THE AMNESTY BILL.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1074, 22 February 1883, Page 1

THE AMNESTY BILL.

The Southland News of TuoscUy states that Mr Wl.itely King, editor of the

Mataura Ensign, and grandson of the late Rev John Whitely, murdered at White Cliffs in 1869, has telegraphed as follows to the Native Minister with reference to the pardoning of Te Kooti and. the Amnesty Bill : According to telegraphic accounts yon have formally pardoned Te Koti. You, a Minister of the Crown, have publicly shaken hands and fraternised with the murderer of your fellow countrymen and helpless women and children. Your satellites will laud you for having advanced the settlement of the native difficulty yet another step, but those who know that such difficulty exists only in the imagination of a few whose interests are best served by that belief, will not be blinded by the efforts your hirelings are making to immortalise you as the liberator of your country from the bugbear known as the Native Difficulty, and to them you appear to day as a traitor to all known principles of British law and justice, and as the man who humiliated and degraded his fellow colonists to secure the adulation of those whose fingers are itching to possess native lands, and who would even pardon Maori murderers to achieve their ends. lion will doubtless not proceed to pardon those concerned in the White Cliffs massacre in 1868. I would remind you that for several years i have urged the New Zealand Government to arrest and place those murderers on trial, but my request lias never been acceded to. Indeed your Government distinctly refused to lake any steps in the matter. I then sought to put the law in motion myself, and you defeated my purpose by bringing down your precious Amnesty Bill, a Bill for the better protection of native murderers of British subjects. The House was misled and the Bill was rushed in and became law before the country know its object. I would remind you that there was no mention of the Amnesty Bill in the Speech from the Throne. It was introduced deliberately to defeat the ends of justice. You have refused to allow the law to take its course, and the murderers of those who fell at the White Cliffs will probably bo the recipients of your gracious pardon as Te Kooti has been. But I would have you censider before taking that step. You have aroused the vendetta spirit by your action in muzzling justice, and whatever the consequences the onus rests with you. The provisions of the Amnesty Bill notwithstanding, and pardoned or not those concerned in the White Cliffs massacre shall suffer for their crimes if you include Wetere Te Rerenga and his followers in the amnesty. I will take my own way to avenge the massacre ot my young English mother and her babes and those who fell at the IV bite Clifis on 13ih February, 1869. Does the amnesty include ‘Europeans,’ where they are ‘ political’ offenders, with ‘ Maoris’ ? If not, why is not Cockburn, who it is said assisted in the butchery at the White Clifis,- arrested 9 Where is your loophole of escape ? An administration unscrupulous enough to bring down a special Bill to stop the machinery of the law and to fraternise with assassins, will have no compunction in sacrificing a European to save a noble savage.”