Poverty Bay Standard. Published Every Evening. GISBORNE: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1882.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1194, 7 November 1882, Page 2

Poverty Bay Standard. Published Every Evening. GISBORNE: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1882.

We have received Mr Larkworthy’s letter and circulars addressed to the Native Chiefs of New Zealand, respecting the formation of a company in London for the purchase of large areas of Native lands in New Zealand, and enclosing a list of well-known names, among whom we may mention tha Bishops of St. Asaph, Liverpool, and London, the Deans of Peterborough and Canterbury, Canon Liddell, Lord Shaftesbury, Kight Hon. John Mundella, M.P., Sir H. W. Peck, Mr H. W. Richards, M.P., with i other names of well-known note in ecclesi--1 astical and civil circles at Home, as the ; ostensible fathers of this scheme, which is set forth upon somewhat the same scale of : philauthrophy in its action as that of a - better known institution called the New i Zealand Native Land Settlement Company, I which also professes to be actuated, not by a ' wish to make money or do any land sharking, but by a purely benevolent wish to prevent anyone else from robbing the poor benighted _ Maori. It need hardly be said that we do j not for a moment believe that the church 1 dignitaries or the gentlemen whose names ' we have quoted know anything of the matter, i They arc all well-known philanthropists, who would sooner give a meal or a shilling to a black skin than a white one, and their names are used as a cloak to the real meaning of the scheme, which seems to us to be simply that of land-sharking on a large scale ; not that there is the slightest chance of its success. In the first place the Maoris have had enough of land companies. They have i been sold and deceived by them, and arc bit- [ terly rueing the day when they were induced ' to deal with them. In the second place . they can obtain far better terms from indij viduals than from companies ; ami in the i third place they think their property is safer ■ in their own hands than in those of their I would-be benefactors. Take the examples of j companies daily before us. Without an uni dertaking earned out, without a promise fulI filled, they have, by a system of exaggera- , tion in purport and description ; by not keeping to the exact letter of their word in their dealings with the Maoris ; by carrying on a sort of hole-in-the-corner system of purchase, or rather promise to purchase, reduced the future value of their Native transactions to a minimum. Not long ago we, on the faith of a person holding an important position in the N.Z.L.S. Company, were induced to publish a statement that 75,000 shares had been placed in the London market. We have been several times I applied to and questioned as to whether that statement was literally true, or whether it had its origin in the fertile brain of the gentleman who supplied us with the information. As with that Company so it may be, and probably will be, with the other. Starting with philanthropy as its basis, it may attain a notoriety as an undignified scramble for Native lands ; but it will never be able to do what it professes, protect the aboriginee who has in all conscience sufficient reason to cry “save me from my friends." If any Company were formed on business like grounds, excluding all cry of philanthropy, for the purchase or lease of Native j lands, and were thoroughly able to give | cash instead of promises, there is no i doubt that they would with an able directorate ultimately succeed ; that is to say providing that they adopted a clever and economical expenditure in their purchase staff, which is in reality the Behemoth in Native lands matters which swallows the capital. To pay £1 or £2, or in some cases £lO per acre, would not be too great an amount for the value of the land acquired, but the expenditure attendant upon such purchase, in obtaining signatures and so

forth, would probably run the cost price up to a large per centage. There has been so much canting humbug about the benefits which the Maori is to receive by selling to these companies ; they have blown their own tru npets so loudly ; and extolled their own virtues in land transactions as between Maori and European to such a Munchausenlike extent that they have not only induced but actually created and fostered distrust and disbelief in the minds of both races. Until they reduce their philanthropic proportions to the altitude of business pure and simple, resolving to pay the Ma.ori a fair value for his land and make what they can out of it, throwing aside all pretension to more christianlike principle than their neighbors, and paying by cash instead of promises for the lands with which they induce the Natives to part, we decline to be- > lieve in the reality and genuneiness of any , Land Company, Foreign or Colonial.