Part 4 (2/2)
The Prince traversed the Inangahua marshes in the dark, reaching the west-coast towns.h.i.+p of Reefton late at night. The streets, nevertheless, were thronged with people. Illuminations and fireworks were in full swing, and His Royal Highness had a reception in no way inferior to his daylight greetings elsewhere. At Reefton he was in Westland of the warm heart, the Wales of New Zealand, a land of collieries, lumbering, gold-mining, and fis.h.i.+ng, home of the late Richard Seddon, whose eloquence did so much, in the long years of his Prime Ministers.h.i.+p, to bind New Zealand in that close alliance with Great Britain which bore such gallant fruit when the great call came.
With Reefton I should cla.s.s Inangahua, Greymouth, Westport, and last, but most important of them all, Hokitika, head-quarters of the province, which is represented in the New Zealand Government by Mr. Thomas Seddon, son of the late Prime Minister, and one of the first members of Parliament to volunteer for active service when the war began. In all of these centres the Prince was most warmly received, Hokitika particularly distinguis.h.i.+ng itself by the size of its gatherings, and the good taste bestowed on the decorations of its streets.
The Prince's journey from Reefton to Westport was by motor through the lower gorges of the Buller river, where the scenery was again magnificent. Much of the route was along a narrow winding shelf, a precipice dropping to the water beneath, while above the rocks overhung the road, sometimes, as at a spot appropriately named the Devil's Eye, to the extent of completely over-arching. The steep mountain-sides around were covered with dense vegetation, gaunt Rimu trees smothered in the embrace of flame-flowered Rata vines, and green lance-leaved _kiakia_ creepers, with a thick undergrowth of tree-ferns standing erect like pirouetting dancers in stiff green skirts and long black legs, amongst a lesser crowd of gorse and bracken. The silence of the gorge was broken only by the ripple of water and the sweet flute-notes of grey Tui birds, a delicate contrast with the clangour of the church bells, rung in honour of the Prince's visit, when the procession of motor-cars emerged upon the open coast, and reached the mining towns.h.i.+p of Westport. Here the reception was on the level, within sight of an inclined road down which is brought what claims to be the best admiralty coal in the world. This coal is mined high up in the hills above Westport, and was burnt upon H.M.S. _Calliope_ when she thrilled the world by beating out of the hurricane off Samoa in 1899. The Prince returned in the evening to Hokitika. In an open square in this city next morning, where the snows of Mount Cook shone out on the horizon, he was presented with a digger's leather bag containing nuggets of west-coast gold.
[Ill.u.s.tration: WESTPORT CHILDREN: A TUMULT OF FLAGS AND FLOWERS]
[Ill.u.s.tration: DUNEDIN'S WELCOME]
From Hokitika the route was by train, via the labour-controlled towns.h.i.+p of Greymouth, and up the fine Brunner valley, pa.s.sing a number of winding-shafts of mines producing good steam-coal, where miners were making 2 5_s_. daily, and more of them were urgently needed. In the afternoon Otira was reached, where New Zealand's longest railway tunnel, which when finished will complete the hitherto broken connexion across the island, was in active course of construction. Here the Prince left the railway and travelled partly by a four-horsed coach, and partly on foot, amidst heights and glaciers, over the magnificent Arthur's pa.s.s, which overlies the tunnel, itself two thousand feet above sea level. The tunnel is one of the big engineering achievements of the century. It is five and a quarter miles long, and has been so accurately laid out that when, a few months since, the excavations from the two ends met in the middle, they were out only by three-quarters of an inch in alignment and one and a half inches in level, a minuteness of error of which Mr.
Holmes, Engineer-in-Chief, and his technical staff may rightly be proud.
Cheers, every few minutes, from people it was too dark to see, broke in upon the rattle of the Royal train speeding to reach Christchurch by dinner-time. Jolts at intervals informed us that we were crossing sidings in the suburbs of a considerable city. Presently light shone into the windows from outside, and we came to a standstill in a railway station that might have been that of Oxford. Upon a red carpet, stretched from the entrance to where the Prince's saloon drew up, was standing Mayor Thacker, with ermine, chain and c.o.c.ked hat, also members of the corporation, waiting to welcome the Royal guest. By the time one could get through the throng upon the platform from the front of the train, the Prince, who was in the rear where a lane had been kept, was inspecting a captain's guard of men and colours in the presence of the dense, cheering crowd that pressed on the rope-barriers. A procession followed, through two miles of decorated, illuminated, cheering, flag-waving streets, the route kept with difficulty by police and territorials. The cars soon separated from one another in the press.
Those who were towards the tail of the procession lost sight of the Prince. Small boys waved paper flags in their faces, and had to be discouraged from climbing on the radiator. Larrikins decided that one correspondent was the Prince's doctor and christened him ”Pills.”
Another, the substantial representative of the ”Daily Telegraph,” was found to resemble Mr. Ma.s.sey, and was cheered as ”Bill.” Presently the procession came to a standstill altogether, the crowd being squeezed tight up all round, in front, as well as on the steps and mud-guards.
Horn-tooting and endeavours to move forward an inch at a time, coupled with the vigorous a.s.sistance of the police, gradually got us on the move again, and amid a din of laughing and cheering we saw the Prince being got out of his car and carried into the club where he was to stay, to reappear a few moments later on the balcony and wave acknowledgments to the people, by this time squeezed solid once more.
Similar scenes occurred on the following day, the same cheerful, friendly, British crowd a.s.sembling in the streets and blocking the wide Latimer Square, where the Prince received a number of formal addresses, inspected a fine body of boy-scouts, and was serenaded, first in Welsh, and afterwards in Gaelic, by groups of nice-looking girls in the quaintness of chimney-pot hats and kilts. Proceeding afterwards to Hagley park, the Prince reviewed some four thousand territorials, and shook hands with two thousand returned men. Later in the evening he held an informal levee at the civic hall, where he shook hands with another two thousand people. By this time, if there is a scientific way of accomplis.h.i.+ng the gesture of friends.h.i.+p, His Royal Highness had probably learned it.
Christchurch is the third biggest city of New Zealand. A larger proportion of the inhabitants is said to be of English extraction than in any other city of the world outside the British islands. Certainly it is one of the most home-like places we saw upon the tour with its well-paved, well-lighted streets, fine business quarter, and pleasant residential suburbs full of comfortable houses, each standing in its own grounds. In Christchurch clear water courses down the gutter on one side of many of the streets. This is from subterranean springs, tapped by artesian borings, by means of which the entire city is supplied. The water is supposed to be derived from the snows of the southern New Zealand Alps as they soak into the valley of the Waimakariri--”freezing water”--river which flows into the Canterbury plain.
A fine harbour, with water so deep that even the _Renown_ was able to lie alongside the wharf, exists eight miles off, at Lyttleton. Until one goes over the ground it seems strange that a large city should have been built so far away as eight miles from the harbour connected with it. The lie of the hills explains this however. The harbour of Lyttleton is so hedged in by steep slopes that it has been considered impossible to build a city around it, and Christchurch occupies the nearest level ground across the range. Connexion is facilitated by a mile-long railway tunnel, one of the oldest undertakings of its kind in New Zealand.
Although so close to the hills, Christchurch stands upon almost absolutely level ground, a corner indeed of the big Canterbury plain, _par excellence_ the farming country of the Dominion. The city contains cold-storage plant, a biscuit factory, and wool and hide establishments, all of which proved their Imperial value during the war. It also possesses one of the best high schools in the country, run on the lines of a British public school. Being also the distributing centre for a large and flouris.h.i.+ng farming community, Christchurch is going ahead rapidly, and has an excellent future before it, its south-of-England climate making it a favourite place of residence.
Farming is not in New Zealand an occupation penalized by the dread of hards.h.i.+p or burden as one is apt to find it elsewhere, largely because of the real love the New Zealander has for the land. The Mayor of one of the larger cities we visited in the Northern Island, himself a prosperous wholesale grocer, told me that neither of his two sons, when they returned to New Zealand from France, would look at his business, though he had kept it going longer than he would otherwise have done, with the express purpose of handing it on to them, there being no one else in his family to whom to leave it. They both insisted upon being set up as farmers. The reason they gave was that farming life was pleasanter and less exacting than any kind of business, and this although they had, with farming, to begin all over again, whereas in the wholesale grocery trade they had a long established and flouris.h.i.+ng concern ready to step into.
The fifteen-year-old son of a prominent official said to his mother, who pa.s.sed on the irreverent observation to me, ”Isn't father a loony to do office work when he might have a farm of his own?” The boy's mind was typical. I met refined women who said they wouldn't live anywhere in the world but on a farm, and never once did I come across anyone who was on the land and wanted to get off it. This att.i.tude of mind has the qualification that it is sheep and cattle-farming that is referred to, and not dairy-farming, which is infinitely more exacting, though, at present prices, and especially since the discovery of the possibilities of the dried milk-trade, definitely more profitable. This is because the sheep and cattle-farmer is not continually tied, and, while he has to work hard at times, can also often get away, whereas the dairy-farmer must be on hand all the year round, to see that the milking is attended to, and that the milk is promptly disposed of at the creameries, of which numbers are springing up, mostly run, upon a co-operative basis, by groups of farmers themselves.
This pa.s.sion of the New Zealander for the land is a trait of the most far-reaching significance. It accounts for the largeness of the rural, as opposed to the urban, population in this Dominion. It has much to do, also, with the splendid physique of the average New Zealander, and the amazing healthfulness and longevity he appears to enjoy. This applies especially to the middle cla.s.ses, amongst whom there is extraordinary immunity from such city diseases as consumption. The death-rate from tuberculosis of New Zealand is less than half that of England and Wales.
It affects also the whole political outlook of the Dominion. The farmer everywhere tends to be conservative in his views, for he has a stake in the country. His farm may be small or large. The individual holding, on the average, is probably not more than from thirty to eighty acres, an area which even the most unskilled of labourers may hope, in the end, to own; and one which, under the favourable agricultural and climatic conditions prevailing, is sufficient to keep both the man himself and his family. The number of holdings is therefore rapidly increasing, and the effect which this has upon the whole political atmosphere is incalculable. Nominally, the Government of the day may be Conservative or it may be Liberal, but the voter's choice is one of men, rather than of policy. Labour itself, as has already been pointed out, has become conservative. It thus comes about that, in spite of the possession of both manhood suffrage and womanhood suffrage, there is probably no country in the world less open to subversive social theories than is New Zealand.
XI
ENTERPRISE IN NEW ZEALAND
It is impossible to travel through New Zealand and to meet the men it sends into public life, without being impressed by the high character, moderation and conservativeness which characterize politics in this Dominion.
There is no country where the spirit of live and let live is more fully operative, none where charges of political corruption are less common, and none where the spirit of co-operation for public ends is more general. The ”ins” at present call themselves Reformers, he ”outs”
Liberals, but, so far as I have been able to make out, Mr. Ma.s.sey's Government retains its majority far more on account of the popularity of himself and his colleagues than because the general policy for which they stand differs very materially from that which would be adopted if Sir Joseph Ward and his Liberal supporters were to return to power. In consequence, again, of practically all voters having a stake in the country, of one kind or another, whether in the form of house-property, land or money, the administration they elect is intensely individualistic, and probably there is no spot on earth where property is more respected, or personal rights more secure.
The financial position of the Dominion is also relatively good, for although New Zealand's public debt bears a proportion to its population not far different from the corresponding proportion in England, there are two factors which make the situation of the Dominion definitely more favourable. One of these is the larger potential margin of taxability in New Zealand, owing to the greater individual prosperity of its inhabitants and the extent of its still undeveloped resources. The other is that so much of New Zealand's public debt has been invested in remunerative public works. Out of a total debt of 194,000,000 no less than 40,000,000 has been put into the acquisition or construction of the three thousand five hundred miles of railway existing in the country, an investment which itself pays the whole of the interest charges concerned. Indeed, at present rates for labour and materials, this happy country possesses a property worth probably more than twice what it has cost to obtain.
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