RUDYARD KIPLING'S OPINION OF NEW ZEALAND.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XL, Issue 9253, 1 December 1891, Page 2

RUDYARD KIPLING'S OPINION OF NEW ZEALAND.

Mr Rodyard Kipling, who made a very short stay in Melbourne, surrendered himself to Press interviewers in the usual way. These gentlemen wore able to make the most readable copy out of what he had to say about New Zealand. The Age reporter thus re-produces his remarks :—": — " In New Zealand everything seems to be intended to jockey everything else — steamboats run against tho railways, and the railways to run against tho coaches. But it is a lovely land all tho same. Everybody was as good as they could be, and I could believe anything you told me about it. If you said tho Garden of Eden was somewhere in the middle of it I could believe it; but what does the country want with so much politics and so much labour question ? A little country with 500,000 people playing at representative Government — and paying their members mind you ! Why, they ought to make every man turn out into the country and grub land for himself, whether he liked it or not , but no, they must have their Parliaments and their politics. You can't build a country that way. What does it want with an Upper House and a Lower House ? Why does it not go ahead and do its work and make the country ? Why, there is more machinery for running their little handful of people than we have for the whole of the 300,000,000 people of India, and they are proud of it — indecently proud of it. You could lay out New Zealand round two sides, of our Province of Lahore, and yet there would be any amount of room. That is a country where they have 500 people to the square mile, that is a country with a population, but down in New Zealand you would think that you could not go 300 yards from the beach without running running into an elector or a member of Parliament, and on the other side of that you meet the bush. This is all right in a country that has been made; these new countries of youra have yet to be made. But it is a lovely place, and what it will be in the future is too much to say." The Argus reports his conversation as follows :—": — " I don't propose to write anything about Australia at present, although there is magnificent material. Those fellows who opened up New Zealand, who grubbed up the stumps with their teeth and clawed their way into the hearts of tho country, what books they ought to write if only they could write, but things seem to have changed over there and now the Government is being manipulated by 300 of the unemployed. At Dunedin relief works at 98 a day were thrown open for 300 unemployed in the city, when there are blocks of land lying idle all through the island. But, then, the unemployed is always the same, all the world over. Ho will stand on the wharf, with a pipe in his mouth, and curse his luck." " What do you think of the position of labour in New Zealand now ?" " Well, to tell you tho truth, I never was in a place where they talked more about work and did less of it, but then you don't know what work is in this part of tbe world. In India we kill half of our people with it. They are ground up in the wheels of the administration. I ran a daily paper by myself with a half-caste to help me for six weeks once, and worked 15 hours a day in a climate that is a climate. A good many people don't come through, but it happened that I do. You don't suppose that this eight hours' work, eight hours' rest, eight hours' recreation is going to last for ever, do you ? Why, then, Chinese must come in and swamp you ; it's only a matter of time. People who can live on nothing and sleep with their heads hanging over tbe Bide of a wheelbarrow, are dangerous. There's competition in them besides. Don't you know that every time a Chinamen ia knocked on tbe head in Melbourne otf* driven over in San Francisco, the stpry is carried hack to the furthest boundaries of Tartary and revenge is plotted, however late in coming it may be."