Our Locked-up Native Lands.

Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 211, 18 May 1909, Page 3

Our Locked-up Native Lands.

The Native Land quuestion, which is more or less in the ah* at present, is dealt with in a lucid article in the current number of • The Citizen.' With regard to the policy of Mr Carroll, the writer points out that in 1900 even the power of the Crown to purchase was abolished by Act of Parliament. He adds : " Consider this for a moment ! One f.rarth of the land in the North Island was raa.^ inalienable fromf one-fourteenth of its population, inalienable to a people who in a few years would not even be one-fourteenth or even one-fortieth of its population, but must beeome an insignifiican t fraction, a people who had never really occupied the land entailed to them." The right to purchase was in a measure restored in 1905, but for the most part the Native lands " lie silent and sullen across the heart of the North Island, denying opportunity to settlement, depriving the country of trado and commerce, growing more desirable and more valuable every day by the labour and the .tnterprise and the expenditure of the European, And the law of the Dominion ' sustains the tribal claims which make the 6ituation possible, and formulates the absuid pretension that j the future of a million Europeans | to be as tenants w thousand $. aoris;