NEW ZEALAND PRAISED.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19991, 6 July 1928, Page 11

NEW ZEALAND PRAISED.

A VISITOR'S IMPRESSIONS.

" IN LOVE WITH THE PEOPLE."

[from our own correspondent.]

LONDON, June 2.

Professor A. J. Grant, of Leeds University, who spent a year at Canterbury College, addressed the members of the Leeds Rotary Club, his subject being New Zealand. He said he had fallen in love with the people of the Dominion and with the country itself. There was not a plant, a fruit, a bird, or an animal belonging to New Zealand that could be identified elsewhere, but with all the differences there could be no question that of all the Dominions of the British Empire no other so closely resembled our own in its social, political and cultural characteristics.

More than could bo expressed was this due to the work of that great colonising founder, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who had tho vision to see that building up of a new part of tho Empire should not lie left to the riffraff or the convict, but called for the best material that tho Old Country could provide. The same foresight was shown hy the first Governor, Captain Hobson, in tho framing of the Treaty of Waitangi, under which the Maoris, while acknowledging tho sovereignty of the British Crown, were assured of their personal possession of the lands owned by them. The relationships of the white people and the Maoris, continued Professor Grant, had developed on remarkable lines, and the spirit of the great act of humanity and justice of 1840 had been carried on. The same spirit was also shown in the effort to settle affairs between capital and labour there. Tho Vicar of Leeds,, the Rev. H. Thompson Elliott, proposing a vote of thanks to Professor Grant, said that the wholo history of the relations between the civilised peoples and tho backward races of the world was one full of warning for the present generation, as well as ono that provided here and there a refreshing example. When people questioned, as they sometimes did, the ultimate value to backward peoples of their contact with civilised races, it was heartening to be able to refer to instances where there were happy relations between the two.