THE PASSING OF THE MAORI.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXII, Issue 8863, 13 July 1907, Page 4

THE PASSING OF THE MAORI.

Tri taking part in a discussion which i followed a lecture on “The Passing ) of the Maori, ” delivered by ■ Arch- ? deacon Walsh, Dr. Pomare, Chief j Native Health Olflcr, expressed the j opinion that the Maori was doomed t not to extinction hut to absorption. Nearly 80 per cent of the South Island Maoris now have European blood in them, while the North Island Maoris also have a large admixture of pakeha blood. He did not, however, believe the would' entirely die out, but the future would find a new race, -in whose veins would be commingled the blood of Anglo»Saxon and Maori. Addressing the audience, Dr Pomare 1 thus continued in the poetic strain of the Maori:—“At the point where we two Aryan races diverged, you had the good luck to turn westward. You were afraid of the sea in those days. My ancestors, having no such fear, turned eastward, and wo travelled on until we arrived to people the sunny isles of the great southern sea. You had the good luck Jin turning westward to come across the metal wo buy. Keeping eastward we were still in the stone age. Westward you met other people from whom you learned in arts and sciences. We met nought but inferior negroid races. Tims it was that when in the years to come we two brandies of the same race met again, you were possessed of all which civilisation was able to lend you, while we were still a stone age people. The British have been slowly arriving at their state "for hundreds, nay thousands of years. We have been brought into the fierce light of civilisation almost at a flash -and it naturally takes time for a people to adapt themselves to new surroundings. ”