Maori Would Always Fight For Land.

Young Clarke, a very capable Maori scholar, was determined that there should be no disputes later regarding either the boundaries or the Native reserves. His little book, “Early Life in New Zealand,” shows to what trouble he went. Clarke knew the Maori proverb: “He wahine he whenua e ngaro ai te tangata,” which he rendered into English as: “For land or wife, man stakes his life,” commenting “that a man, who is a man, will fight with all his life rather than be forced to surrender either land or woman. The depth of this feeling about their land, to say nothing about the wife, was greatly underrated by Europeans, and their disregard of it was and has continued to be, the source of most of the trouble that we have had with the Maoris… Now anyone who carries these three laws in his mind—the law of the Blood Bond, the law of Tribal Possession, and the law of Possession by Conquest—will have the key to all our great troubles with the Maoris from the Treaty of Waitangi to the present hour.”