The Daily News. MONDAY, APRIL 4. A LIGHTNING CARICATURIST.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 354, 4 April 1910, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, APRIL 4. A LIGHTNING CARICATURIST.

We reprinted in Saturday's assue an article from the Sunday Chronicle on New Zealanu, 'by that amusing person Mr. Foster s«tser. Mr. Foster Fraser has a passing acquaintance with many countries. Indeed, he boasted that while here he vßss "doing" his forty-ninth country. He further mentioned that he hated -scenery, that he had become entirely Iblase in regard to every kind of sight; and called us all to witness that ke knew a great deal more about most things than any other itinerant showman. Mr. Foster Fraser was good enough to patronise this country for six weeks. In regard to the facts contained in his articles, these could have been •written in Fleet-street, the British Museum, or any public library. In regard to the utility ofhis criticisms—he will probably be handsomely paid for the copy; therefore they are useful. The faults this eminent journalist finds with New Zealauders is that they .are young; he discovered the prevailing characteristics of everybody by dashing about in motor-cars, by staying nowhere where he had a chance of learning anything about the real country; and when he wanted to see if the young New Zealanders were of as good a stamp as their fathers, he walked down the main street of the capital city one afternoon! He should have paid a visit to the Government Buildings to see how the clerks were getting on with their bushfalling, or to the grocers' shops to ascertain if the assistants were doing well with their shearing. Mr. Fraser is rather sorry for our insularity, but didn't show us how to become united to some other country. In his criticisms he shows his own insularity to a very marked degree. He seeks to prove that persons hailing from his part of the world are so superior to. we insulars that they "laugh at our insularism." Mr. Fraser's marvellous power of picture-writing is shown in the way he gives to the world a complete survey of the glories of the New Zealand bush. This sentence will live for ever as the finest piece of descriptive writing in the language: "I saw the bush—wild, tangled, well-nigh impenetrable forest lands!" What more could be required to give the British people the complete detail of the back country ?

Mr. Foster Fraser does not like us to call New Zealand "God's Own Country." We don't. The late Mr. Bracken, with a poet's license, used the phrase, and the late Mr. Seddon, because he knew Mr. Bracken and loved the sound of the phrase, sometimes used it in a ■peroration. The idea of a representative New Zealand farmer leaving off work to tell Mr. Foster Fraser that New Zealand is "God's Own Country" is absurd. Mr. Fraser is quite sure that there is only room for five or six million people in New Zealand. He discovered this great truth probably in Queen-street, Hagley Park, or Thorndon. The definiteness of the conclusion from a man who has rushed round for six weeks, and who "abominates scenery," is refreshing. By far the most delicious thing Mr. Foster Fraser says in the article is that "the New Zealander is sensitive to criticism." So he is; and so is Mr. Foster Fraser, and so is the Scotsman, the Irishman, and the Englishman. Mr. Foster Fraser as a showman in New Zealand was not the immense success he ought to have been, considering his eminence, the fact that he has been in Siberia, and that this was his forty-ninth conquest of a country. For a man who criticises after a momentary examination, Mr. Foster Fraser is probably the most sensitive showman who has ever been in New Zealand. He became angry with some newspapers which had the temerity to doubt if his lectures were the valuable material they purported to be. He was not "lionised" to the extent he ought to have been. This was probably be- | cause he was not a footballer, or Lord Kitchener; and because we are very insular. Mr. Foster Fraser is no worse than many New Zealanders who go to England. There are cases of New Zealanders summing up the national work of ten centuries in England in two or three words. One youth mentioned that Britishers were too slow for words to express, The youth had been in London nearly a fortnight when he wrote this. If Mr. Foster Fraser stayed in New Zealand for ten years, he would collect the whole of the articles he has just written and burn them for shame. If an alleged impressionist is able to .advise a whole country—or, to be more correct, forty-nine countries—his value is enormous. We take the liberty of saying that the works of Mr. Foster Fraser will never be accepted as authoritative, and that his fame will be as J evanescent as was his visit to New Zea- j land.