The Southern Cross. PUBLISHED WEEKLY. Invercargill, Saturday, May 27.

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 9, 27 May 1893, Page 8

The Southern Cross. PUBLISHED WEEKLY. Invercargill, Saturday, May 27.

Interviewees for the American papers are proverbially keen to obtain the impressions formed of their country by distinguished visitors —so eager, indeed, that before the strangers leave the steamer in which they arrive, they are importuned to state what tb ej think, say, of Hew York. Comingnearer home, it is amusing to notice the celerity with which Hew Zealand’s visitors, distinguished and otherwise, hasten to give their friends at Home the benefit of their experiences. Our interviewers have no need to force their hands. As a rule they blunder terribly in their facts and deductions, but their lucubrations would be harmless if their perusal were confined to the respective home cirples of the writers. Very of ten, however, a fond father or mother, proud of his son’s doings, gets portions of his letters published, and it is then that the mischief begins. The latest example of this kind of thing is contained in the following extract from a letter addressed by a son .on his travels to his father at Home, and written from Dipton (Southland) : “ There is no doubt about Hew Zealand being the working man’s paradise. Ten shillings a day is the lowest he will accept. He spends life just as you or I should; travels about, and goes to the best hotels. He is, in fact, a gentleman in working get-up. All I have met are extremely nice chaps, bar one or two boosers. There are often one or two staying in this hotel, and they turn up at breakfast and dinner, and eat their food quite nicely. They all seem to know a bit, too.” This, by the way, is more than can be said about the writer of the precious missive, which is now going the rounds of the papers. It is hard to say what wonderful discoveries he is destined to make on his travels. He has already found that the fact that a man has to work for his living- need not prevent him “ eating his food quite nicely,” and that he “turns up at breakfast and dinner.” Most people do so as a rule, except when they find themselves in the plight of the much-talked of William Freeman Kitchen, who states that he was so hard up in Victoria for a time that he lived on a meal a day, and a threepenny one at that. But this is getting away from the main point, which is the harm that may be wrought by the publication of such pictures of the lot of the workingclasses in this colony. If Hew Zealand is the working-man’s paradise, it is so in a comparative sense only. It is so, no doubt, when compared with industrial conditions in the Old World, in some of whose great centres of population the toilers and moilers have to engage in a bitter struggle to secure the barest necessaries of life. It is so when the hom-s of labour, and the rates paid for it, are placed side by side with those ruling in the colony. It is none the less true that we have found it necessary to make special provision for the “unemployed,” and that ever and anon the demand for work is raised in some of our cities —■ work, too, at a much smaller rate than the ten shillings a day which our young man on his travels assures the world is the lowest the workingman will accept. In writing thus we have no desire to belittle the colony or its prospects. These were never more hopeful, but that is no reason why such misleading statements as those under notice should be allowed to pass .unchallenged. People acquainted with the real facts of the case will only smile at them, but those at a distance might be deceived thereby, and for that reason, and that reason alone, has attention been called to them in this place.