The Daily Telegraph WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1882.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3554, 29 November 1882, Page 2

The Daily Telegraph WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1882.

The returned colonist is not a favorite in England, if we may believe what the English iournalist says of bim. We are constantly seeing in the home papers references to the colonial visitor of a very far from complimentary character. Perhaps the returned colonists that have come under the observation of public writers have not been happy specimens, or the public writers may have had what the French call " a fit of the spleen" when falling toul of colonials. In either case the taste displayed in watching for and reporting upon the idiosyncrasies of visitors to the land of their birth is not very creditable to the English journalist. Englishmen —those who have never travelled beyond the confines of Europe— can scarcely understand how it is that they are so intensely hated by the foreigner. They are apt to pride themselves that they are not as other men, and because they are different from the foreigner they think that that is the cause of their being disliked. But tbe feeling towards the Spaniard, or the Italian, or the Russian, or Dane, entertained by Frenchmen is altogether different from that which they bave towards the English. Tbe true reason for this difference is that the Englishman seems to surround himself with a halo of superiority; his reserve is pride ; no one is his equal, and his very presence creates a feeling of hostility, and in the lower classes a desire to insult him. There is an immense amount of snobbishness in the average Englishman, which shows itself ia a variety of ways, but more particularly in his undisguised opinion that when his fellowcountryman takes to colonial life that he has not only severed his connection with civilisation, but that he never could have known what civilisation meant. An article in a recent number of the Pall Mall Budget shows all the arrogant selfsufficiency of the ordinary stay-at-home Englishman to a remarkable degree. In this article we read that the colonial possesses good qualities, is strictly worthy, and has no vices. But " he succeeds in making himself supremely ucinteresting. Taken in his own home he is a model host and an excellent fellow." . . "It is only when you see him on his home visit to England that you begin to get his measure. There, out of his proper element, it must be candidly confessed that he bores many of us unspeakably." No doubt he does because he is less frivolous, and he cannot appreciate the narrow-minded prejudice that there is no life worth living that is not mostly spent in perambulating a limited circle of the London pavements. The Englishman expects the whole world to fall down and worship the modern Babylon and those who dwell therein. No, we are wrong. Not all who dwell there, only those who eschew omnibuses, excursion trains, and cheap watering places. And so the writer of the article in the Budget "rounds" upon the colonist because he has no doubts in his own mind as to the absolute perfection of the standard afforded him by his own colony. " In Melbourne, he says, or in Toronto, we always do so-and-so; and to say that appears to him to close the question. Roma locuta est: causafnita est. He has lived so long in a narrow, commercially prosperous, materially civilised world that he cannot understand the possibilty of any other ideal. He sees that his own colony goes ahead of the latest London improvements; that it is admirably supplied with telephones, electric lights, asphalte pavements, street cars, bicycles, and patent corkscrews ; that it is cleaner, fresher, brighter, brandnewer, and far more redolent of white paint than any part ofmusty, fusty, rusty, crusty old England. Those things he can comprehend and those only. For the things in which England can show him a better way he cares little or nothing. Broader views and a wider honzon of thought matter to him not one whit. Accustomed to turn his own band in a rough-and-ready way to' whatever is needed he has a general smattering of all practical knowledge, and a profound disbelief in that deeper specialism which makes a great country really possible. The one intellectual quality he thoroughly admires is smartness ; and smartness means the capacity to get along at a pinch without any previous training by the light of nature. To him academies and Royal secieties are sets of old fogeys ; thinkers and philosophers are people with crotchets; literature, science, aud art are excellent things in their way, but are understood to be represented by the provincial press, mining engineers, and the illustrated papers. The really serious things of life are corn and pork; its rewards are carriages, horses, fine houses, handsome towns, and a seat in the Colonial Legislature. He chafes much at the inhospitality of Englishmen, forgetting that, while it is easy to keep open house for all comers in an up-country sheepfarm, it is practically impossible to show equally expansive hospitality in the overstocked centre of a great Empire. He cherishes an exaggerated personal loyalty for the Sovereign and the Constitution (being usually a Conservative in his vapue views of home politics) ; but he rather dislikes and distrusts the mass of his fellow-subjects in the mother-country. Moreover, as he is always ready with a patronizing opinion about everything, he very often gets snubbed ; and this he puts down unhesitatingly to British intolerance. It never occurs to him to consider that his views about protection will possibly not enlighten the professor of political economy, or that his emphatic condemnation of the folly of Darwinism will strike the man of science with whom he is conversing as ludicrously puerile. If he could only give Salisbury Cathedral a coat of white-wash; introduce green verandahs into Mayfair : and take down the priggish conceit of those fellows in London who think they know a thing or two out of the common, he imagines England would be not a bad sort of country for the retired colonist. But as it is, he returns to his own place from his European tour convinced that in street

architecture, modern progress, general .A comfort, electricity, summer drinks, and all that goes to make up the highest civilization, they over there are a couple of centuries at least ahead of the old country."