SIR JOHN GORST ON NEW ZEALAND.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8432, 2 May 1907, Page 6

SIR JOHN GORST ON NEW ZEALAND.

(Fr&m Our Correspondent.) LONDON, March 17. Lord'iTacauley was a most clever essayist, he wrote the most carefully denned articles in most beautiful language, hut he was more, he was a iprophet. For was it not he who 'wrote of the New Zealander, who should in years to come stand awestruck upon tho ruins of what once v was London, the Metropolis of the World? And have we not even now « glimpse of the -cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, which is to develop into a tiling of such tremendous magnitude and power. Seriously New Zealand is very much to the fore just now. It may be that, taking more interest in your colony, I somewhat magnify details, but it does not seem that any other colony is so much to the front, or so much spoken of at the present time.

Sir John Gorst bar, been giving to the world, through the medium of a well-known daily, his ideas and comparisons between the Old Country andfoer youngest colony. "If you want to know," he says, "how it feels to have old age pensions, women's suffrage, no millionaires, no Labour Party, no strikes—all, in fact, that is still problematic in Great Britain —look at New Zealand.'•' Sir John explains the New Zealand Arbitration Act. pointing out how it prevents iUe existence of the millionaire, and makes life tolerable for/the worker xk well as for the employer. He tnliv, ot' the labour laws', old age pouaior-:, education laws, and of female ;iuitrage,but he says he does not attribute all the blessings of the colony to the latter, as the advocates of female suffrage over here would have us believe; except that women will always be on the side of restrictions in the liquor traffic, he does not think that the admission of women to the vote makes much difference one way or the other. He says there are few problems that we aie now only timidly reconnc itring which New Zealand bas«not solved, arid, apparently, with complete satisfaction to the colonists. *

Sir John is embarking upon a lecturing tour in which lie proposes to explain why England t.houid, receive instruction from her New Zealand colony in matters; with which we in England are now endeavouring to grapple.