A PROPHECY.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIV, Issue 9408, 31 March 1909, Page 6

A PROPHECY.

WHAT NEW ZEALAND MAY OOME TO;

A long article on New Zealand appears in the New York Post of January 9.Bth from its Sydney correspondent. It is a generally appreciative enmmarv of the recent progress of the country, bat the writer concludes with a'nother version of the position. “Now look at the other side, painted as in lamp-black by a. keen observer who penetrates beneath - the smiling surface. In scathing political satire (“ Riallaro ; the Archipelago of Exiles,” Putnam’s), a New Zealand professor has described the island of Wotnekst. The people of this happy isle were so far gone in hallucination that they believed they could accomplish anything they desired merely by passing a law. Their craze was politics. Every one bad a pet political theory for hurrying on the millennium. Politicians arose (Seddon was the type of them?) who pandered to this passion, and bent all tbeir energies towards having each new project, however Utopian, put on the statute book. The first political panacea was a succession of suffrage schemes. All citizens were enfranchised, and yet, strange to say, human ills did not vanish from the land.

“The second panacea wad to tax foreign commerce. As a consequence commerce dwindled under the burden of inspectors and tariffs regulations, till at last the harbours were empty and the marts inhabited only by Government officers. An ambitions young statesman (we know him well; was he not till lately High Commissioner lor New Zealand in London?) bethought himself of a new scheme. He sent out bis agents among the workmen.who inflamed their discontent. His emissaries.made them pick quarrels with tbeir masters,’ when be stepped in to settle them (the Industrial Arbitration Act); but he settled them so as to make chronic ulcers of them. He set class against class and rent the State In two. Then followed a long period of legislation in the interests of labonn He penalised "capital, wbioh fled from the colony. Industry after industry grew waterlogged and sank. The Government had to take over the abandoned enterprises. Foreign loans and cooked accounts concealed the consequent deficit. “A yonnger and equally unscrupulous rival invented a new financial scheme and disclosed a new source of taxation. He gave a competency to every man or woman over fifty who was poor or idle. A State Bank issued flash notes inexhaustibly (a real project of a provincial governor), and hundreds of laws were passed asserting tbeir value; yet wealth disappeared. More than half the population were Government inspectors, and the rest were Government pensioners. The mines were nnworked, the factories were silent. None the less the whole people continued to believe that salvation was to be found in the passing of laws. “Snob is New Zealand, fifty nr perhaps twenty years hence, as it ia seen by the eye of imagination, sharpened by close observation and instructed by a knowledge of history and a profound philosophy. May the terrific satire not prove a prophecy!”