CROWN AND COMMONWEALTH
Sir.-F.C. (Sumner) is so angry that he is betrayed into being personally abusive and misrepresenting part of my letter. The emigrants were not a band of.starry-eyed visionaries yearning to take progress and uplift to the benighted savages in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They were working people seeking escape from conditions described by historians as "unemployment, low wages and starvation," and "resentment against the rule of squire and farmer." They sought to get away from conditions under which agricultural labourers, riotously clamouring for a wage of half a crown per day, were-three of them -hanged, and---420 of them-torn from their families and transported for life to Australia as convicts. The Empire and Commonwealth was founded on force, military conquest, and resulted in the near extermination of native peoples. In New Zealand, when the Maoris wanted the pioneers to go back home, the pioneers, assisted by British military forces, by means of bullets and bayonets, convinced the Maoris they intended to remain. Gibbon Wakefield was one of the few who saw colonisation not only as a means of relieving emigrants from their economic miseries, but as_ establishing centres of British influence, The great and much-admired apostle of Empire, Kipling, said; "It is pure sentimental bosh to say that Africa belongs to a lot of naked blacks, It belongs to the race that can make the best use of it. I am for the White man and the English race." Evidently I was right in saying that the Empire and Commonwealth did not function on altruistic lines. F.C. declares that I said "all" the peoples over whom we have held dominion suffered from under-nourish-
ment, illiteracy and general backwardness. I did not say "all," as F.C. knows, for he does not include the word in the quote from my letter, Anybody who cares to become acquainted with the history of the peoples of India, Burma, Ceylon, Malaya and the African peoples, will find plenty of evidence justifying my comment, There is quite a bit more I could say in reply, but I think the foregoing meets the kernel of F.C.’s_ further emotional outburst.
J. MALTON
MURRAY
(Oamaru)
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 951, 1 November 1957, Page 11
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358CROWN AND COMMONWEALTH New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 951, 1 November 1957, Page 11
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