Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News. TUESDAY, JULY 21, 1908. OUR RESPONSIBILITY TO THE MAORI.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 43352, 21 July 1908, Page 2

Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News.

TUESDAY, JULY 21, 1908. OUR RESPONSIBILITY TO THE MAORI.

This above all—to thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man Shakespeare.

One of the very healthiest signs of the times is the active interest which both Pakeha and Maori are evincing in the future of the latter race. That we have an aboriginal race to be proud of we are agreed. Their political and religious, their industrial and social significance is amply proved, both by their'own demand for a better political standing, and their demonstrated capacity for higher education and religious enlightenment, as well as by their desire for a better standard of living. . . . - The Maori personality is interpreted to us by that most delightful of writers, W. 8., of Te Kuiti, and also by those Pakeha missionaries who, ‘having given up their live to the service of the Maori are able to speak with ihe insight of personal affection, is a personality vivid with insistent | charm. Interpreted by men of true feeling, men persuaded of the capacity of the race for high achievement and grand destiny, the Maori is seen to be a fit subject for corporation into our national being, a stalwart comrade in 'our onward march.

Degraded as he too often has been during the dismal parenthesis which has elapsed between the coming of the white man, whose advent imposed inter-tribal peace, so depriving him of the stimulous of the most strenuous form of self-preservation, and the complete awakening of both white man and Maori to the need for the substitution of a nobler but no less invigorating struggle for place and name,! in that deplorable parenthesis, he has suffered sad deterioration.

It is however most encouraging to note the emphasis which is now being laid upon the grand Gospel of Wotk. Only let our Maori friends realise that the one thing which will commend them to us as meet to be partakers of our nationality and of our destiny is a proven fitness and willingness to share the burden of nationality and scale the difficult height of destiny by faithful, patient work, and there is for them as for us the heritage of a boundless hope. 4- 8 one wr^er h® B said: “Think what work really is, without it your bread is field dust, your butter grass.” We might add, without it your history is but the unremembered legendary of a perishing. race, and your metropolis a congeries of sguallid and insanitary huts. But let us for our part remember that splendid as he is, our darker skinned compatriot is still in some respects a child, or rather a younger brother. While we bestir ourselves to afford him that training in the industrial arts, or her our Maori sister, education in all the gentle and wise accompli* hments of woman’s service, while we do all this let us beware of plucking down their house with our hands, by imparting to them a taste for those follies and luxuries, the knowledge of which has come to them through us, and through us white men alone.