Te Aroha Ohinemuri News TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 1889. COAKE UP ON SATURDAY

Te Aroha News, Volume XIV, Issue 2091, 5 April 1898, Page 2

Te Aroha Ohinemuri News

TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 1889. COAKE UP ON SATURDAY

UPPaSR THAUBS ADVOCATE. •Shla above all—t® tMne ®wa self fea to®®, &ud it mast fellow <u» the nteht the day Thoo oaact sot than be false to any soots. ' BQASBSFBABS.

The Treaty of Waitangi gave the Crown the sole right to traffic in native land: now we gather from what the Ministerial representative of the Maori race, / Mr Carroll, has been saying at Hnntly it is the intentiou of the Government to introduce a scheme of leasing, under supervision, for the benefit of Maori owners.- This new departure does not appear to be meeting with favour in certain quarters. It is a delicate question, and one that can only be approached with caution. To say that until the Maori is deprived of his rents and obliged to earn his bread by the work of his hands, it is useless to look for any permanent advance of the race in the scale of civilization, as a contemporary does reveals the narrowness of vision our insularity engenders in some of us, and a hopeless incapacity to deal in a statesmanslike fashion with a racial question involving the agreeable settlement of not a few difficult points in political ethics. The wholesale merchants and large property holders in the city of Auckland are beginning to realize that in the race for commercial supremacy among the cities of New Zealand, the Queen of the North is being gradually distanced, and that property is extremely likely to depreciate in value if the out-look does not improve. We need not, in these columns, emphasize the mingled sorrow and indignation with which all who have her welfare at heart regard the tenacity with which her local authorities cling to antiquated and discredited methods and consistently seek to prove themselves iix the eyes of the world disciples of a taissez faive policy. There is no such thing as stagnation in life, although the nearest approach to it is occasionally seen in municipalities ; broadly speaking, however, a city like Auckland, must either progress or fall behind in the race for wealth and distinction. To stem the l< cursed drift ” that has set in in their affairs through their own violation of the principles of sound business and hopeless abandonment to the spirit of speculation with its train of attendant evils the party, advocating freedom in dealing with their lands for the Maoris are naturally alarmed at the character of Mr Carroll’s proposals— Briefly, the idea of those whose fingers are itching to play the game of speculation with the lands remaining to the Maoris, is to shut the latter up in inalienable reservations, sufficient for tribal occupation and cultivation and to confer a negotiable title upon them to deal with the remainder. Formerly on acquiring lands from the natives the settler had to have recourse to the Pakeha Maori, in many cases, and, too often, it was the intermediary who derived the greatest benefit from the transaction. We have changed all that, principal meets principal, and the smartest man, he who is most deeply versed in the intricacies of the law, gets the best of the deal. There are millions of acres, it is said, in this North Island over which Maori landlordship “ is casting its fatal blight.” If the Maori were permitted to lease his lands to the Pakeha it would be the means of introducing, some allege, a system by which the sober, honest, industrious white settler would become the bond slave of a number of indolent and wealtbly Maori landlords. It is well, we presume, some of them would argue, for an absentee Pakeha landlord to spend every penny of his rents in the pursuit of vicious pleasures in London or Paris; but the idea of a ‘white’ paying rent to the original lords of the soil, who never spend a halfpenny outside their own happy hunting grounds, furnishes all tne material for the manufacture of a monstrous abuse. Mr Carroll did not hesitate to warn the Maoris at Huntly that in the game of grab they could not hold a candle to the cunning and persistent Pakeha. The city scribe and politician are perhaps only doing their duty to those whose hirelings,they are when they urge the Government to follow the example of the United States Republic when it bundled the Red Man bag and. baggage into the Indian Reservations. Nothing was better calculated to hasten the latter’s departure, and the are gradually being opened up to white settlement. We well remember the rush which took place when Oklahama was thrown open. Fortunately the preponderance of public feeling in

New Zealand to day is in keen sympathy with the Maori, and there are still left in New Zealand, men who are animated by larger and broader views, the possession of which causes the name of such a statesman aa Sit George Grey to be reverenced by Pakeha and Maori alike, while abhorred by the land-jobbers and speculators of Queen Street.