The "Argus" on the N.Z. Government.

Manawatu Herald, 1 November 1894, Page 3

The " Argus " on the N.Z. Government.

The Argus is very severe on Mr Reeves' Undesirable Immigrants' Exclusion Bill. No other colony, it declares, devotes itself to the invention of new laws with greater industry than New Zealand, and the diligence of a New South Wales rabbit in the multiplication of its furry young is scarcely equal to that of a New Zealand Parliament in the production of new laws. If a country is to be saved by Acts of Parliament, New Zealand must be in a condition of simple beatific security. The new Bill, it asserts, is practically a proclamation of non-inter-course with the rest of the human race. New Zealand sighs to become, like Thibet or Siam, a sealed land. It is a noble cluster of islands, with an area nearly as great as the United Kingdom, and with a population about as big as that* of a Lon don suburb, and its Government proposes to translate the fable of 11 the dog in the manger " into an Act of Parliament, and solemnly place it on the Statute Book. What these new and half filled lands want is population ; but the tiny garrison which at the present moment happens to occupy New Zealand would fain shut its doors against the •whole world. The Bill we have been describing will no doubt be regarded as an exquisite joke by everybody outside New Zealand. But how the natural courage of the English speaking race must have perished When the executive body of a British colony seeks after this fashion to lock the whole community up in a glass case, secure from the free air of the rest of the world.