THE MAORI KING.*
WHATEVER may have been the mistakes of the powers that be and have been in New Zealand, that of appointing Mr. Gorst to
an important colonial office was certainly amongst the most serious. In the work before us he has not only made use of his official experiences for the getting up of a highly coloured and strongly partisan case for the Maories against the settlers, but has scarcely the decency to suppress the satisfaction with which, in his official capacity, he received and accepted rebuffs and in- sults from the adherents of the Maori King. The Maories are quite able and ready enough to find out and make the most of weaknesses and flaws in the settlers' case, without having the advantage of the official knowledge of a " Pakeha '' Commissioner placed before them in the form of an open attack on our whole policy and conduct in New Zealand. At the same time, we cannot think that Mr. Gorst has done much to forward his cause, after all. In the course of a very animated and cleverly written —as well as cleverly coloured—narrative of New Zealand events since 1860, he has in reality stated with telling effect the case of those who hold that the preservation of the Maori race can only 'be secured by a thorough assertion of British supremacy, and not by any hollow compromise. On his own showing, the mere contact of Europeans is rapidly producing all its accustomed effects on an inferior race, and though he talks a great deal of our duty of civilizing the Maori, it is difficult to see how anything but still further and ruinous deterioration can take place if European rule is not finally established. Mr. Gorst calls his work a " protest against a theory which despairs of justice and humanity," meaning apparently thereby the principle of our whole policy in New Zealand, and does his best besides to prove that policy, especially as far as it involves the reduction of Maori pretensions within reasonable limits, to be impracticable. He roundly asserts that the one motive which leads the colonists to adopt that policy is their purely selfish wish for the expenditure in the colony con- sequent upon the presence of the permanent and large European force necessary for the coercion of the natives, and refuses to give them credit for any desire to either ameliorate the condition of the Maori or preserve the race. But nothing can show more strongly the impossibility of any such amelioration without the settlement of affairs on a firm basis than his own record of New Zealand experience. Civilization is not easy when a race resists
* The Maori King ; or, the Story of our Quarrel with the Natives of New Zealand. By J. E. Horst, M.A., recently Commissioner of the Waikato District, New Zealand. London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co. 1864.
every main element of civilization as a threatened infraction of the rights of a vaguely defined kingdom, and are prepared at the shortest notice, on any such supposed infraction, to relapse at once into bloodthirsty and revengeful savages. The indirect influences of Christianity have so undermined the superstitious rever- ence on which the authority of the chiefs mainly depended, that ranungas, or tribal councils, formerly held under their presidence and dominant influence, have now degenerated into hastily and irregularly convened democratic assemblies, and merely serve for any agitator with a fancied grievance to excite the natives against the settlers. Mr. Gorst is both eloquent and facetious ou the failur of our attempts to establish legal tribunals for doing justice between Europeans and Maories, but he does not explain either how civilization is to be effected without some means at least for repression of outrage, or how any jurisdiction is practicable under any possible adjustment of imperial rights and Maori pretensions.
But putting aside Mr. Gorst's proclivities towards Maori self- government, and his idee Axe, that whatever Government does is wrong, he has written not only an amusing but an instructive description of the manners and customs of the Maories, and their unique character. His account of the great native judicial, deliberative, and military council, the ranunga, is particularly interesting. The original constitution was confined to chiefs of the first rank, and the deliberations were conducted with great show of argument and formal decisions. But in general the loss of authority by the chiefs has led to the exten- sion of membership to whole tribes, men, women, and children, wh3 simply talk against each other night after night without order or regulations of any kind. Their judicial capacity has naturally suffered much from this, and their code is nothing but a chaotic mixture of Maori custom, the Ten Com- mandments, Levitical law, and English law. Mr. Gorst once heard a trial before a village ranunga in which it appeared that a man named Kepa had made a law that no one should go to his house while he was from home. "Rape's law" was gravely accepted throughout the trial as the proper basis of jurisdiction, and the only question was whether the law which Kepa was unto himself had been duly promulgated. The legal acumen of the Maories is great, and they enter into the argument of a " point of law" with great zest, especially if a European is in the case, as the decision is then of little consequence—the Maori has all the pleasure of arguing, and it seldom occurs to him to accept the consequences of an adverse judgment.
The rapidity with which the Maories have become thoroughly versed in Biblical phraseology and expression is most strik- ing, and is accounted for to a great extent, as Mr. Gorst points out, by the resemblance in many points of the conditions of life illustrated in the earlier books of the Old Testament to their own. Their study of the Old Testament for judicial objects seems to have imbued their minds so thoroughly with its peculiar tone as to result in their use of Scriptural phraseology at every turn.
In taking leave of Mr. Gorst's volume we must repeat our regret that he should have taken a line which can do no possible good, and will probably do a good deal of harm. What would otherwise have been a decidedly useful record of New Zealand experience, is thus to a great extent converted into a partizan pamphlet.
Previous page
