AS OTHERS SEE US

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 103, 1 May 1926, Page 7

AS OTHERS SEE US

NEW ZEALAND THROUGH GERMAN EYES

SATISFIED PROVINCIAL COMMUNITY

SERIOUS STAGNATION.

, (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, 23rd March. During recent months there have appeared a number of articles on New Zealand in two or three of the most important German newspapers; For the translation of ono ■ appearing in the "Berliner Tageblatt" I am indebted to Mr. H. E. L. Pri- ■ day, of Wanganui, who is studying the language in Berlin. The article in question is by Herr Arnold Holltlezel, a very well-known journal-ist-critic, who seems to have paid a visit recently to the Dominion. The Vriter first of all describes tho physical features of "this desirable country—one of the richest lands Of proaise of the earth." New Zealanderg, he maintains, have presented the traditions, customs, prejudices of Victorian England in a remarkable way. "This is the land in which women practically never smoke, and have not taken to bobbed hair; here Europe's mode-before-tho-last is worn without especial grace; Sundays are a hideous void, such as London for a long time has known no more; all the virtues are intransgressible, and tho cooking, served up with a superabundance of mutton, is honest. This provincial island democracy does not possess five stone buildings that ,bno could call beautiful; scarcely one permanent theatre, and so little music that the drummers and bagpipers of a Scottish regiment, who came to Dunedin for tho Exhibition, were swarmed round as if they had been the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. It is to be doubted whethor a good picture .or a single noteworthy poem has yet been produced in New Zoaland. RICHEST, HAPPIEST, AND HEALTHIEST. But this peoplo, though unkissed by any muse, living in sleepy wooden townships or in corrugated huts in the bush, .this, .sober folk of sheepbreeders and butter-makers, is nevertheless aetmilly ♦he relatively richest nation on earth, titid certainly the happiest and hcalth..iest. "New Zealand, unlike Australia (which it indeed quite another couu-:try),-has been settled from the begin-ning-by free men, and, indeed, by astonishingly vigorous and prominent people. Nowhere in-'tho world's history has there been a finer spectacle "than: thi3 conscious arid nobly planned colonisation. The number of statesmen, noteworthy pioneers, and energetic legislators who shaped the destinies of New Zealand in tho nineteenth century is astonishingly above all measure. Now Zealand, in 1830 stiH a cannibal inhabited wilderness, hat. by 1853 a democratic constitution. The country, even as it is: to-day, is the work of a few great men of consciously creative genius, and of people who came hero not merely by chance, hut who knew the why and wherefore of their coming. Tho real founder of ,tho British Empire of to-day, the man,", to whom ono lias raised no monument because in tho British. Empire he was h ever looked upon as 'respectable,' bus the man to whom :, w,°;' e, 'than to anyone else Canada" arid ■Australia owe their existence as modern Anglo-Saxon democracies, Gibbon Wakefield, planned New Zealand, designed it, fashioned it like a work of art. The intention was to create a land of white men in which there should be no poverty. This object has as good as been atta.-ned. "Thiß country, wMch for the size of its population exports more goods than any other (here is produced the meat, butter, and cheese on which half England lives, to say nothing of the wool) possesses to-day hardly a single citizen whose yearly income reaches half-a-million marks (£25,000), and hero no citizen goes hungry. Private property and capitalist economy have not been uprooted. But New Zealand was the first English-speaking country to frame decisive laws for the protection of the workers, to give old age pensions and •women the'right to vote, and the first which through the establishment of courts of arbitration has taken away tho extreme bitterness of the wage fight, even though it has not brought that bitterness to an end. The New Zealand worker says with animated eyes that he is in this country 'exactly as good as his boss'; here it is 'worth a man's while to work.' There are certainly social differences, but not a shade of caste spirit. It is understood -that the chauffeur should eat the same lunch and at the same table as his employer, and that the wife of a navvy is just of much a lady and quite as welldressed as the wife of a landowner. The New Zealand worker eats meat at least three times a day, and drinks tea at least ten time. (He drinks whisky also, and not a little.) In the neighbourhood of the large harbour town of Auckland I saw charming villa colonies, clean houses of at least four room 3 and incredibly beautiful gardens; here the industrial proletariat lives, nearly every family in their own house, with bath, gas, and electric light. SERIOUS STAGNATION. "But it cannot be denied that this blissful condition has its shady side. The high scale of wages, the fixity of the social ordinances for tho protection of social welfare and the weight ef social charges has indeed not hindered the extraordinary prosperity of New Zealand, but it has interfered with the :■ further development of the country. Now Zealand is to-day a satisfied provincial community without fresh impulse. The country ha 3, as it were, fallen asleep on the culture stop •of the Victorian age. Her railways are miserable, her townships, young as they are, appear here and there to bo falling into decay, tho life on the land is still that of the 'way-backs,' like the life in the Wild-West, which for a long time has been no more. (But this Wild West is almost unbelievably tamo and commonplace). The great r.forming spirit of tho legislation hay been for tho last 20 years as if extinct. Since the stormy reform, period of the' .'nineties New Zealand has been mostlygoverned by tiny conservative majorities. Only in the first days of November, 1925, has tho last election given.a safe majority to the young, highly-pop-ular, and very commonplace leader of the Conservative (Reform) Party, J. G. Coatcs. Tho great seamen's strike of the last months has helped this outbreak of tho latest dissatisfaction of the New Zoalander with the somewhat , tyrannical impositions of .the trade unions, and led up, as in Australia, to tho. thorough defeat of the Labour Party. This means no active reaction, but only the protest of tho farming electorate against the (quito overdone) 'red peril.' This moat progressive of all Anglo-Saxon peoples i 3 also animated by strong conservative instincts. Just us the New Zcalanders passionately hold fast to tho British Empire (a thing not quito so universally popular in neighbouring Australia), so they reject the ideas which appear to them foreign or iin-Britieh. The country needs new settlers. She could;still support many

million, people; her fruitful provinces are thinly settled sheep pastures, the mineral richgs are, sinco tho decay of the once exceptionally ricl diggings, as yet scarcely exploited, industries hardly exist, but New Zealand would. rather remain empty than see noi-Britons emigrate, and the race of generous statesmen who once packed groit well-organ-ised dioceses of the Church of England from Lord and Bishop to land worker on a ship, and sent them off to New Zealand, to find a happy existence thore, this race of Wakofield appears to have died out. The result is a serious stagnation of tho ideals and mentality of the country; a gloomy fear of undefinable dangers fills New Zealand, of Bolshevism, which appears to have so little chance in this land without poverty, of future wars, which might bring an invasion of the Japanese. . . This blossoming Paradise, that, literally and symbolically, possesses no snake, is in the Now Year of 1926 not free from tbo morbid dUquiefc that elsewhere fills less happy lands." 85, Fleet street. ■: