"SEEN BY COLONIAL EYES."

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8448, 25 May 1907, Page 3

"SEEN BY COLONIAL EYES."

(From Our London Correspondent.) LONDON, April 1. Under the above (leading a very interesting article appears in the "Nineteenth Century and Afterwards." I give a :IVv of the items below as thoy nuit-t u,> of interest over your side. "Our Motherland." says the writer, "must be t,ho land that bred and bore us. New Zculunders are not a new or a young people; they possess as fully as any native born Briton the intellectual heriL-t';o left by common ancestors. All Uie 50 or 60 years of English history which have just passed are theirs. They are a British people, who from the outset were more adventurous and less trammelled by convention than the majority of their countrymen, and who having settled in an untamed country dropped off most of the fossilised traditions and antique customs of the Mother Country; yet at the same time, they lost much of the artistic and polished perfection of style and appearance that characterise modern England. In modern London vice has lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. Allusion and innuendo have driven away the bluntness of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Our colonial, critics admit that the civilising of speech and manner is carried to a higher degree of perfection in London than in the colonies. Thi3 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 than 3he could hear in London in a twelvemonth. There is a superficial kindness and bonhomie in the streets of London, analogous to the conventional courtesies of society and equally destitute of real depth of feeling. The national self-control has made London the supreme type of civic society in modern times. Speech in London has to be refined and polished to a proper tenuity. Natural impulses and opinions have to be filed down, clipped, and in some instances, stamped flat—in London.