THE BTSHOP OF NELSON AND THE GOVERNMENT DEALINGS WITH THE NATIVES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume VI, Issue 1562, 26 November 1868, Page 7

THE BTSHOP OF NELSON AND THE GOVERNMENT DEALINGS WITH THE NATIVES.

I To the Editor of the Nelson Examiner. 1 • -k° r dship's speech at the public raeet- | ing held to express to the settlers of the North Island the sympathy of the people of this province with the suffering caused by the atrocities lately committed by a party of natives in Poverty Bay, the Bishop of .Nelson, while very properly warning the meeting against falling into the injustice of including the Maori people generally in their conclemnatiou, adduced as a partial justification, or, at all events, as some palliation of the barbarous murder and mutilation of a number of helpless women and children, the fact, or rather what his Lordship assumed to be a fact, that, a brcach of faith had been committed by the Government of this colony by the non-payment of certain natives in the Thames district of monevß received for miners' rights. As I am well acquainted with tlio circumstances to which the Bishop referred, I should have been glad to give public contradiction to his Lordship'? statement at the time, but, as Chairman of the meeting, I thought it inconsistent with that position to do so. The only facts are these: Owing to the confusion of authority consequent upon the breaking out of a new antl important gold-field, and to the stringent regulations adopted to secure the due application o public funds, some delay occurred in the payment to the native owners of the Thames gold-field of the sums received for miners' rights winch it was agreed should bo paid to them for permission to mine upon their land. I don't remember exactly what the extent of this delay may have been, but I think it was somewhere about two months. At any rate the money had been paid long before these atrocities had been committed in Poverty Bay (some two hundred miles away), and it is in the highest degree improbable that the wretches concerned in them, who were in no way interested in the matter, had ever heard of it. My object in writing this letter is to give the most unqualified denial to the statement of the Bishop of Nelson that the Government of this colony has been guilty of a breach of faith with the natives, and to express my surprise and regret that hiß Lordship should have allowed himself to make so serious and so mischievous an accusation without having taken the precaution to make full and searching enquiry into its truth. I hope you will append this communication to the report of the proceedings at the meeting in your summary for the English mail. —I am, &c., Oswald Cceth. Nelson, November 17.