WHAT THE MEN SAY.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 8415, 14 January 1899, Page 2

WHAT THE MEN SAY.

THE SAVINGS OF YEARS SPENT. The Daily Telegraph, which interviewed the men waitinc in Sydney, said : — Several of them were fine looking, upstanding, fellows, with frank, open countenance, and of intelligent appearance. The worst of them might have been taken for fairly comfortable laborers. They conversed readily with our representative in two or three dialects of the Slavonic tongue. One man who knew Italian was a painter by trade, and he said that the men all felt that a very great injustice was being perpetrated in their not being allowed to land in New Zealand. They knew nothing of the new restriction until they got to Melbourne, and some of them had embarked the savings of years in the enterprise. What had attracted them to the far off, isolated British colony was news they had received from friends who had been at the Antipodes for years. They estimated that at least 2000 people had emigrated from the district whence they hailed — Dalmatia — to New Zealand. Some of these had done very well financially, and the news they sent back to the homeland had encouraged others to look far afield and gather together the spare florins to pay the fare by steamer to the laud where milk and honey flowed. "How much did their passage cost?" — His eyes opened, and his arms and shoulders moved rapidly. His calculation in Trieste currency made the sum £10 from the Austrian port through to Auckland, and the crowd stood round in reverent silence while the sum was mentioned. And then the base treachery of it ; the unfeeling, immovable hatred of the Government which, after they had expended this sum in reaching the far country, refused tv allow them to land. Such perfidy was surely never met with. "What were they in Dalmatia?"— He was a painter, and others agricultural laborers, another an artisan, others laborers in the city, and so on. He earned four francs a day, and the agricultural laborers three francs and a meal in £;ood seasons. They had not come to New Zealand because they were starving at home. They all had their homes ; some had a little land, and they had enough to eat and wine to drink. Some even had wives and families/ It was the prospect of earning more money that had attracted them. I