THROUGH GERMAN EYES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19785, 10 May 1926, Page 5

THROUGH GERMAN EYES.

NEW ZEALAND VIEWED. A JOURNALIST’S IMPRESSIONS. COMPLIMENTARY-AND OTHERWISE. (From Oub Own Correspondent.) LONDON, March 23. 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 one appearing in the Berliner Tageblatt I am indebted to Mr II E. L. Friday, of tv angamii, who is st'-L- -- the language in Berlin. The article in question is by Herr Arnold Hollriezel, a very well-known journalist-critic, who seems to have paid a visit recently to the Dominion. The writer first of all describes the physical features of “this desirable country —one of the richest lands of promise of the earth.” New Zealanders, he maintains, have presented the traditions, customs, prejudices of Victorian Eneland in a remarkable way. “This is the land in which women practically never smoko, and have not taken to bobbed hair; here Europe’s mode-bcfore-the-last is worn without especial grace; Sundays are a hideous void such as London for a long time hag known no more; all the virtues are intransgressablo. and the cooking, served up with a superabundance of mutton, is honest. This provincial island democracy does not possess five stone buildings that one 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 the Exhibition, were swarmed round as if they had been the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. It is to be doubted whether a good picture or a single noteworthy poem has yet been produced in New Zealand. RICHEST, HAPPIEST, AND HEALTHIEST. “But this people, though unkissed by any muse, living in sleepy wooden townships or in corrugated huts in the bush, this sober folk of sheepbreeders and buttermakers, is nevertheless actually the relatively richest nation on earth, and certainly the happiest arm healthiest. “New Zealand, unlike Australia (which is indeed quite another country) has been settled from the beginning by free men. and indeed by astonishingly vigorous and prominent people. Nowhere in the world’s history has there been a finer spectacle than this conscious and nobly planned colonisation. _ The number of statesmen, noteworthy pioneers and energetic legislators who shaped the destinies of New Zealand in the nineteenth century is astonishingly above all measure. New Zealand, in 1830 still a cannibal inhabited wilderness, had 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 here not merely by chance, but who knew the why and wherefore of their coming. The real founder of the British Empire of to-day, the man to whom one has raised no monument because in the British Empire he was never looked upon as ‘ respectable,’ but the man to whom more than to anyone else Canada and Australia owe their existence as modern AngloSaxon democracies. Gibbon Wakefield, planned New Zealand, designed it, fashiongcl it like a work of art. The intention was to create a land of white men in which there should be nc poverty. This object has as good as been attained. “This country, which 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 today hardly a single citizen whose yearly income reaches half a million marks (£25,000), and there no citizen goes hungry. Private property and capitalist economy have not been uprooted. But New Zealand was the first English-speak-ing 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 the 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 dilferei es, but not a shade of caste spirit. It is understood that the chauffeur .'.euld eat the same lunch and at the same table as his employer, and that the wife of a navvy is just as much a lady and quite as well dressed as the wife of a landowner. The New Zealand worker eats meat at least three times a day, and drinks tea at least ten times. (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 rooms, 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 thaf this blissful condition lias its shady side, iho high scale of wages, the fixity of the socia ordinances for the protection of social welfare, and the weight of social charges has indeed not hindered the extraordinary prosperity of New Zealand, but it has interfered with the further development of the country. New Zealand is today a satisfied provincial community without fresh impulse. The country has, jxs it were, fallen asleep on the cultuie step of the Victorian age. Her railways are miserable, her townships, young as they are, appear here and there to be falling into decay, the 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 \v ilu West is almost unbelievably tame and commonplace.)) The great reforming spirit of the legislation has been for the last 20 years as if extinct. Since the stormv reform period of the nineties New Zealand has been mostly governed by tiny conservative majorities. Only in the first days of November, 1925, has the last election given a sate majority to the young, highly popular, and very commonplace loader of the Conservative (RcfoinD Party, J. G. Coates. The great seamen s strike of the last months has helped this outbreak of the latest dissatisfaction of the New Zealander with the somewhat tyrannical impositions of the trade unions, and led up, as in Australia, to the thorough defeat of the Labour Party. This means no active reaction, out only tlio protest of the farming electorate against t.ie (quite overdone) “red peril. Uu most s progressive of all Anglo-oaxon peoples is also animated by strong conservative instincts. Just as the Now Zealanders passionately hold fast to the British Empire (a thing not quite so universally popular in neighbouring Australia), so they reject the ideas which appear to them foreign or un-British. The country needs new settlers. She could still support many million people; her fruitful provinces are thinly settled sheep pastures, the mineral riches are, since the decay of the once exceptionally rich dig,r q.rs, as yet scarcely exploited, industries hardly exist; but Now Zealand would rather remain empty than see nonBritons emigrate, and the race oi generous statesmen who once packed •meat well-organised dioceses of the Church of England from lord am bishop to land worker on a wup, and sent them off to New Zealand to find a happy existence there, this race of Wake field appears to have died out. The re suit is a serious stagnation of the ideals and mentality of the country, a gloomy fear ‘of indefinable 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 new year of 1926 not free from the morbid disquiet that elsewhere fills less happy lands. ...