| — Newman.—On Causes leading to the Extinction of the Maori. 471 
Wars during the past thirty or forty years have destroyed a number of 
Maoris, but though they lost, in their wars with us, many on the battle-field, 
and very many more by semi-starvation leading to lowered vitality, and 
others from diseases arising out of the hardships they endured, yet these 
i wars were neither so long nor so frequent, nor so sanguinary as their former 
incessant intertribal strifes. Moreover, when we took any Maori prisoners, 
| we lodged and fed them well—only we did not slay and eat them afterwards 
as was the former custom of the country. 
Many writers assert that horses have been a not unimportant factor, in 
two ways (1) directly by falls, which either killed outright or after a time ; 
(2) by making locomotion so easy as to induce the natives to be always 
travelling long distances, thus carrying diseases far and wide: this easy 
travelling also induced them (by opening wider their range of pleasure) to 
neglect necessary work in their fields; it also led to all the evils that spring 
from clothes wetted on their long journeys and worn till dry. 
Natives whose limbs are severely crushed by machinery, in battle, or by 
other accidents, not infrequently die because they refuse to submit to ampu-— 
tation. 
Mental depression is held by many authorities to have a large effect 
upon the Maoris, and certainly the loss of their former cropping grounds, of 
their sacred burial grounds, of the rivers and lakes wherein they formerly 
fished ; and the evident decrease of their race does probably affect a few, 
but most assuredly only a very few. A want of courage, however, in 
another direction does influence the death-rate: namely, the readiness wi 
which they “ throw up the sponge” when attacked by disease. Unquestion- 
ably many Maoris die of slight ailments because when attacked they do not 
fight against the disease and strive to resist its ravages, but quietly coil their 
_ blankets round them, and lie down passively to die. They seem to have no 
| Pluck, and their friends look on in a listless do-nothing way, accepting their 
fate needlessly, 
Pe ee ery ae eee 
als tain i aia re 
‘Though the adult Maori death-rate is greatly im excess of that of the 
- Whites, yet the excess is not so much in excess as to lead to the rapid 
erease of the race were it not that the race is so infertile and its children 
each woman being extremely few. De 
