The Ashburton Guardian. Magna Est Veritas et Prevalebit THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1886. “OCEANA” EXPLODED.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume V, Issue 1349, 23 September 1886, Page 2

The Ashburton Guardian. Magna Est Veritas et Prevalebit THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1886. “OCEANA” EXPLODED.

Yesterday we gave our readers some idea of the contents of the first portion of Mr Wakefield’s able paper in tho Nineteenth Century and now propose, as promised, to glance at the manner in which Mr Froude is taken to task in connection with his treatment of New Zealand. Mr Wakefield points out that New Zealand, of all the colonies, takes longest to see and is the hardest to understand, owing to its great extent of latitude, its unique variety of climate and formation and to the fact “ that it is divided into two totally different islands and into nine separate settlements, having little more in common with one another than the states of the Union have.” It will readily be understood (says Mr Wakefield) “ that this ii a country which demands a i good deal of studying, if any knowledge is to be gained of it at all. Let us see how Mr Froude studied it. In his preface he says : ‘ The object ol my voyage was not only to see the colonies themselves, but to hear the views of all classes of people there ’ V i y well. How did he set about attaining that, object in New Zealand ? He arrived at Auckland on the 4th of M uch 1886. He made himself comfortable at the Northern Club for two days, durirg which time, as he says, he “ did Auckland,” a town of 50,000 pSople and one of the most beautiful and curious in lljp world. He then made the regular humdrum, cut-and dried tour of the hot laker,, in the regular humdrum, cut-and-dried way, just as more than two thousand other tourists did lastsumraer; and noted down the most shallow remarks, probably, of what be saw or did not see, of any that were made by those two thousand casual sightseers. That took a week. He then went to Kawau, a secluded, island off the coast of Auckland, where SirGeorgeGrey lives in solitary state, and he stayed a week there, speaking to nobody except Sir George Grey, his visitors and servants, and a family in a farmhouse on the mainland, whither he was blown whilst on a boating excursion. He then returned to Auckland, slept at the club, caught the steamer for Honolulu and San Francisco —and so ended his visit to and study of New Zealand. If he had candidly admitted that he saw nothing and learnt nothing of New Zealand; that he was tired and bored when he got there, and instead of making himself acquainted with the colony, went for a holiday at the lakes with Lord Elphinstone and enjoyed an intellectual lounge with Sir George Grey and then was glad to get home it would have been easy to enter into his feelings, and to respect his straightforwardness. But he does nothing of the sort. Having deliberately shirked the duty of seeing the colony and meeting its people, ho nevertheless presumes to give an elaborate account of it, and to pass a critical judgment upon them. He net only draw> a picture ol'Ncw Zealand which is equally offensive and preposterous, but he publishes statements about its inhabitants so injurious that it was seriously considered whether some public means of refuting them should not be taken. Where did he get his information from? Did he ‘see the colony and hear the views of all classes of people there’? No, he saw the Northern Club and Kawau, and he heard the views of Sir George Grey and his servants, a Mr Aldis, and some man whose name he did not catch, or forgot, in the smoking room at the club. But mainly, and for all practical purposes solely, he heard and adopted the views of Sir George Grey. Mr Froude lost his head completely about Sir George Grey ; and the things he says of him, while they make all sensible colonists chuckle with satiric glee, or burn with prosaic indignation, must even have made Sir George himself blush, if he have not lost the faculty of blushing bv long disuse. Mr Froude, on the strength of a week’s acquain- j tance, pronounces Sir George Grey , the greatest ablest, noblest, wisest, most pious, and beneficent man who ever deigned to waste his Godgiven qualities on a.wretched colony.”

Mr Wakefield then proceeds to fill in a word-portrait of Sir Georgy as a man and as a politician, sufficiently flittering in the first resprct but by no means complimentary in the latter, his des criplion of the Knight of Kawau culminating in characterising him as the ame damnk of New Zealand politics. “ Yet this is the man (writes the critic) on whose sole, unsupported word Mr Froude deliberately formed his judgment of the public men and the public life of this colony; and even on less responsible authority than his, if it were possible, he caimy promulgated the astounding invention that we intend to repudiate the public debt. It was Sir George Grey again whose jaundiced and distorted views on every topic of public interest he deliberately accepted as the views of the great body of intelligent and unprejudiced people throughout the colony. He swallowed everything he was to'd holus bolus , and probably invented or imagined as much as he was told. For instance, he makes the astounding statement that the colonial debt is thirty-two millions and the municipal debts are “at least as much more.” The municipal debts, including haruor loans, some of which are at 2 5 per cent premium, do not exceed four and a-half millions. But twenty or thirty millions more or less are neither here nor there to Mr Froude. Neither are such statements as that representative institutions have failed in New Zealand, whereas there is no country in the world where they work more smoothly; or that nobody can buy less than 20 acres cf Crown land—this on the authority of one of Sir Geo. Grey’s servants —whereas every facility is afforded for buying the smallest areas or acquiring them without payment on terms of occupancy and improvement; or, finally, that New Zealand politicians are a set of needy, self-seeking adven turers, whereas the colony glories in such public men as Sir Frederick Weld, Sir Edward Stafford, Sir Frederick Whitaker, Sir Dillon Bell, Sir William Fox, Sir John Hall, Major Atkinson, Mr Rolleston, Mr Bryce, and last, but not least, Mr Stout, the present learned Premier, who is as capable and highminded a public man as an) one of those over whom Mr Froude went into such raptures in Australia.” And having thoroughly and ably com|Teted his exposk of the great historian, Mr Wakefield thus delivers the coup de grace —“ But it is futile to go on picking holes in a book which, like the Irishman’s coat, is more holes than stuff. Suffice it to say that a perusal of ‘Oceana’ gives us a totally new conception of how history is written. If this is the sort of work Mr Froude produces from the utmost abundance of (xrct, recent, and thoroughly trustworthy information, from facts patent to his own knowledge, from persons in coirsc* with him, from events progressing under his own eyes, what are we to think of those monumental productions of his which have been compiled on dubious surmises and vague conclusions drawn from ancient and abstruse documents or from second hand sources corrupted or obscured by a thousand errors or misconstructions ? If * Oceana’ is his story of the Australasian colonies in our own day, beware of his books I on old countries in old times.”