MAORI GRIEVANCES.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 248, 19 October 1928, Page 6

MAORI GRIEVANCES.

MONET AN INADEQUATE REMEDY.

(To the Editor. 1

In your leading article of September 3i you commended the desire of the Government to compensate dispossessed Maoris by money grants. It is true that very nearly the only remedy available in law is the payment of money. But how utterly inadequate tViy remedy is in the case of our Maori population is revealed by the address of the old chieftain, Mita Taupohaki, to Lord Lovat on the 11th inst. Very pathetically the old said that his people were "on the platform for departure to the unknown realms of night." Why afcould he strike so melancholy a not* seeing that his people are to be paid so m«& money? Because, sir, he recognises that money will not keep them alive. He follows onr en poet who spoke of the land "where wealth accumulates and men decay." It is obriooi that the pakeha invaders of this country have erred grievously in their treatment of the Maori. "It was right that suzerainty be acquired by treaty and not vi et armis"but we found here a people with no native genius for agriculture. They were hunters, fishers, builders, artificers. Relatively little of their sustenance was drawn directly from the soil. With one document the natives were absolutely protected in the enjoyment of their lands, and legislation ever since been designed to compel their retention of tfces* estates. In innumerable cases their lands havn been unworkable because owned by families and not by individuals, and the system «f proprietorship, according to Maori notions, frequently gave to families rights to widely separated and therefore not Decay of moral fibre in the Maori set in. Com pelled to hold unworkable land, he became % rent-collecting landlord—living from hand te mouth—all incentive -to work being dried un by the certainty that rents would come m. "Faclis descensus averni," and no one, I suppose, is proof against the nndyrmm;™. power of unearned gains. And "easy come, easy go"; the gains that came without tt> sweat of the brow were lightly esteemed, and. having acquired habits of ease, the native intellect of the Maori was given a «!»«;» twist in order to get for himself the nieatt of subsistence till next rent day. We admira the Maori, but the act of compensating hha in money will only help him onwards towards those "unknown realms of night." We might have had in the Dominion a racs of virile artificers, but instead we see a race of great attainments being slowly strangled by misdirected kindness. W. H. TAYLOR. -Hawera.