The Gisborne Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. THURSDAY. SEPTEMBER 23, 1909 FRANCE IN THE PACIFIC.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2614, 23 September 1909, Page 4

The Gisborne Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. THURSDAY. SEPTEMBER 23, 1909 FRANCE IN THE PACIFIC.

Despite the reassuring statement of the Governor of New Caledonia there is every reason to believe that the inhabitants of the French colony are profoundly dissatisfied with their treatment by the Home Government. The trouble, of which we have had brief announcement in the cables recently, has been caused by the fact that a. loan of £120,000 raised through a Paris bank has been stopped in France for an indefinite period. The money was urgently ‘needed to alleviate the distress consequent upon the existent deplorable condition of affairs. The people, in a semi-starving state, have been clamoring for assistance and the loan had been arranged for tho continuation of railway construction —8 or 10 miles—as a means of affording some relief. At the end of last month mass meetings were being held to protest against the alleged injustice. That a territory so bountifully blessed by nature as is New Caledonia should ever have been allowed to drift to ruin in this manner is a very sharp commentary upon the capacity of France to colonise. In view of the anxiety she has evinced in recent years to get a footing in the Pacific, it might have been thought that she would have bestirred herself to turn to better account the possessions which have fallen to her lot. In New Caledonia sho had more scope for colonising work than in any other Pacific island territory 6he could hope to acquire, but the official ideas of the place seem never to have got seriously beyond its utilisation as a depot for criminals. It is true the colonists themselves have other and better aspirations, but they do not seem ever to have received anything like intelligent sympathy from the French Government. In their despair they have been leaving New Caledonia with the view of trying their luck in the New Hebrides, and there, apparently, they are receiving more official encouragement than they did in the colony they left. There is something very pathetic about this lonely little settlement in the Pacific, which feels itself gradually going to pieces.