The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 10
Cause of Maori Decrease
Cause of Maori Decrease.
I would observe, too, that your Correspondent boldly points out a certain social cancer ever preying on the Maori Race which the false delicacy, the mistaken humanity, of the thousand and one disquisitions we have had on the "Maori and his Manners," have almost ever concealed or ignored. In the first edition of my little work on New Zealand, treating of the decrease of the New Zealanders despite of all our nursing, I stated that the chief cause of it was the almost promiscuous inter-course of the Sexes before marriage; and intimated that if it had ever been otherwise yet that, in these days, the existence of virgin Maori Brides was perhaps more problematical than the existence of the Maori Moa.
For this misdemeanour of declaring the naked Truth, I had the ill fortune to be denounced by Philo-Maori Pharisees as a Vessel of Wrath, and to become the object of much "file-biting" abuse—but, the able Letter of your Wellington Correspondent, in your issue of to-day, shows I was right in my remarks on "girlhood chastity" among the New Zealanders, and, virtually, almost repeats my very words.
March 16th,1865.