The "war" was put an end to the other day, by a few policemen arresting the "King," in the midst of his dominions and surrounded by his subjects, and conveying him off to durance vile at Wellington. A demonstration of Taranaki volunteers was enough. No blood was spilt; no violence offered.
Maori wars are things of the past entirely. When are British journalists going to awake to that fact? Now, settlers outnumber Maori everywhere ten to one. There are roads and railways and steamers, sufficient to convey constabulary to any riotous neighbourhood pretty quickly. But the great point is that the Maori of the present day are decent, quiet, and orderly folk. They are intelligent, and possess as much civilization as would be found in many rural districts of England, Scotland, and Wales—I will not add of Ireland, too, for fear I should be Boycotted! Maori and settler are on perfectly equal terms, and the former know it; moreover, they are not an homogeneous people, but live scattered in small communities. The Kingites, who are the least civilized, and who profess not to acknowledge our authority, showed what they thought of the possibilities of war by their submission to a party of constables the other day. There is no strength among them to make a war if they wished it, which they are much too sagacious to do. Riots, or brigandage, even, in isolated localities, are less to be feared than similar outbreaks in Lancashire or Staffordshire.
To read, as we did a short while ago, in influential London newspapers, that war with the Maori was again imminent, strikes us as excessively ludicrous. "Our shanty" even regards it as a dire insult, and there was some talk among us of going to war ourselves—with the fourth estate in England. Anyhow, it shows how little our friends at home really know about this land of the blest and the free. Have there not been books enough written about it _yet_?
There are, it is true, a good many Maori who adhere to primitive custom. Here and there you may find a kainga, containing from a score to a hundred souls, where there is not much apparent advance from the state of things fifty years back. But even here you will find that men and women turn out in European clothes, on occasions of state; that the children receive schooling of some sort; that there is a surprising degree of intelligence and knowledge of the great world and its ways; and that there is a fervent, and often dogmatic, Christianity among the inhabitants.