OF NEW ZEALAND INTEREST.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20964, 1 March 1930, Page 26

OF NEW ZEALAND INTEREST.

TREATMENT OF WOMEN SETTLERS. PRICE OF LAND. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, January 10. A comparison of laud prices in England and in Now Zealand is a subject dealt with in the Spectator. The writer of the Country Rife notes has heard of a young settler who has bought a farm of some 200 acres in the North Island of the Dominion. “ The land has cost him just over £3O an acre, and lie regards the price as moderate. It is unfenced internally and partly fenced externally. It has no house. “ The production of the farm,” continues the writer, “ will in part be marketed 12,000 miles away. Contrast with this a recent experience in England, one of many. A small farm, of fairly good soil, _ equipped with a house, situated within 30 miles of London, failed to fetch £27 an acre. To give a previously quoted example, an estate within 60 miles of London, containing farmhouses and cottages, accommodating a population of about 130 persons, good farm buildings, and. roughly, 2000 acres of land, is valued at £6OOO or less—a smaller sum than the 200 acres of unfcnced land in New Zealand. Can it really be true that land close of Loudon is worth less than a tenth —ai good deal less if the houses be reckoned—of the price, of land in New Zealand ? “To discover what is the cause and what the cure of such a condition would appear to be one of the most stringent of national obligations. Perhaps Lord Bledisloe will explain the contrast when he has had sufficient experience of our antipodes, the land that is most widely removed in distance and the nearest in affection? ” : SLIGHTLY MAD. A correspondent signing herself “Home Again,” describes in Gateway her reception as an office worker in New Zealand. “With many employers,” she says, “rightly or wrongly, the English girl has a reputation for being more thorough and conscientious than the New Zealand-born girl; but the employees will probably give her a very hard and lonely time before they accept her as ‘one of the staff’ or make friends. I went to Now Zealand prepared to like everything, never to say ‘We don’t do it that way in England? hut to be pleasant and friendly to everyone, and I found—a blank wall. No, not even that, but a coldly critical atmosphere and no response at all to my attempts at friendliness.

“ It is hard to overcome this prejudice, but it can be lived down, and once it is there are no kinder or more hospitable people than the New Zealanders. During the last two years of my stay there I met with as much warmth and kindliness as I had met with chilly hardness before. But what I would most emphasise is that we must try to understand them, for thev wifl never understand us. To them we are, at the best, slightly mad, and only rational when, we become colonised.” TREATMENT OF SEDITIONMONGERS.

The Patriot reproduces from the Poverty Bay Herald an account of the court case in which four men were fined £SO each for having in their possession for sale or distribution books and pamphlets advocating violence. The Patriot refers to the published cutting as “another of the innumerable illustrations published in justification of the efforts of the Patriot, for years, to expose the importance and progress of world revolution. The cutting is useful also,” the Patriot adds, “to show the proper method of dealing with those wlui preach sedition, ns opposed to our hab>t of electing them to Parliament.”