THE TRUST PRINCIPLE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 303, 17 May 1911, Page 8

THE TRUST PRINCIPLE.

MAOKIS ANI) TllKitt LANDS. Masterton, Monday. The highly siiicL'.s-fiil administration of education endowments by the Masterton Trust Lands Board led the Hon. James Carroll, Acting-Prime Minister, to make some interesting observations on the conservation of native landß at a gathering here to-day. The Minister, speaking at the opening of a school museum which owes its inauguration to the substantial help afforded out of endowment revenues, pointed to the building as an illustration of what could be done by and forethought on the part of the early pioneers. They set aside lands which, by reason of careful administration, had resulted in enormous benefit to education. This was an insurance age, when all the great minds of the world were tending in the direction of discovering some lucid line of insurance principle by which the future wants of the people, educationally and otherwise, could be duly provided for. If the trust principle had served 80 well in giving effect to the provision made by the early settlers in regard to education, then the same trust principle would have acted equally well to the great advantage of the natives, had it been adopted at the same time. (Hear, hear). All knew the generous mind of the native, and his ready response to the applications made to him by the Government of early days for ample reserves to be handed over for education of the young. At that time there was a spiritual form of government to which was transferred in many instances large educational endowments so generously given by the Maori people. He would not say that the administration had in all cases been of such beneficial results as those related by the Trust Board members. "Still," he continued, "we have to-day inaugurated as one of our main planks of policy in dealing with native lands the Native Land Board system. So you will see that after the lapse of many years, after bitter experience and ■watching the slid devastation of the fam--1 ily home of the natives, the huge acquisition by a few of large territories of native land not always to the advantage of the Maori, we have to fall back on | that policy of the trust as the saving line for the remnant of the Maori people and the remnant of their lands to■jday." (Applause).