The Western Star. (PUBLISHED BI-WEEKLY.) SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1883.

Western Star, Issue 787, 27 October 1883, Page 2

The Western Star. (PUBLISHED 81-WEEKLY.) SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1883.

The effect of the direct steam service between the Home country and New Zealand is already being felt in a variety of ways. One of the vessels made the outward passage from England, a little while back, in 43 days, and quite recently the British Queen made the run Home in 43 days also. Among the other effects of this shortening of the distance has been the bringing to our shores of the first instalment of “ distinguished visitors” from the Old World. A few days ago we recorded the arrival here of a foreign aristocrat of the very bluest blood, in the person of Baron Hiibner, the Austrian diplomatist, and we now learn that in a short time the Earl of Rosebery, an ex-member of the Gladstone Ministry, will also, in company with his wife, be here to explore New Zealand. As Lord Rosebery is said to be a very able thinker and acute observer, he will have the opportunity of correcting some of the absurd misunderstandings which have existed about this colony, and which have sometimes done us harm. The blunders still made by even high-class journals and magazines in England, about New Zealand, are sometimes very funny. Thus, for instance, not long ago, the Mark Lane Express, the leading organ of the farming interest in England, under the heading of “ New Zealand,” published some items from Swan River, Western Australia. The notion that the places were between two and three thousand miles distant from one another, and that the description of one was aboutasapplicable to the other as the fanning of the Lothians would be to the desert of Sahara, never seemed to have crossed the enterprising editor’s mind. So again in the London “Daily News,” the paper which pays Archibald Forbes at the rate of a foreign ambassador’s salary for accurate details of what is passing abroad, we learn that mother outrage in the South Seas is reported from “ Townsville, New Zealand.” The beautiful mixing up of the Western Pacific Islands, New Zealand and Queensland as all the same place, is rather startling here, but is not thought anything of at home. Unfortunately, these misstatements are sometimes likely to do us harm, for if intending emigrants among the farmers possessed of capital, learn that our summer heat is often over 110 in the shade, day and night, and that the place swarms with mosquitos and snakes, and the rivers-with alligators, they might not care to come to such an objectionable colony, as Queensland in some respects is, and as most certainly New Zealand is not.

All this ignorance, however, is gradually passing away. It certainly cannot last if public men of influence in the Home country get into the habit of taking trips here, and make their reports, as they certainly will do, of what they have seen when they go back. It is only quite lately that it has been shown by frozen shipments of our produce to hand in England that our fish, game, fruit, and oysters are quite worthy of the consumption of even epicures, and perhaps it may not be long before the Londoners become quite as much.accustomed to get these things from Zealand as they have been, for many years past, to buy grapes from Portugal, oranges from the Azores, and pine apples from the West Indies. Gradually, the food supply of each one country and colony, at any part of the earth, is becoming the common property, on due payment for it, of every place in the world.

And as with the material, so also with the intellectual food. Three or four years ago we had Mr Procter lecturing here on astronomy, and telling his friends in England on his return, that it paid him far better to lecture in Australia and New Zealand than at any part of the Home country, for he had here more people present, and they listened more attentively. It is reported that Professor Huxley or Mr Matthew Arnold will shortly follow in Mr Procter’s footsteps, and post us up in the very latest notions of the cultivated world on physical science and literature. One or two very eminent actresses, actors, and musicians fiave already visited tw, and

more will come as soon as we are able and willing to paj the - T customary, but somewhat extravagant demands for entertaining us!, ‘lt is a paalpble fact that now “ many run to and fro, and knowledge is increased.” The New Zealand of to-day is no more like the New Zealand of thirty years ago than the England of to-day is like Queen Elizabeth’s time. Euless, some unforeseen object should prevent it, another generation or two will show,] at the antipodes of the mother country of.! Great. .Britain,, a. .strong and,, very highly civilised federation of Australasia, holding in its tendencies something . like a. middle posit ion between the enterprising but rather too reckless republican United States of America, and the steady, solid, but rather too slow going monarchy of Great Britain.