TOWN EDITION. The Daily Telegraph FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1881.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3246, 25 November 1881, Page 2

TOWN EDITION. The Daily Telegraph FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1881.

Henare Tomoana, in addressing the natives yesterday at the close of the nominations of candidates for the E'ist Coast Maori district, said it would be impossible for the natives to pay rates. "If I be re-elected," he said, " I will at ill oppose the rating of native land?. I consider we pay a very large share towards the revenue in the way of Customs duties. There are 45,000 natives in New Zealand, and I consider they pay three pounds each towardsthe revenue. If I and the other native members act together we shall succeed in preventing any tax being laid on native lands." In an election address to Maoris HenareTomoana struck the right nail on the head in making it appear that by an average indirect payment of three pounds a head per annum the natives fully compensated the Government for any outlay on their account. But no native knows better than Mr Tomoana that the Maoris do not pay their fair share of taxation, and that they are just as capable of paying local rates and general government taxes as their European neighbors. It stands to reason that if the natives choose to sleep away their days, and allow their vast landed estates to lie idle, they can no more pay rates and taxes than they can supply themselves with food. But there is no physical obstacle in the way of natives becoming industrious. They can work as well as anybody else if they like it is only their intolerable laziness that gives them an appearance of inferiority to their fellow men, and teaches them that it h impossible for them to take an active part in pushing forward the prosperity of the country. Are the natives always to remain in their present condition of dirt and idleness ? Are they always to remain contented with their slovenly kennels and their miserable food, and to look upon their duties as human beings as comprised in the acts of sleeping, grunting, and smoking? Iβ the race to die out, a good riddance to the world, or is it to rise with its opportunities to a position of honor? If Henare Tomoana bad the courage of his knowledge he would tell his countrymen that the best thing that could happen to them would be for theirlands to be subjected to every rate and tax to which all other lands are liable ; he would tell them that industry alone would save them from dying off the face of the earth unhonored and unwept; and that as long as they continued content with the bare necessaries of life supplied by the smallest amount of labor, they must always be regarded by the pakeha as cumberers of the soil, and a nuisance to the country. The great fault of the Crown and the Native Lands Rating Bill was that the taxation it imposed was to be paid by the Government, and only in the event of the land being sold could the money be recovered by the treasury. We see no reason why in the settled districts the native lands should not be rated, and sold for the recovery of ratC3, in exactly the same way as the lands of the settlers. If it led to wholesale confiscation it would be as advantageous to the natives as it would be to the colony. It is the height of absurdity to suppose that the Maoris, as a race, derive any benefit from their waste unleased lands. The thousands of acres they own in the Seventy-mile Bush are of no value to them ; and when they sell that estate very few will ever see more of the money tMan what may be doled out by the chiefs. Instead of pandering to the idle habits and to the half-civilised ideas of the natives Hen.ire Tomoana should have given the Maoris a few home truths; he might have pointed to his own comfortable homestead, and compared it with the filthy dwellings of his people, and showed them that the difference was due to imitation of the pakeha, and the abandonment of the habits of his race.