will not hesitate much about deciding where justice has best been dealt out. Maori settlement in New Zealand began, it is stated, about four hundred years ago with a small number of Malays, perhaps driven by stress of weather in wrecked vessels to these shores, or, as we are rather inclined to think, by previous arrangement at a time when the Malays occupied something of the same position with regard to the commerce of the Asiatic world which Great Britain has lately with regard to the trade of the world generally. The Maoti or Malay in New Zealand has had his day, and done some little good in colonising here, but he is now played out. Probably in another hundred years there will be no pure-blooded Maoris, the small remaining population having been absorbed and intermingled with the colonists by marriage, &c. It has not been so much our doing that we are on the road to this consummation, but rather the law of destiny, that law which scientists have seen to prevail in so many countries elsewhere, that where the higher race settles, the lower dies out or is absorbed. We cannot regret that it should be so. If it be desirable that the world should be peopled, it is not the less true that it is host that the world should be well peopled : that is to say, by the highest types of humanity available. It is well to be philanthropic, and to render the process of gradual extinction as painless, or indeed as comfortable, as possible ; but the result will come, and it is foolish to deplore what is in reality a great blessing—namely, the surviving, of the fittest. The Maori was good enough in his day, but the European is wanted by the laws of Nature and Society now.