MR. ARTHUR CLAYDENS SPECIAL PARTY.

Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 37, 14 February 1885, Page 1 (Supplement)

MR. ARTHUR CLAYDENS SPECIAL PARTY.

(From our London Correspondent. ) London, Ist January. In reply to a request of mine for some further information respecting his projects, Mr. Arthur Clayclen has sent me a long letter, from which I extract some of the more interesting paragraphs: — "I am desirous of introducing some of our good sound middle-class population to Now Zealand. My experience over there has shown me the supreme need is more power to employ more labour. Capital and practical skill are wanted, especially agricultural experience. The farming is much too slipshod as a rule. "With advantages — climatic and otherwise — such as New Zealand enjoys, there should be the finest agriculture in the world. It should bo the garden of the Pacific and the ' home farm ' of Great Britain. I see in the North Ibland — once opened up by railroads — some of the finest possibilities in the way of agriculture in the world, and I am desirous of seeing some of that incomparable farming which lias made England and Scotland what they are, brought to bear on them. . . I came Home fully prepared to go throughout the rural districts and put New Zealand fairly before the handicapped farmers and I thought a letter which the New Zealand Government gave me for Wr F. D. Bell would have ensured me the necessary official assistance. I only required necessary expenses repaid. The Agent-General, however, met me with a non 2>osstvmus, I had therefore only to abandon my perhaps somewhat Quixotic enterprise, and coutentmyself with sucli service as the Press — ever open to me — afforded. I have, as you most probably have 6een, succeeded in getting a couple of letters in the Times, a couple also in the Birmingham Daily Post — a very influential paper — one or two in Bristol papers, circulating all through the rural districts of the West of England, and several letters in the Christian World, a paper with a quarter of a million circulation, and which gets into all the middle-class chapelgoing folks of England 1 have scores of letters from little farmers and their wives — splendid dairywomen — anxiously enquiring if there is any Governmental assistance in getting out to save their small capital. What would these men and women be worth in New Zealand 1 I will give you an extract from one of 20 letters received yesterday morniug. The writer is a young farmer's widow with three children. She says : — ' I could undertake three small butter dairies if they were situated near together. lam very fond of butter-making, and have always excelled and sold it many times at 2s a pound. I understand cheese-making, and have made £SOOO worth before I was married, and when quite young ; but I like butter-making best.' Now here is a young woman who would be worth her weight in gold in New Zealand, and if I could offer half her passage money she would be able to go. . . A great hindrance to my work, and one that may prove fatal to any party project, is the lamentable tendency of New Zealand papers to admit depreciatory letters into their columns. The winnings of ne'er-do-wells are repeated in our journals, and most of my letters contain references to them. In one of my letters received yesterday a gentleman tells me that he was induced by reading my pamphlet on 'The England of the Pacific,' and Judge Bathgate's pamphlet, to go out to New Zealand a year or two ago, but a leading man in one of the cities — a gentleman whom I know well, and was once M.H.R. for Nelson, advised him not to invest his capital in the colony until he had been a year in the place. This suspicious recommendation deterred him from settling, and so his capital, some £10,000, was lost to the colony Many wrongly suppose that my mission is to flood the New Zealand labour market. .Nothing could be further from the truth. I want to send out men who will be employers of labour. I lecture to-night at a country village, where I shall address a hundred labourers. I shall not advise a man to go out. If I get some farmers, I shall very strongly urge them to go, and then send for their men as they want them. ... I am just seeing through the press a ' Popular Handbook to New Zealand.' It is not meant to compete with the official handbooks so much as to elucidate them. They are usually too heavily weighted with statistics, &c, for people to read. I have aimed so to marsh all my facts and figures as to cany the reader along with me. I I have written it wholly independent of Government help or, indeed, any other help. I did think the AgentGeneral might have given me a £5 advertisement to help out the cost, but red-tapistn prevailed and I had to do without."