The American Mirage.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVII, Issue XIII, 28 September 1901, Page 585

The American Mirage.

The City of Buffalo, “The Rainbow City," as the Americans term it, has within the last few weeks won an undesirable prominence in the eyes of the world, for it was there that President McKinley fell a victim to the Anarchists. A minor tragedy, though to us not a less affecting one, has brought the American city still closer within the ken of us New Zealanders. In its streets a fellow colo- , iiist succumbed a short time back to the effects of starvation. The story opens in the neighbourhood of Masterton, where a family of small settlers named Broska, dazzled by the accounts of American prosperity, and the fortune that is said to await the worker in that golden land, sold their modest possessions and made for Buffalo. It. was no common exodus this, but a general movement of the clan, so to speak. The father, the mother and their children, nnd their children's children composed the sanguine band of sixteen souls which went forth from these shores seeking a new home. Cruel disillusionment seems to have been their portion almost immediately on their arrival in the Rainbow City. The old folks with the unmarried children bought a farm, the married settled in the town. The grinding sordidness of American farm life under the disadvantages they had to face must have awakened fond longing for the green pastures of far awav New Zealand; hut the lot of the sons who. with their wives, endeavoured to make a living in the city, was ten times worse. All in vain they went from door to door seeking work. Easy going settlers, perchance such as New Zealand's genial climate and fruitful soil beget, they were all untrained in the employments that might have offered to suitable men. No work meant no food, and starvation stared them in the eyes. “We are starving: God help ns,” came the cry in a letter to a New Zealand friend. And it was no weak appeal of a faint-hearted man this, no empty hyperbole, for not long after it was made one of the brothers fell down in the street utterly exhausted from want of food, and later died. Efforts are now being made by the New Zealand friends of the family to raise funds for getting them back to the colony. The Broskas are not the first New Zealand settlers who have been dazzled by the glamour of the far-off Republic. I have met in the bush good honest sanguine folks whose minds had become so saturated with

the ‘’From Log Cabin to White House" theory, that they veritably believe they had but to be translated to one of tire big go-ahead American cities to make a name and fame for themselves at the first jump. Lucky was it for them that the bush work only brought iu a decent living, and that the bush farm was not likely to attract purchasers, or their hardly earned savings would doubtless have gone to buy a ticket for the States. And the country folks are not the only people who dream dreams, and see visions. How many a town dweller in the colony fondly imagines that New Zealand is much too small a place for a person of his abilities; that he is only wasting his time here; and yearns for the Californian shore o o o o o