Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/362

330 This set me thinking. Allowing for the inevitable trouble and sorrow that is the common lot anywhere, I wonder whether we are as thankful as we should be that our lives are cast in such a well-favoured country. Those who are born and bred here, perhaps, take it for granted; they have never known anything else. Occasionally they travel, and if they have eyes to see behind the screen of wealth and progress which, in the great cities at home, hides to a great extent the poverty and misery of so many there, they return to New Zealand glad to escape from the sight of it all.

Another illustration: Travelling to Christchurch, I met one of our chief detectives, and got into conversation with him. "There is, practically," he said, "no crime in New Zealand as compared with other countries. Some occasional cases of it, of course; in such a centre as yours in Timaru, no crime; in larger centres it is beginning to exist, but only beginning; there is intemperance, but not to any great extent; young New Zealand as a rule doesn't drink; gambling is a considerable evil; there's too much racing,—a race-meeting somewhere nearly every day in the year."

"And what about the Local Option question?" I said.

"Well, so far as it gives the people the opportunity of reducing the number of publics, or abolishing them altogether, it has done good. But I have my doubts as to abolition,—useful in some cases, but, as a rule, in centres it encourages sly drinking. I would rather regulate the traffic strictly than try to abolish it. The temperance folk have done good, but they go too far."

With regard to his testimony as to the state of Timaru, a port town of eight thousand people, I may