The Fielding Star. Published Daily. FRIDAY, MAY 18, 1894. AN AUSTRALASIAN CRITIC.

Feilding Star, Volume XV, Issue 317, 18 May 1894, Page 2

The Fielding Star. Published Daily. FRIDAY, MAY 18, 1894. AN AUSTRALASIAN CRITIC.

Little wonder that the London Times deemed it necessary to send out a special representative to write up the Australian Colonies, for the amount of ignorance that prevails in the Home Country on the subject has always been matter for amazement, to say the least, in the mind of every colonist. We might excuse the Americans, or any other nationality, but there is no excuse for our own next-of-kin in the Mother land. It is a failing that has not been confined to the rank and file of the people, for the Colonial Office has not been free from reproach in the matter. Successive Governments, from the Premier to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, have ever exhibited a reprehensible disregard of the best interests of our Colonial empire, though probably a turn in the tide has come with the accession of Lord Rosebery to the Premiership, for no one among the leading British statesmen of this, or any former time, with the exception of Sir Charles Dilke, has exhibited such an intelligent interest in these outposts of the Empire as Mr Gladstone's successor has done. To the credit of the English press generally, be it said, they have not attempted to assume a virtue which they had not, having carefully abstained from touching any but the most external of Colonial topics. There is on« exception, however, the Investors' Review, Mr Wilson, its editor, seeks to pose, apparently, as the fearless and all wise critic of these colonies. Mr Wilson is a would be clever opportunist, a bit of a sensation raiser, a la Stead, from whose book he appears to have taken part of a leaf. He seized the opportune time when the late serious financial cloud overshadowed the Colonies to publish statements and lop-sided comparisons, calculated to create distrust in the minds of outsiders, though his real aim, doubtless, was to secure an advertisement for his paper. So long as he confined himself to figures, which, unhappily, can be made to prove anything, few, we think, troubled their heads over Mr Wilson's lucubrations, but, according to a cable we published recently, he has capped all his previous efforts by a statement which, for supreme ridiculousness, would be hard to beat. "The wholesale deaths," he says, " among sheep during droughts in the Australian Colonies can only be characterised as a gigantic crime, due to insatiable greed, and that if half the population died from hunger .and thirst it would be an incomplete retribution." What a ghoulish creature he must be to be sure. A good anarchist has been lost in Mr Wilson. He would have nearly two millions of his fellow creatures wiped off the face of the earth as expiation, not for thsir own sins, but for that of others — for " the insatiable greed " of a few. What a pity this " Colonial Reformer " had not been sent out to Australia in his youth. The moral reformation that he thinks the colonists so sadly need might have been begun ere now, though more probably he would have had the verdure rubbed off himself, as many another of bis ilk has had. Mr Wilson apparently cannot regard the tbe Australian squatter as being an average specimen of the race, - but a creature so vile that the greatest human holocaust ever offered up as sacrifice would be insufficient to blot out his sins. Can the squatters ever bold up their heads again ?