A.—No. 4.
REPORTS ON THE STATE OF THE NATIVES AT THE TIME OF SIR G. F. BOWEN'S ARRIVAL.
No. 1. Ciectjxab from the Native Secbetaey, calling for information on the state of the Natives. (No. 71-2.) Native Secretary's Office, Sib,— Wellington, 15th February, 1868. I am directed by Mr. Richmond to request you to furnish for the information of His Excellency Sir Or. E. Bowen, a general report giving the fullest information you are able to afford on the present state of the Natives in your district. A similar report will be called for from other officers of the department with the view of placing before His Excellency as complete information as can be procured on the subject of Native affairs throughout the Colony. I am to request that great pains may be bestowed to render the report as full a history of the past few years as your experience enables you to furnish. It should deal first of all with the facts which have come under your own immediate cognisance in the position you have occupied under the Government. Reliable information should be given as to the present numbers of the Natives, with the causes affecting their increase or decrease, their state of feeling towards Europeans generally, their physical and moral condition, and as to the progress of Hauhauism, giving your opinion as to the present intention and effect and ultimate tendency of this movement. You will state what you consider to be the feeling of the Natives in respect of the war, the removal of the troops, the suppression of outbreaks of rebellion on the East Coast or elsewhere, and what you think to be the prospect of peace being permanently established. I am further to request you to notice the effect present, or prospective, of the working of any recent legislation in respect of Native Lands, Education and Representation, and to give any other information which may appear to you to be likely to prove \iseful in the forming a general opinion on the present state of Native affairs. As His Excellency has already arrived in the Colony, the report is required with as little delay as possible. I have, &c, W. ROLLESTON", Under Secretary.
No. 2. AUCKLAND. Repobt from E. E. Making, Esq., Judge, Native Land Court, Auckland. I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of this day's date asking me for such remarks as may suggest themselves on the subjects laid before you by Mr. Under-Secretary Rolleston in his letter of the 21st ultimo, a copy of which I have also received. The subjects to which you have called my attention are so numerous and of such great importance, and the answers required to some of the questions as to the future effect of measures administrative and legislative depending much upon diverse contingencies, difficult to foresee or duly consider at a short notice, I feel that to do justice to the subjects and to treat them in anything like an exhaustive manner would require an essay far more voluminous and laboured than my present duties allow time to attempt. Under these circumstances I can do little more than to, in a short manner, state what my opinion may be in each particular subject which has been pointed out, but without entering far into the causes or train of reasoning which may have given rise to such opinion. I wish also to state that my chief experience in Native matters has been acquired in the North, and that, therefore, my remarks where not obviously general, are to be taken as applying more particularly to that part of the country than to any other. I shall commence by describing the last few years in the country south of Auckland, as years of war, followed by a doubtful armed truce, the result of physical exhaustion on the part of the Natives, and a great pecuniary expenditure impossible to bo longer continued, on ours. In the country north of Auckland the Natives refused to take up arms against the European people although repeatedly solicited to do so by the southern rebels, several indeed of the northern chiefs, representing about two-thirds of their military force, offered to take arms for the G-overnment and advance into Waikato. The northern tribes refused to join the rebels from various reasons and considerations, amongst which may be named the following —their chief reason, however, for not joining in the war against us I shall state further on : — 1. Because at the beginning of the war the old feeling that the southern Natives were foreigners, enemies, and not countrymen, was not completely worn out. 2. About two-thirds of the able-bodied population were then, and had been for some years, engaged in very profitable industrial pursuits by which they could obtain very considerable sums of money, and they were in so far as the weight of this circumstance went, disinclined to war. 3. Because, in consequence of the northern districts having been the first settled, and the
E. E. Manina, Esq.
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