The Certificate.

• 2. The principle of the Native Lands Act is to make the certificate of the Land Court the primary evidence of title and the basis of all our dealings with the land: a principle which appears to me sound, and even necessary, as the only mode of avoiding great difficulties. The requiring of such a certificate can be no cause of suspicion, because every man sees that, for the peace of the land and as a safeguard against fraud, some public inquiry and some certificate to show the results of the inquiry are necessary. To require a certificate which asserts, on the authority of a Native Court, that a certain block of land, properly identified and delineated thereon, belongs to certain Natives enumerated therein, and to require and connect therewith an actual survey and marking-out of the land, will be seen to be a reasonable and necessary precaution for the good of all—a needful security against mischief between the races, and even war. We know that the offer of a Crown grant for their land is apt to be regarded by the Natives with suspicion, and declined as seeming to involve an admission that their title to their lands is defective, or that it depends on the pakeha rather than on their own forefathers.

  Another and a weighty reason for preferring the certificate is that a Crown grant would at once bring with it our English law of real property, our canons of descent, as well as a large body of rules not understood or even heard of before; and so would cast upon the Natives a burden which would be to them intolerable. We must be on our guard lest we discredit Crown grants, so as even to render it impossible to induce Natives to accept them; which we certainly shall do if we introduce them as a means of security and protection, and if afterwards a crop of questions and disputes shall grow up, not to be settled except by reference to the Supreme Court—that is to say, to a tribunal which to the great body of the Natives is, by reason of distance, cost, and their own ignorance of our procedure page 4and our language, practically inaccessible. Mr. Dillon Bell, in moving the second reading of the Native Lands Bill, clearly pointed out the nature of this difficulty, and the necessity for propounding for the Native districts a body of rules touching interests in land and the transfer and devolution of them, which should be substantially English, but adapted and simplified. I believe the remedy proposed by Mr. Bell to be perfectly practicable; but, until we are in a condition to propound such rules and to set up local and accessible Courts to interpret and administer them, I think it is absolutely necessary to avoid all these sources of difficulty and to keep within safe limits. The certificate will give us all that in the first instance we need, for the first thing is to mark out the boundaries of separate pieces of property and to register the owners thereof, to gather those owners into groups, and to bring them as groups into legal action. This is the first step. The individualization (of which much has been said) is a further step, for which every facility ought to be given, but for which there is no reason why we should wait, as the members of the several groups of owners may join in letting or selling the land. Much of the soil of England was at one time in a similar condition.