MEN AND THINGS ABROAD.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1745, 16 August 1905, Page 8

MEN AND THINGS ABROAD.

(By Dr. W. HI. Fitohetfc.)

1. THE ALL-RED ROUTE. ¥he “ all-red” route is geographically not all red. At Honolulu the colour note is broken and the Union Jack gives place to the stars and stripes. It as curiously composite, too, being Australasian in one section, Canadian in another, a*nd British or Canadian in yet another. Who travels by the “All-Red Route” bo Europe sails across 7000 miles of the Pacific in one of the fine boats of the U.S.N. Co; crosses Canada in the smooth-running cars of the C-P-R-l and then, sailing down the majestic and 1 many T isled St. Lawrence in one or other of the great Canadian steamships reaches the Atlantic. But the line in each section is under one flag and is sufficiently red in colour to satisfy the most patriotic sensibilities. And it is asi picturesque as it is patriotic. No other route to Europe has a colour scheme so vivid, or offers every sense experiences so varied. PICTURESQUE EXPERIENCE®. Its colour scheme ranges from the deep purple of equatorial seas to the grey skies and slate-coloured waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The traveller sees in the early stages the palmcrowned atolls of the Pacific; he stares later at some iceberg, as big as a hundred cathedrals, floating white and green —and such frosted white and such deep mysterious green as earth nowhere else can show —say, off Cape Race, or further east on the Newfoundland banks. A route which begins amid the heat and glories of the Pacific and 4»TidR in the Gulf Stream as it breaks on the Irish Coast, and gives betwixt the snow-crowned heights of the Selkirks, the wide sea-like floor of the prairies and the frozen majesty of a fleet of icebergs, with the blowing mists on their cape—has surely a unique charm. The Pacific service is contributed by New Zealand, and nobody need wish for better conditions of sea travel than it supplies. The Manuka, on which these pages are written is a boat of nearly 5000 tons, with the lines of a yacht and a steadiness in rough weather which boats three times her tonnage do not always possess. For seamanship on the bridge, taste and comfort in the saloon, and the perfection of organisation and courtesy everywhere, the service would bear comparison with any of the great passenger lines of the world. Considered as the Australasian contribution to the “All-Red Route” it is a very splendid bit of work. And a run of 7000 miles through the island groups <rf the Pacific and across what Tennyson calls “the broad belt of the world,” is—granted decent weather and a sea-going stomach—a delightful bit of sea experience. . , A MIRROR. OF AUSTRALASIAN LIFE. And somehow the decks and the passenger list of the Manuka are a more expressive reflex of the life '' of Australia and New Zealand than those of any other ships which leave Australian waters. The great passenger boats by Suez have human cargoes of a curiously mixed quality. The commercial travellers and the wool buyers of all nationalities —-French and German, Belgian and British —go by them. At Colombo an Indian stream flows in. But the passenger list of the “All Red Route” is almost purely Australasian in character, with a dash of Canadians and Americans thrown in. The groups under the white awnings of the Manuka are a perfect mirror of the life of the Australasian oolonies —of both their failures and their successes —picturesque enough to satisfy an artist, and suggestive enough to delight a philosopher. A sufficiently subtle chemistry would find present in a single drop of blood all the elements of the body from which it was drawn and might diagnose with a near approach to accuracy the exact condition of its health. And the ship’s company of the Manuka is exactly such a drop of living blood drawn from the veins of Australasia. A philosopher might deduce from the .types he finds here a reasonably faithful picture of the whole community they represent; while a politician would find reproduced in microscopic terms the whole drift of things in both Australia and New Zealand. MIXED CARGOES. The decks, of course, reflect that migratory impulse in British blood which has so powerfully shaped British history, and goes so far to explain the British Empire. Here is the second son of a good English county family, a Cambridge man, who has teen sugar-growing in Queensland, is driven out from that State by the “White Australia” policy, and is on his way either to start a ranch in Canada or to grow rubber in the Straits Settlements. All skies and soils are alike to him. He is the type of a class somewhat inarticulate in itself, but on which much picturesque prose and many rhymes have been expended. Here, again, is a British Columbian, smooth-faced, quiet-mannei *d, who knows the wild landscapes of Alaska, and the ice-bound waters of the Behring Straits as he knows the palm y£ his own hand. He has driven a dog-

sled across wide leagues of Arctic snows, and is as familiar with Klondyke as a London club man is with Piccadilly. When ten years younger he assisted to carry relief stores to' a cluster of icebound whalers somewhere in the neighbourhood of Herschel Island, and came back overland by the Alexandra, the Rat River, the Porcupine, and the Yukon, charting as he went, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society as a reward. And he is not yet 35 years of age. The übiquitous Soot is, of course, amply represented on the Manuka’s decks. He carries his broad vowels, his high cheekbones, his cool, shrewd brain, and his habit of succeding everywhere; and nowhere is the land of oatmeal and of the Shorter Catechism more happily represented than in what may be called the outer fringes of the Empire.

AUSTRALIAN AND' CANADIAN. There is a sprinkling of Americans and Canadians amongst the passengers, and it is curious to note both the agreements and the differences betwixt them. They are, in substance, two varieties of one type. Both are practical, shrewd, alert; but the Canadian has a certain quietness as of a man who lives beside a big loud-voiced blustering neighbour; the air of a small trader who is building up a business under the shadow of one of those huge composite stores that seem to defy competition. He has learned to keep his own counsel; to do things quietly and not to talk about them when they are done. Canada, after all, is only a community of 6,000,000 rubbing shoulders with one of 80,000,000. But the Canadian is doing great things and promises to add a new and very fine type to the British stock. It is a type, however, quite distinct f rom the Australian or the New Zealander. The Australian is quicker, more vivid and alert, than the Canadian. He is built physically on finer, if less sturdy lines. Hi« good qualities are more in evidence. He has an air of breeding to which the Canadian cannot pretend. He takes the lead naturally and as if of right; though whether he will keep it for the future is a question yet to be determined. But the chief difference betwen the two is one of temper, and the difference is profound. In the Australian temper there is at the present' moment at least'—a note of discontent. He knows that the world 1 thinks he is failing; he half suspects himself of failure, he does not quite know why. He is sure he ought not to fail, and he curses his politics and his politicians morning, noon and night, for the temporary shadow which has falen on Australian credit. The Canadian, on the other hand, knows he is succeeding, and knows why. He is trying no experiment. He is building a prosperous community on a solid' and enduring foundation; and he knows the world takes him seriously and contemplates him with respect'. Judged by the saloon , the Australian and the New Zealander would, in some respects, rank very high. The older men are men who' have succeeded! in commerce, or in the professions, or as pastoralist®; the younger men are exceptionally well educated. All the universities—Oxford and Cambridge as well as Sydney and Melbourne —are represented amongst them. They are doctors, lawyer®, engineers; though, ini

not a few cases, while Australasia has given them their birth and training they are seeking their car leers elsewhere. They differ curiously amongst themselves. The man from Quensland is parted by subtle differences from the New Zealander, and both, say, from the Victorian. Climate and geography leave their mark on the human face and character as deeply as the glacier scars the granite. History, too, curiously affects the human type. The Australian has, perhaps, less of what may be called the ecclesiastical temper, than perhaps any other variety of the human race; and yet he not seldom shows signs of the action on him of ecclesiastical forces. It counts for something still that Otago was originally a Presbyterian, Canterbury an Anglican, and South Australia a Congregational settlement. The marks of that ancestral strain are still visible in not a few instances on the faces of the men from these' States. A STUDY IN DISCONTENT. Australian politicians would find the decks of the Mianuka an uncomfortable, but perhaps very wholesome, school. Disgust with Australian politics amongst Australians themselves is bitter and loud on. every deck; and that its politics are driving people from Australia finds abundant proof. Here is a sugargrower from Queensland who drops off , at Fiji in search of some happy land where he will not be compelled to em- ' ploy labourers of only one particular colour of skin. Here is a business man from New South Wales accustomed to deal with big affairs, who discourses of i the Arbitration Act with a gloomy ener--1 gy and an ordered wealth of facts which would strangely disturb the complacency of Mr. Wise if he could only hear it. Here is an architect and engineer who has spent more than 40 years in Australia and New Zealand, and is leav- ; ing both, as he explains, not because he , has failed, but that his sons may have • a chance of success. When he was himself a young fellow of 21 in Australia — this is 40 years ago—he could earn £250 a year and had a future; to-day his son, aged 20, is in a big warehouse, does the work of a man, gets the wages of a boy, and has no prospects. So this father is taking his family to a country where, as he puts it, “a young fellow has a chance.” Australia, he admits, in climate, soil, and' all natural conditions, has immense advantages over Canada; but then in Victoria every third inhabitant lives in Melbourne. The social state —for a new country—is artificial and evil. In Western Canada, for which this father and his sons are hound, out of every 100 inhabitants 92 are on the land' and only eight in the town®. He knows of a Canadian town where the houses cannot be built fast enough for the people; and to this architect’s paradise he is betaking himself. In ten or 20 years he calculates Australia will have mended its ways and bo acting on a saner policy; but pending that beatific event he emigrate®. , STEERAGE POLITICS. I • But discontent with Australian politics is by no means confined to the saloon and to the class represented by the saloon passenger list. It is just as strong in the steerage. Here are 63 passengers in the third-class, of whom 34 are men; and they are all leaving Australia. They are a ripple which shews

the flow of what is not yet a tide, but which may easily become one. They are not failures. They have cash in their pockets, brains in their heads, skill in their fingers. They are carpenters, farmers, gardeners, millers; most of them with families, all of them with money. Some of them, indeed, are in their way small capitalists. They are exactly the men whom it would pay Australia to import at almost any cost; but. they are leaving it, and in almost every case, owing to some deep disgust with its legislation. The disgust has various root®. Sometimes it is because Parliament does too much ; sometimes' because it does too little, and always because it does the wrong thing. New Zealand, it is somewhat surprising to find, is represented in this outward flow. Mnny oases might be given from the passenger list of this or recent boats. Here is a farmer from Otago, for example, who puts £BOO in the purser’s hands for safekeeping; another farmer with an even bigger amount of cash from Wellington; yet another farmer from Auckland with £llOO solid cash in his pockets, and! better wealth still, in the shape of three fine sons and a daughter. They are all going to a country where the farmer 1 gets the freehold of the land he clears and cultivates, for the discontent in New Zealand with the leasehold system, if inarticulate, is both deeper and wider than New Zealand legislators realise, or will admit. It is certainly costing New Zealand many families. A farmer from South Australia., with 13 children, was on. the last boat outward. and is another example of the best sort of asset Australia is losing. Here is another man turning his back on Australia, with plenty of money in his pockets, and wife anti children about him. Be is half farmer, half grazier, and was the first man, he claims, to make cheese for the market in Queensland. He is of a fine type, rich in shrewdness and practical sense, and tells his tale with a frankness and humour altogether delightful. He had! built up a big and prosperous dairy; but when the drought lay fierce in Queensland he had to import lucerne from Victoria to keep his cows alive. The Railway department, instead of helping the distressed farmers, chose this exact moment for raising rates. As a result, the narrator goes on, “we all voted dead against the Philp Government at the general election; but,” he adds, with a rueful sigh, “this put the labour party into power, and meant for us being out of the frying-pan into the fire.” Parliament, too, afflicted him with many irritations. There were Government inspectors who came to teach him the dairy business, and were as innocent of it themselves as so many townbred old maids; and he had to pay threepence per head for every cow ho possessed for the sake of supplying these inspectors with a salary they did not earn, and a knowledge they did not possess. It was, he complains, with rueful energy, a wasted threepence. So he is leaving Australia for ten years, by which time he reckons the country will have been whipped tack into sane politics, and it will be safe for the farmer with small capital to return. For those who are leaving Australia, somehow, all intend to come back to it. Australia, this man holds, is the finest country, with the finest climate under heaven. It is only afflicted with a mysterious disease known as “oolitics. No

one can talk with the men lying on the forehatch of the Manuka without seeing that what may be called the smaller capitalists are becoming uneasy in Australia, and are leaving it. There are other interesting types amongst the third-class. Here is an Englishman who has spent, three years trying to grow maize in a rainless district in Queensland, and has. gained nothing by it but the dengue fever; so he is going back to his native Surrey. Here is a young Victorian farmer from Gippsland, who is going round the world third-class purely for the sake of seeing what there is in it. Beside him is a New South Welshman, wixh not many coins in his pocket but many trades at his finger ends—he is a printer, a farmer, a dairyman, etc. And he, too,is simply going to have a look at the world outside Australia. The migratory impulse is nearly as visible on the forecastle of the Manuka as in its saloon. . EMIGRATING UNIONISTS. , Here is another type, a stonemoson, who has been twenty-five years in New South Wales, but is an Englishman by birth. He is a well-built, intelligent and good-looking fellow, belongs to one of the strictest of the labour unions, and is plainly a leader in it. He is naturally an ardent unionist. His trade, he claims with pride, works only eight hours 4 day, and only five and a half days a week ; and he favours the policy of working either shorter hours a day, or fever days per week, in order to distribute the work over all the members of the union, and so keen up the rate of wages. He refuses to believe that, high wages increase the cost of production and so limit the amount of work to be done. Increased cost, lie argues, is always “passed on” to the consumer. What he fails to see is that, at some stage of the process, he himself is a consumer, and the increased wages he gets at the beginning of the process means higher prices for what he consumes at the other end. That this is so is proved by the experience of the man who sits beside bim. He is an engineer, a mid-dle-aged, smileless man, with an aged mother and wife, who is leaving Australia for Canada. He also is an unionist, 6ut, he declares with gloomy energy, the union did him no good. He always got work, he explains in Australia, but saw no prospects before him. Be had tried all the colonies; and, curiously enough, found himself worst off in New Zealand. The wages were higher there than in Australia, but the purchasing power of money was less. Every-

body in the town, he complains, belonged to a ring; the bakers were a ring; the butchers were a ring, etc.; and so prices were kept up. He could save more money on less wages in Queensland or in New South Wales than in New Zealand. Hie is leaving Australia in disgust; and his case certainly proves what ought to need no proof that an increase in the cost of producing a tiling means in the long run. an increase in the cost of the article produced, and the increase must be paid by the consumer ; and we are all producers and consumers.

The stonemason, ardent unionist though he is, has one complaint against the unions. They forbid a man, he says, making the best of himself. He is a very quick and capable workman; but he argues frankly, “if I am working beside a slower man and get no more wages than he does, why should I work faster?” So he lowers his pace to that of his slower comrade, and the effect of a State-fixed wage, he admits with a sigh, is to bring all workmen down to the level of the poorest and slowest man of the group. He contends, with great force, that there ought to be different grades of workmen, and the man who can do better work or more work, should be classed according to his capacity, allowed to do' his best, and get a higher rate of wages. But, he admits, the unions themselves won’t tolerate this at present. A man who “makes the pace” faster for his fellow-workmen is looked upon as a traitor, and if he got higher wages as a result it would be branded as “blood money.” But he hopes as the unions grow wiser they will consent to a classification of workmen, with higher wages for better men, so that a man may be allowed to make the best of himself. IN SEARCH OF A HUSBAND.

One odd figure in the group on the forehatch is a girl, a- merry-faced, rather comely young woman, who explains with unsoftened voice and eyes that dance with mirth, that she is all alone. She has not got a husband, and could not get one in Australia, though she did her best to effect that laudable purpose. So she is leaving a land where possible husbands ate so scanty, or, unlike Barkis, are not “willin'.” Her explanation is offered coram publico, and is received with shouts of laughter by all hearer®; but it is genuine enough. And if a young man emigrates in search of higher wages, why should not a young woman emigrate to lands where lovers are more abundant, and the prospects of matrimony more cheerful. It is -worth noting that the only Australasian who does not apologise for himself is the New Zealander. The New Zealanders in the saloon have a fine robust, and even aggressive self-respect. They are inclined to pity the Australian; who, for his part, has a halfconscious but inarticulate sense that his place just now is one that deserves a little pity. Even those New Zealanders who are leaving their country so are a little bit inclined to look down upon Australians. The New Zealanders, it may be added, shoAv a singular unanimity in their estimate of Mr Seddon. They are prepared to trade him off, on reduced terms, to the Australians; and the Australians are not indisposed to do business. Suppose that for those two year® during which Mr Barton dozed, and yawned, and drifted as Prime Minister, the strenuous and 'stentorian Mr Seddon had been at the head of the Commonwealth. -The difference might have been worth million® to federated Australia. A BAND OF PIE GRIM S.

There is another group of emigrants on board of quite another type, a band of 85 Dowieites, on their way to Zion Oity. Of these 85 ecclesiastical pilgrims only 18 are men. There are many children.— little fresh-faced boys and girls, who are being translated to a new and very curious world without any consent of their own. There are some widows, and not a few elderly 'Spinsters in the group. It would be ungracious to suggest that these are in search of new chances of a matrimonial sort; but it is at least intelligible that they are not unwilling to give up without regret a social system which has somehow failed to 1 provide them with husbands. These Dowieites are not fanatics. There is no touch of the dancing dervish about them, and, what is odd, there is no visible spark even of enthusiasm. Their note is that of a drab-coloured sincerity; their air is one of submission rather than of expectancy. There are one or two good faces among them; but they wear the look, on the whole, of people who have failed. 'The world has yielded them no prizes; they have ceased to expect any. They sit in groups ail day, and sing hymns—Sankey’s hymns mainly—to the exasperation of the smoking room. Never was singing with less of the note of gladness in it. Their leaders exhort them publicly every day, but the exhortations are dull commonplace in the last degree. When not singing hymns or listening to moral platitudes from their leaders they sit in rows and read, or rather stare, in half-hypnotised fashion, at the Dowieite organ called “Leaves of Healing.” They carry about with them a refutation of their own doctrine of “divine healing,” in the shape of an epileptic Dowieite, who has sometimes two or three fits in a day. In rough weather the Dowieites were seasick almost unani-

mously, and in open violation of their own principles. Their deacon confessed frankly that he thought “divine healing” did not apply to seasickness. That is a disorder so plainly non-natural, not to say diabolic, that, even the theology of Zion City makes no provision for it. John Alexander Dowie himself, in a south-west would bend over a friendly steward’s basin, with all his high priestly robes upon him, as abjectly as any sinner out of Zion. THE NEW ZION. When questioned as to what they meant to do when they reached that remarkable Zion outside Chicago, where John Alexander Dowie is worshipped, they have no very clear explanation to offer. Some of them will be put on a register for employment; one of the deacons explains that he will take up an allotment in Zion City on a leas© from Mr Dowie for 1100 years. This term is to cover the millennium, with a margin of a century to allow for a certain obscurity as to the exact date at which the millennium is to begin. The rent is calculated to yield' a substantial interest to Mi' Dowie op the market value of the land. Now a thousand years spent in paying rent to John Alexander Dowie is the most astonishing conception of the millennium that ever yet entered a human brain. The company on the Manuka is the second band of such pilgrims from Australia, and others are to follow. Their loss to Australia is, perhaps, not very great; for, taken as a whole they are a band of weaklings and failures. Nevertheless, they are sincere in their belief and blameless in life, and Australia has a place for them in her social system.

What is the charm which John Alexander Dowie exercises over such a group ? His is one of the most unlovely figures that ever offered itself -to the astonished gaze of mankind as the founder of a sect. He is bitter-tempered, ignorant, a mere male scold with no graces of either mind or body. But he has the office of a foolometer. He finds out the weak, the abject; the characters which exist in every community who need a master, not to. say a bully, and who fall ready victims to the first crank with a stentorian voice and a domineering manner who happens to come along. But this does not wholly explain Mr Dowie and the little band of emigrants from Australia who are “miarohing to Zion” via Chicago. A heresy is usually a truth distorted or seen in a false perspective, or partially forgotten and brought hack in an exaggerated shape to human memory. Most of the crank religions of this generation—like the Christian scientists or the Dowieite® —appeal to the hate of sickness always present in human nature, and find their strength in their claims to divine or semi-miraculous healing. Now, that prayer has an office in sickness, is part of all Christian belief; and that the mind has an ama-' zing power over the body is one of the certainties of science. But the ortho-

dox churches neglect, or leave unexplained or unapplied, the first ttruth, and the great body of medical mean neglect the second; while these crank I religions exaggerate both. I One American, by the way, when | asked to explain why all these crank religions either were born in the United States, or betook themselves to it as by some natural law of affinity, offered by j way of explanation the unconscious epigram, “Wal! in the United States we have many ‘religions’ but not much' religion.”

The smallest tree in the world is the Greenland birch. Its height is less than three inches yet it covers a radius of two or three feet.

Statistics show that the Chinese live longer than the people of any other nation. . *