DOMINION'S BLESSINGS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21349, 25 November 1932, Page 12

DOMINION'S BLESSINGS

HAPPY BY COMPARISON

WOMAN NOVELIST'S TRAVELS

[BY TELEGRAPH —PRESS ASSOCIATION]

WELLINGTON, Thursday

Sines leaving the Dominion five yean ago, Miss Nellie M. Scanlon, a New Zealand novelist, has visited 23 different countries. She returned by the Rangiiane, convinced that there- were more blessings, more opportunities for happiness and more freedom in New Zealand than anywhere else in the world. " I don't know which one of those various countries I liked best," she said, " but I certainly do think, as one who always travelled alone, that the further I travelled the more respect I had for the British flag,, and New Zealand in particular. We hear of freedom and good conditions in tjiis country or that one, but I don't think New Zealanders who have not been out oi their own Dominion realise how lucky they are by comparison even in these times of depression. " Things may be hard according to your New Zealander. They are harder in other countries. People here may be poor and distressed, but they are poorer and more distressed in other countries. Yon have more blessings than other countries and you are freer here than anywhere else in the world. You don't know what hardships are. There are sections of populations of other lands from' whom far heavier loads have not been lifted for 15 or 20 years."

(< Miss Scanlon had been glad to find tha " extraordinary prestige" which New Zealand's name enjoyed in other parts of the world. " Everywhere you go." she said, they always know some little things .about us, and it's always something good abqut us. The naroe New Zealand is synonymous everywhere with first-class, and I think it would be a tragedy, even in this depression, to let our standard go down at all from first-class.

We will always be a small country and we will always be exclusive. We cater for a good class of buyer, not for the poor, and we have pot to keep our standard good on which our reputation so largely depends. It we let it go down, generations may go by before it is recovered."