A.—No! 2a."

OF THE NATIVE LAND ACTS.

19

2. The practice of vesting legal and convertible estate absolutely in a few individual Natives, who are, in fact, only representative! of a number of families. 3. The great expense and imperfection of the means of ascertaining and fixing the limits of the parcels of lands from the want of a sufficiently comprehensive and accurate system of survey ; and 4. The great and increasing expenses involved in the hearing of contested claims, especially in the larger towns. The first defect noticed is one which was inevitable in the commencement of the system. In tho twenty-five years which elapsed between the foundation of the Colony to the full establishment of the Native Land Court, no progress had been made in ascertaining what constituted Native title to laud; whether conquest absolutely extinguished the rights of the conquered? What right remained to conquered or submitting tribes suffered to remain on land in some subject capacity ? (Rahi) rules of inheritance. &c.

Thus the Native Land Court had unavoidably to seek out, from the evidence before it —from its Native Assessors—and ultimately from its own experience, what the Native custom and usa^e was, as ■well as the facts to which it was to be applied. This happened to be a function to which the Court was peculiarly fitted, and it has unquestionably been very well performed; but I cannot but think that the time has now come when the experience acquired is sufficient to enable a tolerably complete system of rules to be laid down, and that their publication would save the Court and the litigants a great deal of time and labour, and would make the Court's judgments more clear and intelligible to the public, and so increase the confidence with which it; is regarded. As regards the application of English law to the issue coining before the Native Land Court, I cannot but think that the leaving decisions in any disputable point of law to the Court was an unfortunate mistake. Originated to deal with " Native customs and usages" —intended to nit in Native districts to decide on claims to land on the spot, and constituted partly of Natives—questions of technical law were peculiarly foreign to its nature and to the purposes of its institution. Ifc appears to me, that ihe carrying out of its own proper objects requires that the Court should be as much as possible identified with the Natives, who should be able to follow the pleadings before it, and to understand all its proceedings; and that the introduction into it of solicitors and barristers, generally wholly unacquainted with the language or customs of the Natives —arguing technical points utterly unintelligible to the suitors, and even to the Assessor on the bench —was a fatal departure from its principles, which has brought to it opposition from many of the colonists, has in some degree estranged it from the Natives, and has introduced into its operation a delay and an amount of expense which is often utterly destructive to the interests it was constituted to protect. It appears to me, that in any legislative revision of the Native Land Acts, a provision ought to be made enabling the Court, in case of any question arising on a point of Hnglish law, to make up a case to be decided in some cheap and expeditious way by the Judges of the Supreme Court; and that in the Native Land Court Natives alone, ought to be heard, with the aid only of Interpreters, whose functions should be Btrictly defined by the Court, and that the proceedings ought to be carried on originally in the Maori langiiiige, and be interpreted to the Court for record. The evils which have arisen in practice under the third head have been of so crying a character that several attempts have already been made to mitigate them. I doubt if any will bo effectual which do not go to the root of the matter ; and that I conceive to be, to leave the land, as long as it continues to be held by the original Native owners, to be held by all interested in it in common, (in the now legal sense of the word) capable of being dealt with only in the way which alone Natives can clearly understand, hy common consent, and only to invest it with the attributes of English real estate when, by the general consent of the owners, to be proved, lilte any other Native fact, by appearance before the Court, it is transferred to an individual capable of understanding and being bound by the rights and obligations effecting real estate. The chief difficulty in carrying this out would be tho necessity of making the Native Land Court always available in the chief centres of Native districts, since a recurrence to it would be necessary whenever the certified owners wished to make a first transfer to the land awarded to them ; but other reasons exist in fitvour of establishing the Courts permanently in the chief centres of Native districts, instead of sitting in them casually as now. As it is, the .Natives generally have Bhown themselves incapable of appreciating the duties and responsibilities which they well know attached to the nominal estate in the hinds of their relatives, which became vested in them, by their names being put into the Crown grants ; scandalous frauds have been committed, by which valuable estates hafve been sold for a mere trifle, no part of which baa reached the real owner; and those very parties who have thus abused the trust reposed in them have turned round against the law aud the Court which gave them the power to do it. I now come to the question which more properly belongs to me, the defects and shortcomings of the system of survey. The Native Land Court system was not only in its nature tentative and obliged to work experimentally, and therefore aubject to many risks of failure in detail, but it also inherited many of the evils which arose from the faulty system which preceded it; these operated especially against a good system of survey. In the time when every Native stood in terror lest his hereditary enemies or his own kindred should privately sell the land he claimed, the act of survey was particulaely dreaded as evidence of such operations. The surveyor was watched for, to be hunted off' the land whenever seen. Thus any system of general survey was impossible, and the practice became universal of making wholly detached surveys by cutting lines round the periphery of a piece of land, and traversing it with the chain by compass bearings, a system open to every kind of objection : it is enormously expensive; it defines the estate on the ground most imperfectly ; it does not admit of any adequate cheek being applied to its correctness; and, above all, it does not enable the survey, when made, to be laid down on a record map. Moreover, the jealousy of the Natives of a surveyor, and particularly of a Government surveyor, was so great that, in 18(55, it was not practicable to limit the performance even of such surveys as described to persons employed by the Government; but in order to avoid responsibility, and to disarm opposition, the .Native claimants were left to employ their own