NEW ZEALAND EULOGISED.

Taranaki Daily News, 24 June 1915, Page 3

NEW ZEALAND EULOGISED.

ADDRISSS BY ARCIIBISIIOP REDWOOD. JO AMERICAN STUDENTS. ' Oil Monday, May 3, his Grace : Archbishop Redwood, of New Zealand, was the honored guest of St. Thomas', Allege (says the Catholic Bulletin of -St. Paul, Minn., U.S.A.). lie inspected witli kindly interest the two new buildings completed since his last visit, reviewed the corps cadets, chatted with the professors after luncheon, and gave the student body an instructive and delightful lecture on New Zealand. Ilis Grace invested the subject with a halo of romance as he spoke of the days of. the early navigators in southern seas, and traced the strange, _ stirring memories of those hazardous times yet living 011 in the names of capes and bays and hills. He depicted New Zealand as the wonderland of the world. He drew a .picture of its snow-capped peaks and lovely valleys, its woods and lakes, its glaciers, and fiords. He spoke of a vast and varied flora in whi'.'h every tree is an evergreen; of a fauna that, in days when Nature, revelled in building on a huge scale, comprised birds as large as oxen, and of "wingless birds, survivals of a strange past, now verging to extinction. Touching on the social conditions of his country, Ms Grace described it as a land where none are very rich and none are very poor, and where the indus- j trial problems that w>x older nations have been solved to the satisfaction of all classes. The Maoris furnished a picturesque topic, and all heard with some astonishment that these primitive tribes, notorious not so long ago for their cannibalism, now send their own representatives to the Dominion Parliament. It was these same Maoris who attracted the first missionaries to New Zealand in the days when whalers and seal hunters were the only white men who touched at the shores of that country. Indulging for a moment in personal reminiscences, his Grace told how sixty-one years ago, when he was fifteen years of age, he set out for Europe. in a passing brig of a few hundred tons, and how lie returned as Bishop to the country he had left as a boy. The novelty of the whole theme, the rare grace with which the story was told, jj and the charming personality of the speaker, will fix forever in the mind* of the students of St. Thomas' the visit of his Grace Archbishop Redwood. — Tablet.