HARDY COUNTRY

Hokitika Guardian, 3 October 1930, Page 6

HARDY COUNTRY

POVERTY UNKNOWN. “We have no divorce law. We have no divorce court. And, what is more, the people do not want one.” That sound like the Garden of Eden, but it is not. It is rugged, hardy, windswept Newfoundland, the country of sterling fisherfolk, trappers, lumbermen, and farmers, writes a correspondent of the “Daily Chronicle,” London. The speaker is Sir Richard Anderson Squires, Newfoundland’s Prime Minister and Minister of Justice, one of our younger Empire Premiers, whose vigorous forth-right manner brings something of his country’s vast spaces to this bright, comfortable, sittingroom at the Savoy, where we talk and look out over the river.

“There is no divorce,” he continues, “because in Newfoundland marriage is a sound working partnership between man and woman to achieve by mutual help the end they desire—comfort, well-being, healthy children, and the best start in life possible for those children. .

“A man there does not take a woman in marriage; they enter into marriage on equal terms. Both have real work to do. The men are not wasters; the women are not drifters, who have to find diversions to help fill in their day. The woman is essentially a skilled, painstaking homebuilder. They know they- cannot make anything of life unless they pull courageously together. Sir Richard went on to describe a typical fishing village of only about thirty families on the most wideswept part of the coast. These people were all industrious and prosperous ; they never knew poverty. The house in which he stayed was solidly, comfortably furnished, admirably run. In the corner was a good wireless set, on which they could get places like New York and Montreal. Tlie son, a lad of eighteen, was away at St. John’s getting an education comparable to the ’varsity matriculation standard. That was a happy community in the true sense of word, although it was segrated from most of the diversions deemed indispensible to life in the cities.

“Tf there is one outstanding characteristic of the. Newfoundland man,” resumed" Sir Richard, “it is independence, self-reliance, the refusal to admit defeat in face of difficulties. If he meets a difficulty he at onoe sets about finding a way through it—and his wife will give him every help Work is daily bread for both. The sea is there for him to fish, the land to cultivate the wrnods tc trap and hunt in. He will usually build his own house, his own boat, a.nd devise his own trapping, and hunting gear. Poverty as other countries know it, does not exist.