OF NEW ZEALAND INTEREST.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19958, 27 November 1926, Page 20

OF NEW ZEALAND INTEREST.

A KINDLY ACTION. SIR JAMES ALLEN CONGRATULATED. “BENJAMIN OF THE FAMILY.” (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, October 20. In the editorial columns of The Observer Mr J. L. Garvin strikes an usual note in regard to the relations betweeu New Zealand and the Hoinc Country. In view of the conference, he gives a few pen pictures of the people of the Dominion. “New Zealanders,” he writes, are an island folk, nearly a million and a-half in number, most like ourselves. The Benjamin of the family is most affectionate towards the parent, and this often does us more good than even Benjamin knows. We understand well that Australia is just as staunch, though more critical.” SIR JAMES ALLEN. “ Congratulations to those responsible for reviving the Exhibition galleries at the Imperial Institute,” says the Outlook, “and particularly to Sir James Allen, the late High Commissioner of New Zealand, who fought so valiantly against the proposal to close them. It was always difficult to understand how such a proposal could ever have been made, still less supported, by most of the Governments, at a time when everybody professed to believe in Empire development, and vast expenditure was being incurred on the purely temporary effort at Wembley. The new galleries, when completed, are evidently going to be a vast improvement on the old, the designers having profited by Wembley ideas. But it is melancholy to reflect that without Lord Cowdray’s timely offer of £SOOO a year for five years the destruction would have been effected.” CARE OF YOUNG SETTLERS.

A letter from a “New Zealand Mother” seems to have obtained a good deni of publicity in provincial newspapers here. The correspondent, who writes from Auckland, asks for space to express her desire “ that her words will tend in some small degree to comfort any parents in the locality who have. sent their dear boys to this far-distant land to work upon farms.” Ehe explains how a little band of women (mostly middle-aged) in Auckland set themselves out to get into touch with boys who had been apportioned off to different farms. “ Until they have become accustomed to their surroundings,” she writes, “ and have made some nice friends and acquaintances, we erstwhile mothers and aunts undertake to write to one or more boys, and send them pictorials from time to time, so that they may feel they are not quite alone out here, and that some motherly woman takes an interest in them, in the absence of. their own dear parents. Many of us are not able to do anything financially, but find it a great pleasure to keep in touch with them. We procure the list of names from the shipping company, ns they arrive, and distribute them amongst the ready and willing mothers and aunts of New Zealand.” Judging by the number of newspapers in which the letter has been published the people in this country appreciate this kindly action on the part of the mothers of Auckland. MACAULAY’S NEW ZEALANDER. Correspondents continue to write to the Saturday Review and to point out how Macaulay’s New Zealander who is to sit on the piers of London bridge and contemplate the ruins of St. Paul’s is anticipated in literature. One writer refers to Shelley’s ‘Dedication to Pctar Boll." In this is the following: “In the firm expectation that when London shall be an habitation of bitorns. when St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will bo weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians.” Airain, in a letter by Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, dated November 24, 1774, there is the following parallel with Macaulay’s New Zealander passage: “The next Augustan ago will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, in time a Virgil in Mexico, and a Newton in Peru. At last some anxious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.” DRAWBACKS OF CONTROL. Control and speculation are question? referred to in the editorial notes of The Times Trade Supplement. “While the control boards in the dominions exercise their powers to regularise supplies, and thus to stabilise the market,” says the writer, “they servo a useful purpose to consumers and producers alike j but should they develop a tendency to speculate and to use their power to hold up supplies ’n cold storage for better prices, there will be an inevitable reaction that may have a very serious effect on the attitude of the public towards dominion pro duce. Naturally this question of the legitimate functions of control boards is seen from a different angle in the dominions, but it requires no great gift of foresight to see that in tho long run oceasional high prices are loss profitable to tho producer than n steady, assured market. “Tho activities of Bawra constitute a case in point. When Bawra first, began to operate, wool producers thought that better prices could have been secured, but as time went on they realised that Bawra had enabled them to get rid of a huge surplus without breaking the market, and that its benefit to tho wool-growing industry had been very great Although Sir John Mig gins’s scheme was not adopted, wool growers in New Zealand are hy no means satisfied with tho present state of affairs, and would welcome tho formation of a statistical bureau that would publish reliable information concerning the amount of wool in stock, and in this way contribute a stabilising factor to the market. . Violent fluctuations in price sometimes benefit the speculator, hut they are an element c,‘ danger and difficulty to both producer and user of wool.”