AS OTHERS SEE US.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 10713, 11 January 1913, Page 4

AS OTHERS SEE US.

Mr Norman McMunn, 8.A., of Strat-ford-on-Avon, who resolved at a moment's notice to make a trip to New Zealand for the benefit of his health, writing to his people in England, says there i« a strange sweetness in the absence of all class distinction which lie found in New Zealand. He add«: "F sat at the same table in one of the leading boarding-houses of Auckland—a refined and charming house it was —with an army officer, a railway guard,-a head of a Government department, an Indian officer's widow, and a. telegraph, boy. There was no restraint, no contempt, no servile admiration. It was a table of men and women transformed by mutual respect and good-will into gentlemen and gentlewomen in the only good and noble sense of the word. In New Zealand there is really nothing respond with. the so-called lower class in England. The colonial working man is far more nearly the erjuivalej.it of the small shopkeeper or the post office clerk in England. Such is New Zealand, a country where the poor, the eccentric, even the social pariah will have .his chance, where side by side with a. physical and moral manliness is to bo found pity and forgiveness for all. Of course, all such things are relative, but in no country have I found them so finely developed as in New Zealand. If the people- a. little puritanical, it is because they are n. practical people, am? not, they are a race of hypocrites."