The New-Zealander. AUCKLAND, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 1860. THE NATIVE QUESTION.

New Zealander, Volume XVI, Issue 1491, 1 August 1860, Page 2

The New-Zealander.

AUCKLAND, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 1860. THE NATIVE QUESTION.

Re just and fear not; Let all the ends thou aim’st at, be thy Country's, Thy Goo's, and Truth’s.

In the year 1813 Captain Hobson, Her Majesty’s Consul, concluded with the Chiefs of New Zealand, at Waitangi, the Treaty which opened these islands to the enterprise o! European settlers, and cleared the way for the advance of that civilization and improvement by which, itmay safely be affirmed, the aboriginal people have largely profited. After the lapse of twenty years the Queen’s Governor lias appealed to the loyalty and good sense of a new generation, to maintain inviolate the faith of their fathers, to hold fast to that charter which is the tenure of their existence as a race, as well as the security for their future progress, and to discountenance and suppress the King movement, originated and promoted by rasb and misguided young men at the prompting of evil minded and reckless Europeans, a movement which has had as results the absurdity recently peipetrated at Ngaruawahia, bloodshed at Taranaki, and which, involving both races alike, has carried desolation to that fair Province. The assembly of Maori Chiefs at Kohimarama may be marked with a white stone in our annals. There, in the educational establishment of the Melanesian Mission, itself the cradle of the civilization of another race of South Sea Islanders, Governor Gore Browne opened the proceedings with a formal address, and His Excellency has since, ou several occasions, communicated with the meeting by “Message/ Day by day the several points raised in the Governor’s speech, and special questions incident thereto, have been discussed with orderliness and propriety, such as we might look in vairr to find in some other places of greater pretension that we wot of. To those “ old hands” who remember Waitangi, the change in the appearance of tiiis gathering is very striking. Death has been busy with the orators and diplomates of the first great meeting. The striplings of that day have grown to be the leaders of this, yet tire old familiar faces are not wholly u anting:—stillfoiemost.aniongstthem stands Tamati Waka Neue, the Chief to whoee successful ucgociatiou the Treaty of Waitangi

Was mainly due, and who, having since that day, in peace and war, approved himself a loyal subject of the Queen, now enforces the duty of obedience to the law by appeals to individual experience of its benefits, and justifies his own steadfast course, by demonstrating to his audience, with much of his old fire, the advantages which European settlement has conferred upon the Maori people. The unanimity with which the Maori King movement is condemned by successive speakers is us remarkable as the reticence displayed in dealing with the question of the Taranaki insurrection. A desire seems general that peace should be restored; yet no one appears as yet to have ventured to specify the means by which that end is to bo attained. On the whole we think it may be assumed, on the assurance of these chiefs, that the great majority of the natives of this island have no sympathy with the violence of the faction of whom l*btatau was the tool. Those, however, who believe that—now that peace has been actually broken and blood shed—the natives do not, more or less openly, sympathise with Wiremu Kingi and his companions in rebellion at Taranaki, that they do not, as it were instinctively, rejoice at his successes, as being the triumph and the proof of the superiority in war of their own people over the stranger, expect too much of human nature of this type, in its present developemeut. And herein lies the greatest danger from this war, conducted as it is now —with its inconsequent operations, its errors, and disasters—that tribes, other than those already concerned, may drift into it, because wild and turbulent spirits from all quarters will be attracted to Taranaki from mere wantonness and love of fighting—the passion of the aboriginal New Zealander, It would be well if, by a sudden and sharp success on our side, or by submission on the other, the war could now be ended. We arc surely at this moment strong enough to accomplish the one, and, being strong, we may pardon or overlook some things which, before, we dared not to do, lest the act of grace should be construed into a confession of fear or of weakness.

Rightly interpreted, the signs of the times are significant of the necessity of a radical change in the mode of governing the native people; they have passed their state of pupillage; education, rude as it has been, has developed a mental activity amongst them which needs direction and an useful aim if it would not be rendered merely mischievous. The spread of Christianity, intercourse with Euiopeans, and the individual acquisition of property, have weakened or destroyed the power of the chiefs and priests, and abrogated the common law, of which these latter were the depositories and administrators :—it has been a just cause of complaint that we have done but little to supply the place of that law; our own institutions—the growth of an advanced civilization—being but ill suited to the condition of a people emerging from barbarism.

The native question is the problem of the day. In the face of terrible experience, no member of the Mouse of llepesentatives will again he bold enough to pronounce it to be a “bugbear.” If the labour and attention which, we are sure, will be devoted to the subject in the present session of the General Assembly shall have for its result a lawembodying a practicable scheme for such an individualization of Native titles to land, as will facilitate the acquisition of territory by the Crown, that solitary Act will outweigh in importance the eighty Acts which crowned the session of 1858.