The Feilding Star. Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette. Published Daily. SATURDAY, DEC. 22, 1894. NEW AUSTRALIA.

Feilding Star, Volume XVI, Issue 151, 22 December 1894, Page 2

The Feilding Star. Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette. Published Daily. SATURDAY, DEC. 22, 1894. NEW AUSTRALIA.

_♦ At first glance it seems almost an impertinence on the part of those who started to found the new colony in Paraguay to ask for help from anyone, whether private or public, to releive them from the consequences of their own acts, but a little reflection shows that it is not so, Mr Cassey, the agent of the settlement, who ia now in Sydney, is appealing for funds to send several families to Paraguay, whose husbands have already crone there. These families, we are toll, have been left practically destitute owing to the collapse in New South Wales, and the organisation is absolutely without funds. On the other hand, the Governor at Adelaide has been notified by the British Legation at Buenos Ayres that twenty families belonging to the " New Australia " settlement there are destitute, and much suffering will be obviated, especially among women and children, if these people are afforded the means to return to Australia. The position is apparently absurd. The agent in Sydaey is appealing for help to send wives and families to now Australia, while the British Legation at Bueuos Ayres is begging the Governor at Adelaide to get back to their original homos some of those unfortunates already in the new settlement. This apparent absurdity, however, does not remove or alter the fact that women and children at the point of departure and the point of arrival are in distress, and therefore the fitting objects of pity and the exercise of charity. The whole of them have been the victims of deceit as well as of their own folly in being led away by a man who might be good enough as a theorist, but as a practical head of a new settlement was not worth his salt. However much wo may hold in contempt the husbands and fathers who followed him, we have only com miseration for the helpless wives and children on whom the heaviest burden of the failure of the scheme seems to have fallen The rac3 of fools will nover become extinct, and we have another example of the truth of that trite saying in the case of the impostor Eugene, who has taken with him to Africa a following of wellmeaning but weak-minded individuals, who were over- persuaded by his false reasonings, or terrified by his equally falso threats of dreadful calamaties soon to fall on New Zea land, to place themselves and their money under his guidance, to be led by him to a place of aafety four thousand feet above high water mark Already some of his victims have discovered the fraud and left him, but others have gone on to fulfil their destiny, whether for good or for evil Well, we have a notion that before many months are over we shall have | appeals from Capo Town on behalf of . theso wanderors—or such of them whose bones are not left to bleach on the sands of an African desert — for help to return to New Zealand, and when that day does come we confi dently expect the appeal will be cheerfully responded to. They will bo objects of pity just as much as the women and children who have been brought to sorrow by the New Australia imposture.