SHOULD INDIANS MARRY MAORIS?

Free Lance, Volume XIV, Issue 720, 18 April 1914, Page 4

SHOULD INDIANS MARRY MAORIS?

Talk of " Undesirable Intimacy " in the King Country. SOME fuss is being made about the intimacy of Indian men and Maori women in the King Country. So far as that intimacy is illicit, it is obviously deplorable; but if the -Indians marry the Maoris there is no obvious need for lugubrious ululations. People who talk at random about race questions often overlook the fact that the great Indian peoples are Aryans of our own race. They approximate much more closely to the true Aryan tvoe than the Maoris do. Now the enthusiasts of the Maori race hold that the Maoris are a fine people of Aryan descent. How then can there be anything undesirable in the intermarriage of Maoris and Hindus—of just possible Aryans with Aryans of high type? The Maori stock would almost certainly improved by the Hindu strain. The physical lineaments would become more delicate. The physical type would improve, the Hindu physique being on the whole sounder than the Maori. The idea that Hindus are likely to corrupt the morals of the Maoris in the King Country is preposterous on the face of it. The Hindus are on the whole a more moral race than the Maoris. They do not drink, they show remarkable abstinence from fleshy lusts. Where a Hindu falls into sexual intimacy with a Maori woman, he is much more likely to be the tempted than the tempter, "for he sins against his caste and his inherited traditions. The whole subject has been made a little scare of the sillv season, and we have had too much made of it.