The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and Echo. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1897.

Auckland Star, Volume XXVIII, Issue 42, 20 February 1897, Page 4

The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and Echo.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1897.

THE NEW ZEAL AN DEE OF THE FUTURE.

For tiio-'canso that kefos assistance, For tlio -wrens that nocla resistance, For th.o future in tlis distance, And tlie good that ive can do.

It is always interesting to speculate on the future destiny of a great race, especially IV it happens to be the race to which one belongs. And although we cannot hope to gain any actual knowledge of what the years will bring forth, still such speculations might be almost as profitable as they arc interesting if we could only lay to heart the many obvious lessons they suggest. But considering how very little we permit ourselves to learn Irom the past we are scarcely likely to be much influenced in our conduct by any dim prophetic vision of the future. Besides it is seldom instruction we are seeking when we take r.o musing on our national destiny any more than when we build castles in the air for our own individual glorification. We deliberately set ourselves lo see only the most pleasing side of the picture and to dwell almost exclusively on agreeable possibilities.

Take the case of our own nation. There may be an occasional prophet who believes that he can trace, in our national tendencies the beginning o( the end, just as there are hypochondriacs who are always vexing their souls over diseases with which they imagine themselves to ha afflicted. But the general and the popular spirit displayed in such vaticinations is one of sanguine cen^dence. We all are willing to

believe that the Anglo-Saxon race is destined for great things, and that the greatness of the British Empire is on the increase and not on the wane. Visions of the glory, and honour, and dignity, that is in store for our descendants never fail to kindle our enthusiasm, and the wisest of us is little apt to be guided by reason in these dips into the future. Although history emphasizes the fact that empires as great as ours have had their day and ceased to be—"Rome, Greece, and Carthage, where are they I" —we cannot contemplate such dissolution for our progressive race. It will surely survive the shocks of time and circumstance.

The prevalence of a national sentiment of this kind is certainly healthy ; the healthy man finds it hard to believe that he will ever fall before the dart of the King of Terrors; and regarded in that light it is lo be encouraged, even if it is associated with a good deal that is over-confident and braggart in its character. If we have lost laith in ourselves our decline is certainly not merely beginning, but has gone some distance. In these colonies the belief in a triumphant future for Australasia is very pronounced. We hold it in the first place as a necessary corollary of the faith we have m th.c destiny of the whole Empire- Bat we seem to hold it too independently of that. There exists among young colonials a lively sense of the power and importance of that particular part of the globe in which they have their home, and it requires no great stretch of the imagination on their part to picture Australasia standing in the forefront of the peoples when all the other portions of the British Empire have crumbled away and been forgotten.

We like to believe that this absolute reliance on its own resources, which may seem to many mere presumption, is some index of a power in the people to realise their high national expectations. We confess that there are moments when we do not take this hopeful view—moments in which we are inclined to regard this rich selfconfidence as a somewhat degenerated inheritance from the Mother Country. For after all, whatever cause we may have for self-congratulation on account of our own efforts, there has hardly been evolved during the brief* history of Australasia anything that would be a sufficient reason for the boundless faith in themselves which we see occasionally displayed by colonials. In too many instances they appear to bave forgotten their indebtedness to the Mother Country in the past, and their present dependence on her, and merely echo the assured tone of men whose assurance was the result of a recognition of the immense value of being under the British flag.

High spirit counts for a great deal in a race, but physical stamina is scarcely less important. Indeed we may say that it is more important, for it is very certain that if the physical standard of a people is weak or (ailing there will be a corresponding mental degeneracy. Now, it is a very grave question whether the physical standard in certain of the colonies of Australasia is not declining. In discussing this question lately the " Sydney Bulletin " delivered a rather vivid picture of the Australian youth of to-day. " What a weedy lot we are breeding," says the writer, "in the great cities of Melbourne and Sydney—pithle3s, sallow, with pipestem limbs and narrow shoulders, alternating between fever and lassitude, ripened prematurely." According to this observer, your Sydney youth never walks if he can go in a 'bus, seldom if ever plays cricket, and hates hard work simply because he is unfit for it. He leaves the heavy labour to be done by the men who have arrived from the the Old Country. The Sydney girls and women present characteristics as depressing to those who are building their hopes on the future of Australia. " Look at them," says the writer already quoted—" plump at fifteen ; 'going off' at twenty; at thirty yellow and cadaverous in maidenhood, or cadaverous and yellow in marriage; at forty dowdy and draggletailed, with sn eternal tale of their diseases." And the worse of it is that these remarks are from a source usually most partial to Australia. But there is no hiding facts which like these are patent to everyone who runs. What sort of progeny can one expect from such fathers and mothers 1 And when you bear in mind how largely the population of Australia is confined in the towns it is clear that a very large proportion of the Australians of the future will be the city bred children of these wretched city bied parents. One hardly feels so ready to speak loudly of the future of Australasia in the face of these things.

In New Zealand we are happy to think these conditions of climate and life so disastrous to the physical welfare of a people are almost entirely absent. We have a healthy, and, except in some parts, invigorating climate, and our population is not cooped up in cities. As time goes on the advantages ive enjoy in comparison with Australia will become more and more evident as the differences between our people, and those of the great continent become more strongly marked. In view of these things, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the destinies of the group of colonies on the other side of the Tasman Sea may be widely divergent from ours, and it is not impossible that some instinctive sense of this, of which we are hardly conscious, may be one of the determining forces which prevent us, even at this early stage of our history, from uniting our fortunes with Australia.