A PROPHECY.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 463, 23 March 1909, Page 7

A PROPHECY.

$ WHAT NEW ZEALAND MAY COME TO. A long article on Now Zealand appears in the New York "Post" of January 28 from its Sydney correspondent. It. is a generally appreciative summary of tho recent progress of tho country, but the \yrifccr concludes withanother version of the position: "Now look at the other side, painted ns in lamp-black by a keen observer who penetrates beneath- the smiling surface. Tn scathing political satire ("Riallaro: tho Archipelago of Exiles," Putnam's), a New Zealand professor has described the island of Wotnekst. The people of this happy isle woro so far gono in hallucination that'they believed they could accomplish anything they desired merely by passing a law. Their craze was politics. Every ono had a pet political theory for hurrying on the> millennium. Politicians arose (Seddon was the type of them ?) who pandered to this passion, and bent all their energies towards having each new project, however Utopian, put on tho statute book. The first political panacea was a succession of suffrage schcmes. All citizens were enfranchised, and yet, strange to say, human ills did not vanish from the land. "Tho sccond panacea was to tax foreign commerce. As a conscquCnce commerce dwindled under tho burden of inspectors and. tariffs and regulations, till at last tho harbours were empty and tho mails inhabited only by Government officers. An ambitious young statesman (we know him well; was ho not till lately High Commissioner for New Zealand in London?) bethought himself of a new scheme. Ho sent' out his agents among tho workmen and inflamed their discontent. His Emissaries made thorn pick quarrels with their masters, when he stepped in to settle them (tho Industrial Arbitration Act); but ho settled them so as to make chronic ulcers of them. He set class against class and rent the State in two. Then followed a long period of legislation in the interests of labour. Ho penalised capital, which fled from the colony. Industry after industry grow waterlogged and sank. Tho Government had to take over the abandoned enterprises. Foreign loans and crooked accounts concealed tho consequent deficit. ."A younger and equally unscrupulous rival invented a new financial scheme anil disclosed a new source of taxation. He gavo a competency to every man or woman over fifty who was poor or idle. A State Bank issued flash notes inexhaustibly (a real project of a provincial governor), and hundreds of laws woro passed asserting their value: yet wealth disappeared. Moro than half the population wore Government inspectors, and the rest were Government pensioners. Tho mines were umvorkod; the factories were silent. None the less tho whole people continued to believo that salvation was: to bo found in tho passing of laws. "Such is New Zealand, fifty or perhaps twenty years hence, as it is seen by tho eye of imagination, sharpened by close observation and instructed by a knowledge of history and a profound philosophy. May the terrific satire not prove a prophecy!"