The Westport Times. TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 1869.

Westport Times, Volume III, Issue 478, 16 March 1869, Page 2

The Westport Times. TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 1869.

The news from the North Island, though it may not be in all particulars correct or thoroughly confirmed, is certainly of a more serious and depressing character than has been the news at any time since the recent renewal of hostilities, if individual murders and the massacre of families in cold blood can be so described. Not only is no progress being made by Colonel Whitmore's force against the enemy in arms at Wanganui, but on the East Coast Te Kooti and his " braves " have so far recovered from their very doubtful decimation in the last retreat as to renew their operations after the fashion of "operations" in the dissecting-room, by slaughtering a solitary surveyor or some defenceless family groups at Opotiki. More serious still in relation to the future, and to the extent and ending of the war, is the report that the " Maori King," as the mouthpiece of the numerous and powerful Waikatoes, has announced himself and them as ready for the fray. By us in the Middle Island, and especially in relation to the present juncture, the precise prerogative and powers of his mythical Majesty are not very well known. By those best informed as to affinities of the tribes, his declaration for peace or for war has, however, been looked upon as in a great measure determining the capacity of the colony to extinguish the present outbreak, and, if it be really the case that he and the Waikatoes have committed themselves to the war,there cannot be a doubt of it that the colony is now involved in war the end of which will not alone be to prove merely the policy or impolicy of self-reliance, but will involve the final subjugation, if not extermination, of the Maoris as a race. The reports we have by way of Auckland arethatthe Waikatoes have notyet gone to this extremity, but, rather, that they discouraged and discountenanced the perpetration of the Taranaki murders. The fact that the Challenger had been detained at Wellington, and the information received there of emissaries being despatched by the " Maori King" with ambiguous epistles to the East and West Coasts, would seem, however, to encourage the belief that it is war, and not peace, that is meant. It is only to be hoped that, if it is to be war, neither England nor the Colony will any longer be ambiguous in their actions with an equivocating enemy, but that, however disastrous in the beginning, the end will be both an early and unmistakeable assertion of the position which, not the colonists, but England herself has assumed.