Abstract
Lord Bledisloe's eloquent appeal on behalf of the Maoris in his address to the Royal Society of Arts on February 27 came with added force from one who both by his official and his personal acts during the five years of his tenure of the Governor-Generalship of New Zealand had shown that not only had he a sympathetic appreciation of the history of the race and its achievement in the past, but also that he believed in the potentialities of this people as an element in the future cultural development of the Dominion. In characterising them as the most interesting, the most attractive and the most civilis-able of the ‘native’ peoples of the world, he did not go beyond the warrant of the results of scientific study of the Maori during the last generation or more. When he reviewed the relations of white administration and the natives from the days of early colonisation down to recent times, Lord Bledisloe displayed sound judgement in attributing the decadence of the race, which at one time seemed in danger of extinction, to the harsh and inequitable land policy of the Government, which confiscated and alienated native holdings after the Maori wars. Experience elsewhere, notably in South Africa and North America, has shown that the well-being of an indigenous people is closely bound up with an understanding on the part of the administration of the place of land-tenure in its cultural economy. The remarkable recovery of the Maoris during the last generation, to which Lord Bledisloe referred, is in itself a sufficient guarantee that if the present moment is, as he describes it, a crisis in their history, they will repay the confidence which he trusts will be reposed in them, should their future be assured them and their equality of status under British sovereignty be unchallenged in four years time, when New Zealand will celebrate her centenary as a British possession.
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Maori Culture and Modern Civilisation. Nature 137, 391 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137391c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137391c0