A CHARACTER SKETCH.

Otago Witness, Volume 01, Issue 2123, 1 November 1894, Page 17

A CHARACTER SKETCH.

♦•AUSTRALIA'S EVIL GENIUS."

A Mr G. Buckmaster, of Redfern, New South Wales, writing in the Ovens and Murray Advertiser, wishes to brand Sir Juliui Vogei as Australia* evil genius. If a stray copy of the Beechvrorth journal happen to meet the eye of Sir Julius ia LontloD, or wherever upon this sphere he is working out the few remaining years of his earthly destiny, it will ba rather edifying to lee himself so described. Mr Buckmaster appears to hare been an y>ld Victorian digger* as he is well up in the different " ruab.es," the very names of some of which- — suoh as " Parson Hall's Diggings" (now Inglewood) — have long since perished. A* an old Victorian digger he had excellent opportunities of noting on the spot, and then afar off, the rise, progress, and decline of Julius Vogel. We believe that Sir Julias ia at present very far from being a millionaire with lordly estates in the country and a town house in Mayfair or Belgravia, nevertheleßß his Sydney biographer would credit him with being the man who was instrumental in collusion with financial friends in London in burdening Australia with its present load of debt. Is not, he asks, our climate as genial, is not our soil as fertile, is not our mineral production as rich— if less valuable in quantity — and are not our people as industrious, as say 25 years ago ? And yet look on the misery on all Bides, Has

an enemy landed on oar shores and forced us— like the Germans did the French — to pay a ransom of millions P Have we bad an Indian or a Chinese famine to account for our present [ deplorable condition P No, nothing of thtse sort of things have happened to explain how we have drifted on to the rocks against which, the majority of us, ar* now being battered. But there is a cause, which few of our lending men lika to admit, became it would compromise themselves, for they are the oauso of all our misfortunes through becoming the Trilling dupes of Australia's Evil Genius— Julius Vogel. Our entertainiag writer then treats us to a graphic pen-and-ink sketch of the "evil genius." " During the years 1857-58 59 and '60, a short, stocky man of Jewish look frequented Maryborough and Dunolly in the character of a newspaper reporter and chemist. I had often an opportunity of noting and studying him. Short and stout, dark complexion, eyes, and hair, narrow receding forehead, small retreating chin, thick nose, moustache and whiikera i\ la Prince Albert, very deaf and stupid-lcoking. But hfe waa not as stupid at he looked, for ha had a specious pen and a very pi Ausible manner, and led many an apparently able man astray— who was glad of an excuee for going aslray." The portrait is not an alluring one, but old colonists who were acquainted with the original on the numerous "rushes" during the years above mentioned will be able to say whether its | does or dees not correctly describe the New Zealand Premier who was to be, and who, after he became such, divided honours for a while with Sir Henry Parkes— Parkfti as "Australia's only statesman," and Vogel who was to oreite out of the island colony of Ne?r Zealand a veritable sea-girt Britain of the South. According to hit caustio critic, gold bad a fascination for Vogel which he could not resUt. After doing the North-western goldfields of this colony, true to his instincts ho changed his sphere of operations to New Zealand. There he blossomed out at a politician and ultimately became Premier. The wonderful alluvial goldflelds of Otago and Canterbury were, however, soon exhausted, and then it is charged against Julius Vogel that he opened up negotiations with hi* friends in London with the result that three millions of borrowed money flowed into the colony. This is described as the most diaV.oHcal scheme that the veriest gambler could have thought of. While the loaa moneys lasted Vogel was the Napoleon the Little of New Zealand. Like the third French Empire, there was feasting and dancing, and then the inevitable crash came, and New Zealand mourned in ashes and sack cloth— as Australia does to-day from the same caure. "Seeing," says Mr Buckoaaster,, " how easily the people of New Zealand were duped by vogel, the leading men of Australis imitated hi* spirited policy of borrowing money." But this is only partly true. It was not till about 1885 that the crash cams in New Zealand, and long prior to that Australian politicians had shown that they required no oie to teach them how to set up a false appearance of prosperity in their respective colonies, aud to secure their positions on tho Ministerial benches by reckless borrowing of British capital and by recklessly expending ib. Between 1871 and 1881, in which decade Vogeliam was at its height; in New Zealand, the population was raised from a quarter to nearly half a million of people, an increase of 90 per cent, in 10 years— a f«at unprecedented in the later history of Australian colonisation. Inevitably came the bursting of the boom, and Vogelism fell to rise no more. But the countrj in another 10 years reoovered itself, and is now reaping the benefits of the loan money' thafa Sir Julius Vogel oaused to be brought from London. Without he had lived and been at the head of affairs as he was, New Zealand would probably have been a quarter of a century behind where it is at present. Instead of being the most progressive of the British settlements at the antipodes, the development of its resources might have nearly all been in the future. It would have been thus without its splendid system of railways ; the country would over large traots of fertile territory not have been opeued up with roads; the want of harbour works would have shut cut commerce, and rapid communication through the country would have been impossible without the telegraph lines and the post roads which were established through the expenditure of the Vogelian loans. Where Sir Juliui made the mistake was in acting as if he had struck an inexhaustible stream of gold in London, and as a consequence building railways in advance of population — just as we have been doing and intend still to do iv Victoria. It was a cruel awakening, no doubt, the discovery that Sir Julius had been at the head of affairs for perhaps half a decade too long. But that tho man was an unprincipled and unscrupulous gambler who duped the colonists in order to make them the bond slaves of his friend?, the financiers in London, as Mr Buck* master asserts, is a libel on the restless and energetic little Hebrew. He, at any rate, did not make an immense fortune for himself whioh he might have done, if his critic's estimate of the man and his motives were the true ones. As largely on the borrowed capital brought into the country by Sir Julim Vogel, the New Zealand prosperity of to-day is based ; it may ere long be conceded that he was anything but the evil genius of that colony, or of Australia either. At the worst he was a politician who went the pace too fast, but when the country, after compulsorily taking a few years' rest, got time to catch up with him, it was found to have been all right— that he knew what he was doing, but was forcing events on rather too quickly.— Bendigo Independent, October 3.

According to the Westport Times the ».s» Kawatiri, on her last trip north, had a narrow escape of colliding with a whale when off Rook's Point. The leviathan rose at the bow of the steamer.