A MATTER OF CLIMATE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXXIII, Issue 15920, 4 May 1912, Page 10

A MATTER OF CLIMATE.

The statement made in Sydney that New Zealanders are "disliked in Aus tralia and boycotted by employers"' will be contradicted at once by thousands of our people. As a matter of fact"the young man from New Zealand is very much in demand in many branches of industry in the Commonwealth. He is reputed to be rather more energetic than his Australian competitors, and some employers in Sydney and Melbourne have said as much very frankly. There is no reason why the people of the dominion should take particular credit to themselves in this connection, since the question is really one of climate and not of breeding or education. The Scotsman leaves his own rugged hills, his body hardened and his mind braced by conflict with Nature in her sterner moods, and boats th,e Southerners at their own ' businesses in London. Canada, a century hence, will be found to contain a more virile type of man than the neighbouring republic will possess, simply because the severity of the dominion's winter is driving out or destroying the weaker units in the community. Even here in New Zealand, it is a.matter of common knowledge that the best farmers of the warm north are the men who have been drawn from the colder regions of the south. The laws of Nature are immutable, and one of them is that the-white man develops best in the colder sections of the temperate zone. An excess of sunshine seems to loosen the fibres of his being, though the change may be perceptible only when he is viewed in bulk, and an excess of cold causes him to sacrifice his mental possibilities to the demands of the incessant struggle for existence. Australia and New Zealand will evolve their own types, and there need be no jealousies between them. Possibly time will show that one land is the complement of the other. In the meantime, an illustration of tho tendency to divergence may be found, perhaps, in tho fact that while Australia excels at cricket. New Zealand has given her allegiance to the more vigorous game of football.