SEEN BY COLONIAL EYES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 59, 31 May 1907, Page 4

SEEN BY COLONIAL EYES.

London, April 1. Under the above heading a very interesting article apears in this issue of the Nineteenth Century and Afterwards. I give a few of the items below, says a correspondent, as the must be of interest over your side. "Our .Motherland," says the writer, "must be the land that bred and bore us. New Zealanders arc not a new or a young people; they possess as fully as ;iiiv native born Brituii the intellectual heritage left by common ancestors. All I lie 50 or (>(! years of English history which have passed are theirs. They are a Uriiish people, who from the outset were more adventurous and Jess tramoiled by convention than the majority of their countrymen, and who have settled in an untamed country—dropped off most of the fosiliscd traditions ami unique customs of the Mother Country; yet at tile same time they lost much of I he artist and pnlished peri'eciion of style and appearance that characterise modern England. 11l modern London vice has lost full' its evil by losing all its gross-

Allusion and innuendo bave driven awav the bltintness of the seven!eentli and eighteenth centuries. Our colonial critics ;ulmit that the civilising of speech and inanir'r is only to be expected. English manners, to some extent, are like an English lawn—it takes centuries to make the one, and centuries to produce an English gentleman or gentlewoman." The writer goes on to say that she has heard more bad language in a lonely settlement or township in the West that she could hear in London in a twelvemonth. There is a superficial kindness and lioncontrol has made London tile supreme gous to the conventional courtesies of society, and ccpially destitute of real depth of feeling. The national selfconlrol has made Lonodn the supreme type of civic society in modern times. Speech in London has to he refined and polished to a proper tenuity. Natural impulses and opinions have to he filed down, clipped, and in some instances stamped llat—in London.