Те Ranot Hiroa.—The Passing of the Maori. 367 
progress received such a shock that in some districts the evil effects still 
troops at the fall of one of the Waikato forts, on their liberation spread the 
disease amongst their people. The disease died out after working its havoc 
on the fertility of the race. Any serious recrudescence that might have 
occurred as the effect of helping to share the “ white man's burden " during 
the Great War has, owing to modern methods and treatment, been arrested. 
districts, and the Maori people as a whole no longer accept disease and 
death with fatal resignation. In the last year or so, in districts where 
typhoid has occurred, over 2,000 inoculations against the disease have been 
made. The Tokotoko rangi (Spear from heaven that sweeps away food 
and man"), that the ancient poet Turaukawa lamented over, no longer 
makes thrusts that go unparried. 
Sanitation has made great advances. The simple but efficacious form 
of latrine that Rupe first instituted in the home of the god Rehua in the 
tenth heaven, copied by succeeding generations in the hill-forts of old, and 
abandoned with so much of good in the old culture, is being restored in 
its modern form in a modern environment. Water-supplies are protected, 
and modern systems installed. Ventilation, which as applied to communal 
meeting-houses was bitterly opposed twenty years ago, js now treated 
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mittees acting under the authority of Maori Health Councils. Tangi, 
hui, and such gatherings are conducted under sanitary rules, and avoid the 
disasters of the past. 
Maori communal life is disintregating. Each generation has added 
separate holdings. In many places the tribal meeting-house stands alone, 
or flanked by a solitary cooking-house, patiently waiting until a death or 
some object of great moment shall for a brief period draw its people 
together beneath its sheltering roof. Visiting ethnologists have asked me 
to take them to some typical Maori village where they would see something 
of the old Maori life, but I am unable to comply. The time was when 
