Dowie’s Zion City Condemned.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3593, 2 November 1905, Page 2

Dowie’s Zion City Condemned.

RETURNED COLONIALS.

Auckland, Oct. 31. ,

Mr and Mrs Thomas Hood, Mrs H. McGregor, and Miss Hatpin, Wellington emigrants, returned from Zion City full of wrathful• condemnation of Dowie and bis methods.

They report that a lace factory in the city has closed, and other factories are working with reduced bands, and will probably close down shortly Money is scarce, and work almos' impossible to get. The whole thing is, they allege, the greatest deception of the age. Hundreds are leaving the city, and hundreds are unable to ' leave for want of money. Nobody, according to the returned followers prosper but Dowie and his few paid autocrats. The town has a neglected appearance—not up to a good New Zealand country town. Dowie is endeavouring to raise twelve million dollars to get Zion City out of its financial difficulty, and start a new place in Mexico. Nobody dares air opinions in Zion City, which is all right enough morally for people with plenty of money, but hopeless for the worker dependent on bis earnings. San Francisco, October 31. ' A dispatch from Chicago, dated October sth, says:—Despatches received here indicate that the Mexicans are very hostile to the plans of John Alexander Dowie to establish a colony in Mexico, and their opposition has become so marked that troops have been ordered to protect the property of Elijah 11. It is said that a large consignment of stores sent ahead for the men who will erect temporary buildings has been burned and the Mexicans threaten to burn Dowie's buildings as fast as they are erected. Reassured by the friendliness of President Diaz, Dowie will g* ahead with his colonisation plans, but his followers in Mexico are reported to be greatly alarmed, despite the presence of a large detail of soldiers appointed to guard them. There were rumours at Zion City that if the opposition becomes too marked the plantation idea may be abandoned. Dowieites say religious intolerance is responsible for the attacks upon them in Mexico, as it was in Chicago.