The Ashburton Guardian. Magna Est Veritas et Prevalebit WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1886. BROUGHT TO BOOK.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume V, Issue 1348, 22 September 1886, Page 2

The Ashburton Guardian. Magna Est Veritas et Prevalebit WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1886. BROUGHT TO BOOK.

(As in a recent issue we quoted thi opinion of an undoubted authority tha nothing has for many years done this colony so much injury as the damaging statements made in “Oceana,” it i; matter for congratulation that probably the most brilliant pen in New Zealand has recently be>:n employed in the useful work of undeceiving English readers as to the accuracy and reliability of James Anthony Froude, In choosing the pages of The Nineteenth Century” as his medium ol communication, Mr Edward Wakefield (for it will already have been seen tha'Jthe talented member for Selwyn is the writer to whom we refer) has selected a channel through which he will reach the very class among whom Froude has hitherto been an accepted authority and whom it is most desirable to reach and set right as to the true facts of the case. And admirably well has Mr Wakefield acquitted himself of his task, for he has so completely exposed the ignorance of the great historian that it is hardly possible that his history of New Zealand and Australasia generally can hereafter be regarded as of the smallest value as a history, or as anything more than pleasant reading of a more or less fictional character. Certainly Mr Froude gets no quarter, but he as certainly deserves none, Mr Wakefield’s exposit of his inaccuracies being as trenchant as it is complete. Not that “ Oceana ” and all that it contains is indiscriminately condemned—on the contrary Mr Wakefield writes in terms of the highest admiration of the opening chapter which he characterises as “ So wise and true, so learned, so

liberal and so splendidly eloquent that thousands of colonists have read it with a beating heart,” but this, he says, “ is an essay —a monograph—the rest of the book, except the chapter on the Cape, bearing no relation to it whatever, It seems to have been written by another hand, at another time, for another purpose. It is like a wooden shanty, run up anyhow on foundations that had been laid for a mighty temple.” “ Mr Froude (continues the writer) takes not even one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, fie places nothing but a leaf of paper between them. On one side, in Chapter I, we soar with him over continents and oceans, and through ages of time, in contemplation of the growth of empires and the mysterious destiny of nations. On the other side, in Chapter 11, we are sickened by the twaddle of the cuddy of the s,s. Australasian.” Equally high praise to that bestowed upon Chapter I. is unreservedly given to the chapters on the Gape Colony, which are admitted to contain “ the most lucid and serviceable discussion of the South African question Chat he (Mr Wakefield) has ever met with,” but while it is allowed that Mr Froude f “ knows all about the Cape,” it is clearly shown that he knows very little indeed about Australasia,and that although “no man ever had such opportunities ” he i “never took the smallest trouble to learn i anything about it.” And then Mr Wakefield proceeds to expose Mr , Froude in the following merciless i fashion :—“ He (Mr Froude) arrived at i Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, ; on the ißtb January 1885, and stayed 1 tber 4 one day; and as his description 1

topical of his whole book, I will re it somewhat in detail. His chapter on South Australia only occupies 10 pages. Yet he contrives to compress so many inaccuracies and even gross’ misstatements into that space, that it is difficult to believe he ever really went there at all. He says, ‘ The broad Murray falls into the sea at no great distance to the westward.’ The Murray reaches the sea sixty miles to the eastward of Adelaide, and when Mr Froude was there its mouth had been blocked by sand for two months. Describing Port Adelaide, he says: ‘The harbor was full of ships : great steamers, great liners, coasting schooner?, ships ot all sort?.’ Port Adelaide is not accessible by large vessels. The ocean steamers lie many miles off. He says he saw in the port ‘ a frigate newly painted,’ and a port official growled out; ‘ There is our harbor defence ship, which the English Government insists on our maintaining ; it is worth nothing and never will be. Our naval defences cost us ,£25,000 a year. We should pay the £25,000 a year to the Admiralty and let them do the defence for us. They can manage sue.h things better than we can.’ Now, either Mr EToude dreamt this or else he was blind and that port official was poking fun at him. There is not and never was a frigate at Port Adelaide. At the semaphore, in the outer harbor, there is a gun-vessel called the Protector, which the South Australian Government maintain entirely of their own free will, at a cost not of £25,000 a year, but of about £IO,OOO, the latter amount being the whole charge for naval defence. Of Adelaide itself he says :— ‘ We rose slightly from the sea, and at the end of the seven miles we saw below’us in a basin, with a river winding through it, a city of 150,000 inhabitants, not one of whom has ever known, a moment’s anxiety as to the recurring regularity of his th r ee meals a day.’ Adelaide is not in a basin, but on the highest land in the neighbourhood. There is no river winding through it, for the little Torrens has long since been dammed up and converted into a lake in the , arc lands. The population of Ade- . laid; with all its suburbs never exceeded 75,000, and when Mr Froude ’ was there great numbers of them were leaving daily, starved out by the failure of the harvest, the drought, and commercial depression. I also was there in January 1885, and I saw more poverty and worse poverty than I ever ; saw before in 25 years’ life in the colonies. I purposely attended a sitting of the Benevolent Relief Com- ; mittee, and learnt something about the anxiety of some of the inhabitants of Adelaide as to the recurring regularity ! of their three meals a day. Since then Government House has been mobbed by multitudes of people clamouring for the means of subsistence. Mr Froude had a grand chance when he was at Adelaide to study a wealthy colony in a state of profound, if temporary, distress ; and that is the use he made of it. He cannot be reasonably accurate even about the most striking peculiarities of the country. He says ‘ The laugh ; ing jackass is the size of a crow, with the shape of a jay.’ 'lhe laughing : jackass is no more like a jay than it is like an owl. It is neither more nor less than a gigantic kingfisher. He says, “ In the woods its chief amusement is to seize hold of snakes and bite their heads off.” This is a habit which the most vigilant naturalist has not yet otierved. There is a popular tradition in Australia that the laughing jackass . kills snakes by carrying them up in the air and letting them drop; but I never saw it done, and I never met anybody who had. The bird is no match for a snake, ‘in the woods ’ or anywhere else. But I need not dwell longer on Mr Frcude’s inaccuracy. He admits that he has a bad memory, and that he does not hear very well, and he says the flies affected his eyes. To these causes I am quite willing to attribute his having recorded on every other page of his book sights or sayings which nobody else ever saw or heard in Australasia.” Mr Wakefield’s paper will well repay perusal, and we shall endeavor, if space permit, to give some further extracts from it, more particularly from that portion which relates to New Zealand. Meantime it will be seen from the foregoing that the writer has done the people of Australasia an excellent service, and for which he is thoroughly entitled to the thanks of colonists generally. So also has Sir Charles Clifford, at one time Speaker of the House of Representatives, but who has for many years past resided at Home, and who, writing to the papers, also exposes the great historian’s inaccuracies. Alter stating that he (Mr Froude) “ landed at Auckland, and visited an island on the coast ” (Kawau), Sir Charles says:—lt was much 1 lie same as if Mr Froude had landed in Inverness, gone to a shooting box of one of the lairds in the North of Scotland, and had then written an account of the state of cultivation in England and Wales. That was exactly what Mr Froude might be said to have done with regard to New Zealand.”