THE PARIHAKA MEETING.

Evening Post, Volume XIX, Issue 63, 18 March 1880, Page 2

THE PARIHAKA MEETING.

The Government have received several telegrams to-day in reference to the Parihaka meeting, including some from the Hon. the Native Minister. All agree in representing the attitude of Te Whiti and Tohu as entirely peaceful. The real purport of the remarks made by Te Whiti, of which a condensed version appears in our telegraphic columns, is stated to be that the Europeans, by sending the Armed Constabulary on the Plains with all the " pomp and circumstance of war," are trying to provoke the Maoris to fight, in order to have a good excuse for confiscating their land 3, but that the natives were aware of the supposed trap and would not fall into it. All this, of course, was couched in-a cloud of metaphorical verbiage, but all the most authentic reports agree in attaching that meaning to the expressions used. It is notorious that the PakehaMaori agitators have been persistently endeavoring from the first to instil this view into the native mind, and it is evident that they have been so far successful. Te -Whiti, however, declares that "the floods have subsided, and will never again come on earth," that is to say, Maori wars are things of the past, and will not recur in the present day. He adds, in explanation of this deliverance, that "the natives would not step outside the lines he had marked out for their conduct." He has said there is to be no fighting, and fighting therefore there cannot be. That is his view of the situation. Tohu's speech as telegraphed in brief is apt to be misunderstood so far as regards his remarky in allusion to the Constabulary and their road-making, that "All that meant war," for he expressly used it in reference to the Europeans, as implying that it wa3 a warlike and war-provoking proceeding on the port of the latter, not that it "meant war ".in the sense of the Maoris resisting it. Tohu's_ speech, in fact, was an echo of Te Whiti's, and both these native oracles have assumed the role of the injured and long-suffering Christian who when Bmitten on one cheek turns the other to the smiter. Te Whiti's latest utterances point most unmistakeably to a gradual modification of his prophecies in the direction likely to be taken by the Royal Commissioners' report, judging from the nature of the evidence given before them, in regard to which he is kept carefully posted up. So far therefore the favorable aspect of native affairs remains unchanged.