Commencement of Decay.

Some writers, in attempting to account for the rapid disappearance of the Maori, have put forward a theory that the race was already in an advanced stage of decay by the time of Captain Cook's discovery. It is, of course, possible that a period of internecine strife of more than common intensity may have occured which for the moment would have reduced the population; but the Maoris were a healthy, vigorous, and prolific race, and a season of comparative political rest would have soon brought them up to their normal numbers. They had not yet entered on that condition of decadence whose lines are gradually though surely converging to a vanishing-point. However humiliating to the self-esteem of the white man, it must be confessed that it is the contact with European civilisation that has proved the ruin of the race. From the moment that the pakeha found a footing in the country, by an inevitable chain of causa-