HAPPY NEW ZEALAND

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 17948, 28 November 1932, Page 10

HAPPY NEW ZEALAND

NOVELIST’S IMPRESSIONS

“MORE BLESSINGS AND FREER”

Since leaving the Dominion fivo i years ago, Miss Nelle Scanlan, the New Zealand novelist, has visited 23 different countries. She came back by the Rangitane convinced that there were more blessings, more opportunities for happiness, and more freedom in New Zealand than anywhere else in the world. “I don’t know which one of those various countries I liked the best,” she told the Wellington Dominion. “But 1 certainly do think, as one who always travelled alone, that the further I travelled, the more respect. Iliad ■for tlie British flag, and for New Zealand in particular. We hear of freedom and good conditions in this country or that one, but I don’t •think New Zealanders who have not been out of their own Dominion realise how lucky they are by comparison, even in these ■times of depression. “Things may be hard, according to your New Zealander. They aro harder in other countries. People here may be poor and distressed. But they are poorer and more distressed in other ■countries. You have more blessings than other countries, and you are freer hero than anywhere else in the world. You don’t know what hardships are. There are sections of the populations of j other lands from whom far heavier j loads have not been lifted for 15 or 20 i years.” j

Miss Scanlan had been glad to find the “extraordinary prestige” which New Zealand’s name enjoyed iri other parts of the world. “Everywhere you go,” she said, “they always know some little things about us; and it’s always something good about us. The name New Zealand is synonymous everywhere with first-class, and I think it would be a tragedy—even in this depression—to let our standard go down at all from first-class. Some may say that there is a readier market for products which are second grade, or not of the highest possible quality. But it would be a tragic mistake, I think, to let our standard slip down even a little. “ We will always be a email country and wo will always be exclusive. We cater for a good class of buyer, not for the poor. And we have to keep our standard good, on which our reputation so largely depends. If we let it go down, generations' may go by before it is recovered.”