Te Wananga. Published every Saturday. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1878.

Wananga, Volume 5, Issue 50, 14 December 1878, Page 623

Te Wananga. Published every Saturday. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1878.

Our Maori readers may perhaps wonder why we have taken so little notice of the Native Lawsuits Bill about which there have been so many foolish conjectures and worse untruths spoken and written. The reason of our silence was fear. Like a child who dreads the unknown powers of darkness, we imagined evil in what we could not see through. The fair "promise about the Bill was too ethereal to our mind : the fruition of such promise far too glorious to be anything but shadowy and jumping southern lights, not to be touched, handled, or tasted. Yet the Bill deserved a better fate than it met. It was the result of honest effort and much expenditure of brains by disinterested persons to save apparently an endless litigation, which had not at the inception of the Bill been actually commenced. Then came the mud throwing. How dreadfully easy it is to throw mud ! The difficulty and the art—for it is an art —is to throw it without stereotvping for ever the hand of the thrower in the shape of the mud as thrown. The Minister of Justice always has had a lot of mud thrown at him. This Bill gave the mud-larks a great chance. It must, they say, have come from him—at least from his department. But Mr. Sheehan, strange to say, knew nothing about the Bill, and when it was made public property did not care for it, but was only watchful, as Native Minister, to see it did not take shape to injure the Natives. The Bill arose from a desire to meet certain difficulties in Poverty Bay. The question afterwards was asked, What is sauce ior the goose is sauce for the gander. 7 What will do for Poverty Bay will do for Hawkes Bay. Then the interested among the Europeans began to see what advantages could be gained in the Bill for their own cases, and began to press for concessions from Mr. Stout, who had undertaken the conduct of the Bill as one who was not mixed up in the Native disputes, who represented the Government in the appointment of the Judges, and who is remarkable for absence of bias in his profession. Some of these concessions Mr. Stout agreed to, but at last his patience was exhausted, and he saw nothing would satisfy the Europeans but that the balance should swing down well on their own side. Disgusted, as every fair mind must have been, he willingly enough moved that the Chairman do leave the chair, which being carried most effectually killed the Bill. The House was forgetting its first duty, the protecot of the aborigines. It was listening too readily to those who were pleading not the interests of a race but of themselves

and a class, and it was well that wiser instincts prevailed, and that a Bill introduced in fairness should be lost rather than it should be made the vehicle for additional injustice in the cases which it professed to remedy. The comet with cheap justice blazoned on its head passed our world. The sight may have done some good. We confess it frightened us not a little, and we congratulate our readers that they and we escaped without a blow from its tail. Such a visitant to do good must be held in chains by a wise and strong Government, and not be the created child of those who are most deeply interested in disputes about Maori lands.