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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 63

Evening Post, 10th July, 1872

Evening Post, 10th July, 1872.

"The indifference shewn by the General Government to the interests of the Province of Wellington is in nothing more clearly exhibited than by the manner in which they allow persons in employment under them, and private parties, mischievously to interfere with the operations of Mr. James Grindell in paving the way to a purchase from the natives of the land between the Otaki and Manawatu rivers. That agent is himself attached to the Native Department, and an officer of the General Government; but he has been lent, as it were, by them to the Provincial Government for this special task, and acts under instructions from the Superintendent. If he were simply let alone, he would have difficulties enough to contend with. The tract of land in question is claimed by two great divisions of natives—on one side the original inhabitants at a period between thirty and forty years ago; on the other, the conquerors who, at that time, themselves driven by the Waikato tribes from the Kawhia district, between the head waters of the Waipa and Waikato rivers and the West Coast, poured down upon the shores of Cook's Strait, killed many of the ancient inhabitants, and suffered the wretched remainder to live in a state virtually amounting to serfdom. The conquerors have been until recently, in uninterrupted occupation of the district. But the effects of civilization have combined to put the conquered occupiers on sufferance and claimants by ancestry, in a position of equality, if not of superiority, to the occupiers and claimants by conquest. Only in the middle of last year, some of the discontented conquered page cxlv used force to dispossess Watene and some other descendants of the conquerors from the birth-places and the burial-places of their fathers. A Major in the Colonial army, Kemp, and 'Governor' Hunia, a protégé of Dr. Featherston, were at the head of this raid, both of them directly aiding and abetting in the burning of a house, and the beating and otherwise ill-treating of a woman, and in pulling her out of a house in which she declared she would stay until she was burned with it. Government and Parliament were both appealed to in vain. Mr. McLean promised to abitrate in December, and has not abitrated yet; and the difficulty remained much as it was until Mr. Grindell began to operate.

"If the General Government were in earnest in wishing the Provincial Government to succeed in buying this magnificent district of land, so eminently suited for immediate colonization, and absolutely required in order that incoming population may extend uninterruptedly from Wellington to Manawatu, Wanganui, Patea, and Taranaki, they would at once take measures to prevent, or even punish, interference with the negociations by private surveyors, and by other self-interested individuals. To look on, and allow these obstacles to be thrust in the way, is giving them a tacit sanction more injurious in effect than direct opposition to the purchase would be; and affords one of the strongest arguments against the Government's recent claim, in its mouth-piece the Independent, to credit for 'the actual regeneration of Wellington.' Such treatment may more truly be described as letting Wellington die by slow torture."