INVIDIOUS DISTINCTIONS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 16621, 18 August 1917, Page 9

INVIDIOUS DISTINCTIONS.

—It has become a practice with certain of the trading public to differentiate invidiously against members of the native race of New Zealand, and to refuse them admittance to their premises. Such refusal is not given privately, but, in too many instances, is made as brutally insulting ana public as possible. lam drawing attention, particularly, to the exhibition in the doorway of a public restaurant in Whangarei of a notice to this effect:" No Maori admitted to this diningroom." That such a thing should be possible in a British community, at any time, seems to me pitiable and amazing. That it should have been don© at this juncture, when Maori men are fighting and dying that we may live, and the insult be permitted to endure, is unthinkable. At this time the perpetration of the insult becomes an absolute crime, a crime for which, I am informed, the law provides no redress. But one can surely appeal to the weight of cleanly British opinion to supplv the omission. Noblesse oblige! Having taken from the Maori the power of obtaining " utu " for an insult in his own effective way, it surely becomes part of the white man's burden to protect a subject race from gross public insult in the streets of his cities. Onerahi. D. W. 0. Fagan.