given them no spur to exertion by way of a substitute.  It has fatally wounded their pride and self-respect, and has not given them objects of ambition or preserved their ancient habits of labour and self-restraint.  A hundred years ago the tribes were organized and disciplined communities.  No family or able-bodied unit need starve or lack shelter; the humblest could count on the most open-handed hospitality from his fellows.  The tribal territory was the property of all.  The tilling, the fishing, the fowling were work which could not be neglected.  The chief was not a despot, but the president of a council, and in war would not be given the command unless he was the most capable captain.  Every man was a soldier, and, under the perpetual stress of possible war, had to be a trained, self-denying athlete.  The pas were, for defensive reasons, built on the highest and therefore the healthiest positions.  The ditches, the palisades, the terraces of these forts were constructed with great labour as well as no small skill.  The fighting was hand to hand.  The wielding of their weapons—­the wooden spear, the club, the quaint mere[1] and the stone tomahawk—­required strength and endurance as well as a skill only to be obtained by hard practice.  The very sports and dances of the Maori were such as only the active and vigorous could excel in.  Slaves were there, but not enough to relieve the freemen from the necessity for hard work.  Strange sacred customs, such as tapu (vulgarly Anglicized as taboo) and muru, laughable as they seem to us, tended to preserve public health, to ensure respect for authority, and to prevent any undue accumulation of goods and chattels in the hands of one man.  Under the law of muru a man smitten by sudden calamity was politely plundered of all his possessions.  It was the principle under which the wounded shark is torn to pieces by its fellows, and under which the merchant wrecked on the Cornish coast in bye-gone days was stripped of anything the waves had spared.  Among the Maoris, however, it was at once a social duty and a personal compliment.  If a man’s hut caught fire his dearest friends clustered round like bees, rescued all they could from the flames, and—­kept it.  It is on record that a party about to pay a friendly visit to a neighbour village were upset in their canoe as they were paddling in through the surf.  The canoe was at once claimed by the village chief—­their host.  Moreover they would have been insulted if he had not claimed it.  Of course, he who lost by muru one week might be able to repay himself the next.

[Footnote 1:  Tasman thought the mere resembled the parang, or heavy, broad-bladed knife, of the Malays.  Others liken it to a paddle, and matter-of-fact colonists to a tennis-racket or a soda-water bottle flattened.]

Certain colonial writers have exhausted their powers ridicule—­no very difficult task—­upon what they inaccurately call Maori communism.  But the system, in full working order, at least developed the finest race of savages the world has seen, and taught them barbaric virtues which have won from their white supplanters not only respect but liking.  The average colonist regards a Mongolian with repulsion, a Negro with contempt, and looks on an Australian black as very near to a wild beast; but he likes the Maoris, and is sorry that they are dying out.