The Manawatu Herald. Thursday, April 3RD., 1913. RIDICULOUS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1081, 3 April 1913, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. Thursday, April 3RD., 1913. RIDICULOUS.

New Zealand is at times honoured or cursed with flying visits from American tourists. Of course we are pleased to see our American cousins, but what we object to is the untruthful and imaginary write-ups which these health-recruiting tourists furnish to certain American journals of which the following is an example: “According to a Chicago writer, Australia and New Zealand are ‘diseased communities,’ the disease being Socialism, a slow poison which has destroyed enterprise, thrift and confidence. ‘Take all I have written about the sleepy antiquated aspect of everything in Australia and quadruple it,’ he adds, 'and you can begin to imagine New Zealand. The sleepy backward old towns of Australia, with their poor hotels, are to the New Zealanders wonders of brightness, and they figure on the time when they will be rich enough to I go and live in Australia. . . . . Nobody is planting orchards or building up fine farms. Except for a small tract just south of Auckland, probably a freehold settlement, everything throughout the country has a hopeless, abandoned look; you feel that it is incurable. The New Zealand farmer when he gets old or breaks must turn his leasehold back to the State, step out without anything, and wait until he gets to be sixty-five years old to get his dollar and a half per week as a pauper.’ The same writer says : ‘The children of New Zealand are taught the blessings of pauperism as they are taught religion.’ He also mentions a New Zealand express train which travelled at the rate of twenty miles an hour and ‘bumped about like a stage coach over a corduroy road.’ A few days before his journey a train bad stuck in a tunnel between Napier and Wellington, and ‘when it was extricated it was found that several people had been smothered to death.’ ”