172 Transactions. 



or measles attacks a settlement it finds its readiest victims 

 among the children of the Native school. 



Though there are, of course, individual exceptions, still the 

 vast majority of the Maori scholars find little or no opportunity 

 in adult life of making practical use of what they have learned. 

 The Maori is handicapped from the start, and overweighted 

 all through the race of life. His natural indolence and his love 

 of change and excitement unfit him for the uninteresting 

 monotony of steady effort, while his constitutional diffidence 

 and his fear of putting himself in the wrong act as a bar to any 

 real competition with the pakeha. Thus it is that numbers of 

 young men with a sufficient educational equipment to fit them 

 for employment in a lawyer's or a surveyor's office, or in a 

 banking or mercantile establishment, are to be found cutting 

 flax in a swamp, acting as ostler or boots at a bush publichouse, 

 or driving bullocks at starvation wages for a country storekeeper. 

 Nor are the girls any more fortunate. In the early days, when 

 white women were scarce, many a settler found an excellent 

 wife in a Maori maiden — not only as a practical helpmate, but 

 as a refined and intelligent companion. But as European 

 population has increased the race prejudice has correspondingly 

 asserted itself, and, no matter how capable and attractive a girl 

 may now be, she has very little chance of rising in the social 

 scale. Her bright early promise is unfulfilled. Hope is soon 

 lost, and she gradually sinks back to the general level of the 

 tribe. 



Looking at the question in all its bearings, it must be admitted 

 that the Native schools have not fulfilled the hopes that have 

 been reposed in them. In the vast majority of cases they have 

 failed to bring the Maori into closer touch with what is best in 

 the European civilisation. They have emphasized the race- 

 distinction, and have deprived him of the opportunity of study 

 and practice in many useful directions, while by the inevitable 

 conditions that surround them they have largely contributed to 

 his physical decay. 



Summary. 



I have enumerated some of the principal causes that have 

 combined to produce the wholesale and rapid decay of the 

 Maori people. I might go on to show how at almost every point 

 at which the race has conic into contact with the new civilisation 

 it has suffered a shock from which it has been unable to recover. 

 As Dr. Yon Hochstctter observed more than forty years ago, 

 " Despite the many advantages it has brought to the Natives, 

 the European civilisation acts upon them like an insidious 

 poison, consuming the inmost marrow of their life .. . . 



