THE KAIPARA AND WAITEMATA ECHO WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED "THE KAIPARA ADVERTISER & WAITEMATA CHRONICLE." HELENSVILLE, THURSDAY, July 20, 1916 A CRYING SHAME.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 20 July 1916, Page 2

THE KAIPARA AND WAITEMATA ECHO WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED "THE KAIPARA ADVERTISER & WAITEMATA CHRONICLE." HELENSVILLE, THURSDAY, July 20, 1916 A CRYING SHAME.

DOGGING THE AUSTRIANS

TO seriously think of interning a large number of Austrian gumdiggers—say 2000 —away up at Parenga, a place 'far removed from the haunts of civilisation, restaurants, hotels, and Chinese laundries, is a monstrous scandal and the Government which conceived such an idea, together with those who have been doing the wire-pulling, should be relegated to limbo, and put upon half rations, without skilly.

These poor, misguided Dalmatans, and other aliens, simply because they hail from next door to.a place called Germany, with whom the British, the French, the Russian, and the Italian nations are at war, deserve better treatment than to be isolated on distant, good-paying gum-fields, and to be compelled to sell their gum to the highest bidders. Shameful! Shocking! These poor strangerl came and knocked at our doors —the doors of New Zealand —and were taken in ; planted on beautiful, highlyremunerative gum-lands, within a stone's throw of cities and country townships, where they could rest at ease now and again, and spend in luxuries what they didn't' send home to the Fatherland ; whilst, others of an agricultiirakand viticultural turn of mind, were given the free opportunity of taking up some of the .best of land at a nominal cost of 20s per acre on the Deferred Payment or Homestead systems, in order to make an independence and the best of wines wherewith to make money and the Maori jolly-well-drunk.

Just so, and these poor devils, who sacrificed the land of their birth, and escaped from the rigid obnoxious conscription laws of their country, should, out here, be spook-fed— better than they asp—^and given plenty of good English plum duff and cauliflower instead of being hounded down (as some would wish), as enemies, spies, and loafers, in recompense for the vgry .great hardships .they have had to suffer in being looked upon as foreign "slackers," who reap* all the benefits of chumming it in God's Own Country, caring for no man excepting self, while our boys at the front are fighting for HTM as well as for US !

Good enough, too. The Austrian is a model settler, and fit to get into our boots any day. Let him alone then, to dwell in the land of nodding fools. Which reminds us, that in the old days when the Maori enemy was murdering the missionaries, settlers, their wives and children wholesale, we were bossed from Exeter Hall, London, and Sir George Grey's flour and sugar policy prevailed. The Maori was "too. good to be exterminated." So the Austrian alien is '" too good to intern."

It is absolutely wicked to look upon these great patriots, who sent horne —so it is said —some £30Q for looal charity or war fund, other than " our friends grinning up their sleeves."