No doubt the remnants of the Maori tribal system are useless, and perhaps worse than useless.  The tribes still own land in common, and much of it.  They might be very wealthy landlords if they cared to lease their estates on the best terms they could bargain for.  As it is, they receive yearly very large sums in rent.  They could be rich farmers if they cared to master the science of farming.  They have brains to learn more difficult things.  They might be healthy men and women if they would accept the teachings of sanitary science as sincerely as they took in the religious teachings of the early missionaries.  If they could be made to realize that foul air, insufficient dress, putrid food, alternations of feast and famine, and long bouts of sedulous idleness are destroying them as a people and need not do so, then their decay might be arrested and the fair hopes of the missionary pioneers yet be justified.  So long as they soak maize in the streams until it is rotten and eat it together with dried shark—­food the merest whiff of which will make a white man sick; so long as they will wear a suit of clothes one day and a tattered blanket the next, and sit smoking crowded in huts, the reek of which strikes you like a blow in the face; so long as they will cluster round dead bodies during their tangis or wakes; so long as they will ignore drainage—­just so long will they remain a blighted and dwindling race, and observers without eyes will talk as though there was something fateful and mysterious in their decline.  One ray of hope for them has quite lately been noted.  They are caring more for the education of their children.  Some three thousand of these now go to school, not always irregularly.  Very quaint scholars are the dark-eyed, quick-glancing, brown-skinned little people sitting tied “to that dry drudgery at the desk’s dull wood,” which, if heredity counts for anything, must be so much harder to them than to the children of the Pakeha.[1] Three years ago the Government re-organized the native schools, had the children taught sanitary lessons with the help of magic lanterns, and gave power to committees of native villagers to prosecute the parents of truants.  The result has been a prompt, marked and growing improvement in the attendance and the general interest.  Better still, the educated Maori youths are awakening to the sad plight of their people.  Pathetic as their regrets are, the healthy discontent they show may lead to better things.

[Footnote 1:  Foreigner.]

[Illustration]

Chapter III

THE MAORI AND THE UNSEEN

                          “Dreaming caves
  Full of the groping of bewildered waves.”