FAMOUS SPEECH

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 14 June 1930, Page 11

FAMOUS SPEECH

THE MAORIS MAGNA CARTA ORATORY IN PARLIAMENT LIBERTIES OF NATIVE RACE The anniversary of the granting of Magna Carta, which occurred 715 years ago to-morrow (15th .June), recalls the famous speech delivered in the New Zealand Parliament by James Edward Fitzgerald in 18(12 on the granting of Magna Carta right to the Maori people. In tlie opinion of many, it deserves to rank with the finest examples of oratory in the language, and has been described by Sir Robert Stout as “perhaps the ablest and most eloquent speech that was ever delivered in the New Zealand Parliament, or in any Parliament.’* Fitzgerald’s first connection with Nc\V Zealand was his appointment as emigration agent to the Canterbury Association in London in 1849. He landed at Lyttelton at the end of the following year and became the first Superintendent of Canterbury, being elected to the first New Zealand Parliament in 1854 as member for Lyttelton. He quickly established himself as a statesman, financier, philosopher and orator of the first rank, became Premier in the shortlived Ministry of 1854, was afterwards Native Minister and for many subsequent years held the office of Comptrol-ler-General. STATE OF ARMED NEUTRALITY As leader of the Peace Party in the House, Fitzgerald became famed for liis impassioned advocacy of a policy of reconciliation toward the Maoris, and it was die who introduced and had carried the Native Rights Act, 1805, the Magna Carta of Maori liberties, which provided that every person of the Maori race in the colony should be deemed a naturalborn subject of the Queen. It was in defence of the Maori race that he delivered the memorable speech of 1802. “Tiie present state of tilings

cannot last,” lie said. “The condition of the colony is not one of peace; it is a state of armed and suspicious neutrality. If you do not quickly absorb this king movement into your own Government, you will come into collision with it, and, once light up again the torch of war in these islands, and these feeble and artificial institutions you are now building up will be swept away like houses, of paper in the flames. Tribe after (tribe will be drawn into the struggle, add you will make it a war of'races. Of course, you, will conquer, but it will be the conquest of the tomb.

“TAKE AWAY THE SWORD” “Two or three years of war will eradicate every particle of civilisation from tiie native mind, and will elicit all the fiercest instincts of liis old savage nature. The trilies, broken, up, without social or military organisation, will be scattered through the country

in bands of merciless banditti. The con* fln'Tatiou of Taranaki will lie lighted u|uigain in every border of the colony; and ''in self-preservation you will be compelled— as other nations have been compelled before—to hunt the miserable native from haunt to haunt until he is destroyed like the beasts of the forest. “J am here to-night to appeal against so miserable, so inhuman a consummation. We arc here this evening standing, ion the threshold of the future, holding 'the issues of peace and war, of life and ’death, in our hands. I see some honourable friends round me whose counsels ' ! must ever respect, and whose tried 1 courage we all admire, who will tell ’me that you cannot govern this race until you have conquered them. I rei ply, in the words which the poet has ' placed in the mouth of the great cardinal, ‘ln the hands of men entirely 1 1, peat the pen is mightier than the sword. Take away the sword!• States may be saved without it.’ CRIME OF PRECIPITATING WAR “I know well that evil days nuty come when the sacred inheritance of j light and truth, which God has given 1 to a nation to hold and to transmit, I may only be saved by an appeal to the i last ordeal of nations —tlie trial by I war; but I know, too, how great the 1 crime which rests on the souls of those j who, for any less vital cause or for any I less dire necessity, precipitate that fatal issue. I “I grudge not the glory of those who have achieved the deliverance of a peotple or the triumph of a cause by any (sacrifice of human life or human happiness; but I claim a higher glory for those who, in reliance on a law more powerful than that of force, and wielding spells more mighty than the. sword, have led the nations by paths of peaceful prosperity to the fruition of an enduring civilisation. I claim a higher glory for those who, standing on the pinnacle of human power, have striven to imitate the government of Him who ‘taketh up the simple out of the dust, and lifteth the poor out of the mire.’ And I claim the highest glory of all for that man who has most thoroughly penetrated, that deepest and loftiest mystery in the art of human government, ‘the gentleness that makctli great.’ ' \.

“AN ACT OF KINDRED GREATNESS”

“I have stood beside a lonely mound in which lies' buried the last remnant of a tribe which fell—men, women and children—before the tomahawks of their ancient foes; and f sometimes shudder to think that my son, too, may stand beside a similar monument —the work of our hands —and blush with the ignominy of feeling that, after all, the memorial of the Christian lawgiver is but copied from that of the cannibal and the savage. “I appeal to the House to-night to inaugurate a policy of courageous and inunificient justice. I have a right to appeal to you as citizens of that nation which, deaf to the-predictions of the sordid and the timid, dared to give liberty to her slaves. I appeal to you to-night in your sphere to perform an act of kindred greatness. I appeal to

you not only on behalf of the ancient race whose destinies are hanging in the balance, hut also on behalf of your own sons and your sons’ sons, for I venture to predict that, in virtue of that mysterious law of our being by which great deeds once done become incorporated into the life and soul of a people, enriching the source from whence flows through all the ages the inspiration to noble thoughts and the incitement to generous actions—l venture to predict that among the traditions of that great, nation which 1 will one day . rule these islands, and the foundations of which we are now laying, the most cherished and the most honoured will be that wise," bold, and generous policy which gave the Magna Carta of their liberties to the Maori people.”