The Waikato Times AND THAMES VALLEY GAZETTE. Equal and exact justice to all men, Of whatsoever state or persuasion, religious or political. SATURDAY, JAN. 12, 1889.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 2575, 12 January 1889, Page 2

The Waikato Times AND THAMES VALLEY GAZETTE. Equal and exact justice to all men, Of whatsoever state or persuasion, religious or political. SATURDAY, JAN. 12, 1889.

Tun Auckland people httvc lately licen treattnl to one of those jiroduclioiis with which Mr J. C Firth frei[uently indulges them, and which arc generated from the vast profundity of his great intellect. Mr Firth is an old colonist, possesses large ideas on not a few subjects, himself prominent amongst them, and 011 the whole is wellmeaning in his intentions.. He has many curious notions, and people in Auckland who have hob-nobbed with him so many years' humour his eccentricities. Yielding to the flattery of a Queen-street circle, he is often found tilling the columns of the Press with, or in other ways launching forth his oracular platitudes, as though they were archimedean levers destined to move the universe. Outside of Auckland his sagacity and his opinions do not win the same admiration apparently accorded to them by the limited society around him. Beyond the colonies they are unknown, or where falling, make no more perceptible commotion in the great world than a single drop of water from the clouds on the bosom of the vast ocean. Jt is part of the education of young men of family go abroad into the world to enlarge their minds and knowledge, to acquire experience and be taught by observation in the wide field of humanity. When, however, a man takes to travelling in his old age, after fossilising during the greater part of his life in a remote and almost unknown corner of the globe, he is amazed at finding the human race, rushing through its course inafashion contrary to his preconceived convictions and the comfortable fancies to which he had settled himself down Tie does not look kindly on human society, under the countless phases by which he then encounters it, as an educator to him. He turns upon it and scolds it; and he lectures all the great rulers of the mighty powers of the earth. The world can teach him nothing ; 011 the contrary the world must forthwith learn from him. When Mr Firth returned from a brief and hasty visit to the United States, it was not long before he let the New Zealanders become acquainted with the fact that he was a travelled man, and the egotism displayed in his contributions "Our Kin Across tiie Sea " provoked many a smile. The Americans also must have been amused at the happy inspiration that induced him to create a new nationality for them and distinguish our republican brethren as Romanesque, owing to the turn of their noses and the cut of their gib, as though they were some antique pottery he had unearthud. The latest emanation from Mr Firth's cerebral repository is a letter in the Herald on the " Decadence of England." Though that is the heading he has given this particular paper, he brings forward no proof that England is in her decline. His promises are all put in the negative sense; he makes no positive statement in support of his thesis, and every statement he adduces, though negative:, invites the conclusion that the British Empire has grown in majestic strength, and is still continuing to develop its increasing power and world-wide influence. Mr Firth throws his harmless darts at England, and they fall impotently to the ground. He seems to shrink from calling himself an Englishman ; it would be interesting to learn which other nationality in the wide world Mr Firth would find greater pride in. He thinks the glorious charter lias lost its potency amongst the nations; but were Mr Firth to travel round the globe amongst aliens, saw the many peopleand races who reverently look upon the standard of England as as the emblem of liberty, and those who owe freedom and innumerable blessings to the devotion and sacrifice of her sons, his mind would be disabused of that notion and he would teach his children to do honour to the privilege of their birthright. He seems to imagine that because modern England, animated by a nobler humanity and loftier sense of du-ty, makes her influence felt and her counsel valued without recourse to the old barbarities of the artjunuintiim helium she is, therefore, a decaying nation. 111 the same strain, he complains of England's commercial supremacy in all the marts of the world, and of her overflowing wealth in which all nations participate; this is, he says, the fulfilment of the prophetic sneer of the great Napoleon, and is adduced as a proof of England's degeneracy. The reader of Sacred Writ recalls to mind the promises of a greater than Napoleon which declared that such would be the blessings. He would bestow upon His chosen people. Mr Firth regards England's foreign policy with contempt, apparently because British statesmen, in their justness and sagacity, prefer to exhaust every diplomatic effort to save the nations of Europe from plunging into a terrible struggle in which human beings will be slaughtered by tens of thousands. It was not through contempt that Russia stayed her triumphant march on Constantinople at the bidding of a British Premier, and at the sight of a British fleet. It was not contempt that caused France to abstain from interfering with England'sdecisiveaction in Egypt at the !ime of Arabi Pasha's rebellion, when the former was deprived of her share in the dual control in the affairs of that country. It 'whs not a sign of decadence that, whilst Franco was struggling and

floundering with an army in Tonquin without adding to her laurels, England sent a handful of troops to Burmah,and, in a few weeks dethroned a monarch, conquered an empire, and brought it under her mild and beneficial rule without much difficulty. It is not a pioof of national senility that she has lately taken under her rule immense divisions of country and millions of alien races in Africa and other parts of the globe, where people hail her approach with joy, where the labours and enterprise of her sons and her chivalry are laying the foundations of liberty and the corner-stones of a future empire. 111 the England of to-day there is a vastly wider philantrophy, a truer and nobler charity in her superior classes than at any former period of her history. The conditions of the poorer classes are infinitely better, education has been extended to all, political advantages have been greatly increased, and the democracy Mr Firth writes so discursively about, is a potential reality in the government of the country. The "community of interest," which is dilated upon by Mr Firth, as his strong point, is becoming more and more manifest through the whole range of the Empire, and is leading up to the realisation of that magnificent conception, Imperial and Anglo-Saxon Confederation. The increasing volume of British trade, the satisfactory state of the national revenue, the enormous extent of the maritime commerce of the Empire belie the charges of decadence levelled at our country. Mr Firth, himself, elaborates all the elements of greatness possessed by the British people, but he fails to show that they do not fully realise their advantages or know how best to use them in the interests of the Empire.