AMERICA and HER COLONIES.

Westport Times, Volume IV, Issue 663, 26 May 1870, Page 2

AMERICA and HER COLONIES.

The Saturday Beview of a recent date says:—The United States, to which a few of the more impatient of the New Zealand colonists, in a burst of unnatural indignation threaten to appeal for succor, have, in the central wilderness over which the Pacific railroad now passes, a New Zealand of their own, presenting a "difficulty," in both the English and American senses of the word, not much less serious than that which has been brought to a crisis by Lord Granville's despatch and very closely analogous thereto. The Western plains have their fringe of industrious and adventurous colonists desiring only to be permitted to cultivate their farms in peace, their mining settlements too rich to be abandoned for any ordinary peril, and their towns strong to defy attack while their male population is at home, but liable to fearful peril if these were to march out to wage offensive war with the enemy. They have their savage native, unrestrained by the rules of civilised warfare, and taking cruel and treacherous advantage of the restraints which those rules impose on their antagonists. Skilled in a mode of hostility particularly disastrous to the white settler, and particularly difficult to cope with ; ruthless beyond the ruthlessness of the Maori, yet relying on the forbearance of the white man to spare their defenceless villages, and refrain from retaliating on women and children what women and children have suffered. Aa in New Zealand the attack and storm of a Maori pa or the defeat of the rebels in the field seems to leave their power and their sense of substantial success unimpaired, and only to waste valuable lives on a profitless victory, so no regular operations against the Indians seem to repress their outbreaks or restrain their audacity. To wait for their attacks, to repulse and pursue them, is simply useless ; they escape with little loss, and are ready for another attack to-morrow. Nearly the whole regular army of the United States is now enployed against them, and yet the western settlers complain that their houses are exposed to be harried and burnt, their property to be destroyed, and their families to be massacred with no chance of defence, and very little of retribution. Like the New Zealanders awhile ago, disgusted with the ill-success of the regulars, they ask to be left to deal with their enemy in their own way ; unlike the colonists, they have in many instances taken their defence in their own hands with complete success, and achieved results that have thoroughly cowed their savage enemies. But in America, New Zealand, and we fear everywhere else, a war between settlers and natives is a war to the knife; and leaves the former to their own resources; and means, after a series of isolated atrocities suffered, and acts of vengeance equally atrocious inflicted by them, the utter extermination of the colored races. Only the Central Government, living at a distance from the seat of war, knowing its horrors by report alone, and unmoved by its terrors, can be calm enough to think of mercy in fighting with savages ; only an overwhelming power can afford to spare.