The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1906. THE EXHIBITION.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3723, 13 November 1906, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1906. THE EXHIBITION.

It is obvious that New Zealand has bitten ofitoore Exhibiton than she can convitnently masticate. It is a very excellentlExhibition execrably mismanaged, chiefly because the scheme of inauguration is to be credited to no living man. The scheme in itself would have been a very good scheme for Tondon or Berlin or New York or any centre where millions of people could get to it with a minimum of trouble. In Christchurch.hbwever the Exhibition is partially'Tost and cgflL only hope to attract New Ziianders, Australians who would have probably come to the colony even without the Exhibition to attract them, and the stray Britishers who came to see Rotorua to look in at the Great If the whole popula-

tion of New Zealand goes aloi g and has a look at the Inhibition it will not pay. No International Exhibition is designed for the sole instruction of the people of the country in which it is held and up to now Europe is not rushing to gaze on the squandering- of good public money that is taking place.

The arrangements for the benefit of the public are extremely bad. It is nobody’s business to direct anybody through the sixteen miles of exhibits and it is anybody’s business to bleed the public of its last copper. The mean kind of discipline that forces the weary wanderer to stand unless he pays to sit, the avid gieed of the City authorities who raised the cab-fares the unspeakable and Hebraic instinct of the authorities who make it impossible for people ts see the British Art Exhibition without extra pay are some of the things that are? going to make'that Exhibition want to close its doors with a big deficit within three months. Christchurch at the moment is an excessively uncomfortable place to live in. Every stranger is looked upon as fair game by a horde of sharks desirous only of makingmoney.

The City of the Plains can only 'be compared to Port .Said in this respect. Pickpockets, both legalised and otherwise haunt the place, and the Fair, because there is no one with courage enough to reduce the swelled head of Munro. ‘ ‘Vaunting ambition overleaps itself” as a general thing, but the ambition of Munro is evidently th; sort of thing that the Premier admires. If, as is extremely likely Sir Joseph Ward has no interest in the Exhibition because he was not its initiator, perhaps be has allowed Munro full power, so that it may be ruined and wound up as quickly as possible. It may be therefore that the Premier is wise in his day and generation. The public will never know anything really definite about the financial side of the Exhibition. The deficit will not "be published. The receipts will get very full publication and if the Press Association makes the mistake of- adding a few noughts to the figures what matter ?

Mr Munro, who claims to be a business man is not a business man. He is a clerk from the Tourists’ Department. Fie knows as much about finance as the other clerks in the Tourists’ Department. There is no known method of making an Exhibition which will cost a quarter of a million pounds before it closes being made to pay with not more than a million people to draw on. The discomforts of the Exhibition are so many and the charges for everything in the Exhibition city so severe that the average person returns to his town heartily sick of the whole thing and glad to get away from the sharks. This means that the attendance must decrease day by day. Anyone who has the interest ot New Zealand at heart must see that it is a wicked thing to spend a fortune in .an Exhibition that cannot possibly pay, when the country is in sore need of conveniences that if effected would be a permanently good investment. - , -

While the champion orchestra is playing there are settlers in the backblbcks jacking their milkearts out of the mud. While the people are examining the sylvan scenes in the Art Gallery there are others engaged in cursing sylvan scenes which are cut off from, civilisation by. execrable highways. While the people are being educated in Christchurch, the children of the back country are struggling as best they can to 1 reach leaky schools, taught by underpaid teachers in neglected districts. Anything is good enough for advertisement. The Exhibition is not so ,goocl an. advertisement for New Zealand as it is for the Exhibitors from other Countries. New Zealand itself has lagged behind. It is the outsider who is scooping the credit, merely showing of course that New Zealand ought to .be grafting hard and skiting less to obtain the perfection she believes she has. With the most capable management the St. Louis Exhibition was a financial failure. America is rich enough to stand the racket. With the most incapable management that ever disgraced a country New Zealand pretends that the Christchurch Exhibition is going to pay. New Zealand should have waited another fifty years before she attempted a show that will be a huge charge on a people who have only borrowed money to pay the charge with.