New Zealand NowNew Zealand Now[electronic resource]Oliver DuffCreation of machine-readable versionKeyboarded by Planman TechnologiesCreation of digital imagesPlanman TechnologiesConversion to TEI-conformant markupPlanman Technologiesca. 249 kilobytesNew Zealand Electronic Text CollectionWellington, New ZealandModern English
Publicly accessible
URL: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/collections.html
Copyright 2010, by Victoria University of Wellington
2010153855Line breaks have only been retained for non-prose elements.New Zealand NowOliver DuffDepartment of Internal AffairsWellington1941Source copy consulted: DU414 D855 N
All unambiguous end-of-line hyphens have been removed and
the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding
line, except in the case of those words that break over a
page.
Some keywords in the header are a local Electronic
Text Centre scheme to aid in establishing analytical
groupings.
NZETC Subject Headings1941EnglishGeneral NZ Historynonfictionprosemasculine/feminine11:28:12, Friday 16 July 2010Cara PollockSchematron validation of supplier TEI11:45:01, Friday 16 July 2010Cara PollockText-proofing of a sample of the text11:52:56, Friday 16 July 2010Cara PollockConversion to TEI.2-conformat markup09:55:18, Monday 19 July 2010Cara PollockAdding name markup09:55:20, Monday 19 July 2010Cara PollockAddition of bibls10:00:17, Monday 19 July 2010Cara PollockAssembled all images10:00:19, Monday 19 July 2010Cara PollockCreation of derivative images10:00:35, Monday 19 July 2010Cara PollockValidation of TEI10:01:26, Monday 19 July 2010Cara PollockValidation of names10:02:27, Monday 19 July 2010Cara PollockPromotion to production10:05:22, Monday 19 July 2010Cara PollockAddition of text to access control10:19:39, Monday 19 July 2010Cara PollockHarvest into Topic Map10:19:41, Monday 19 July 2010Cara PollockChecking of text using browser10:21:08, Monday 19 July 2010Cara PollockAddition of text to corpus14:04:48, Tuesday 3 August 2010Stuart YeatesMake text available on NZETC website14:04:50, Tuesday 3 August 2010Stuart YeatesPreparation of EPUB (and other formats such as DaisyBook)14:03:19, Wedsnesday 4 August 2010NZETCIndex the text into SOLR to allow searching16:16:17, Thursday 5 August 2010Jason DarwinAddition of text to Library Catalogue
New Zealand Centennial SurveysXIII. New Zealand Now
New Zealand NowbyOliver DuffWellingtonDepartment of Internal AffairsNew Zealand1941
To
A.S.D. & N.A.S.
Preface
This Survey is not historical. It is not scientific or political. It is personal — some impressions of his country by one New Zealander whose memory goes back fifty years.
It is of course historical to some extent. To illustrate present conditions it has sometimes been necessary to recall past conditions; but that has been incidental and not systematic. By accident there may also be a contribution to knowledge or a new thought for a politician. But that has not been the purpose or the plan. History and science deal with facts. This book contains little but impressions. With the exception of Chapter 2, which comes straight from the Year-Book, it has been written without reference to any other book and without an exchange of opinions with living authorities. If it had seemed to me desirable, or more desirable than anything else, to make no statement that time may amend and to offer no opinions but those generally held, I should of course have consulted authorities and been careful to reach no conclusions. But authority, in a field in which most of the facts are still to be collected, seemed less important than easy reading and stimulated thinking. So I have been cheaply provocative and deliberately rash. It is after all a survey and not a map—a flying survey of a once familiar scene that no one any longer knows.
It has seemed more natural, and generally more honest, to write in the first person; though I have slipped sometimes into the second person, and often fallen back on a kind of editorial 'we'. I should have been ashamed if I had felt it possible to write of New Zealand impersonally.
If a picture emerges at all, the credit belongs to E. H. McCormick, editor of the series, who, though he was no longer available for consultation when I began to write, suggested a line of approach to me before he enlisted for military service overseas. I am also indebted to Sydney Brookes, of the staff of the New Zealand Listener, for much of the second chapter. For inaccuracies and erroneous conclusions I alone am responsible.
Oliver DuffWellington13 May 1941
Contents
PagePrefacevii1 A Look Round12 Appeal to Figures143 Appeal to Facts274 North Island415 South Island606 Questions Without Answers757 Things to Come109Note on Sources123Index125
Illustrations
Advance Partyfrontispiece
From a photograph by N. R. Laird showing members of the first party of soldiers to leave New Zealand in the second World War. The soldiers are descending the gangway in rain to attend an official farewell.
Rivers But No Rainfacing page 18
From an aerial photograph by V. C. Browne. The Clutha river is seen joining the Kawarau at Cromwell to form the Molyneux.
The Railway Made Taumarunui44
From a photograph by the New Zealand Railways Department.
Wellington is Gusty44
From a photograph by C. P. S. Boyer.
They Worship the Cow54
From a photograph by J. F. Louden.
Here There are Sheep54
From a photograph by The Weekly News showing wool being shipped from the East Coast of the North Island.
Ross Forty Years Ago62
From a photograph by N. Folley of the Mont d'Or claim. The original photograph is now in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
Nelson is Peaceful62
From a photograph by Ellis Dudgeon.
Wool Sale66
From a photograph by Green and Hahn, Christchurch.
Across the Frontierfacing page 66
From a photograph by the Otago Daily Times of the bridge over the Clutha river.
Clydesdales72
From a photograph by E. T. Robson.
Teaching was a Trust98
From a photograph by Iles of John Stenhouse in 1895.
No Bishop was so Powerful98
From a photograph by the Otago Daily Times of the statue of the Rev. Dr D. M. Stuart, Dunedin.
Maps
Distribution of Dairy Cattlepage 48Distribution of Sheep49
These maps were redrawn by R. J. Crawford from two maps used by Dr W. N. Benson in New Zealand Affairs (Institute of Pacific Relations, 1929).
This volume is one of a series commissioned and published by the Government of New Zealand. The Government however does not hold itself responsible for any statement made or opinions expressed herein. The responsibility for these is the author's and his alone.
New Zealand Now
1 A Look Round
If a Wild Irishman is grown in a hothouse it loses its spines and develops soft leaves. If the experiment is continued for some time, with the moisture nicely adjusted to the heat, the changes brought about are so marked that the plant ceases to be recognisable by those who are not specialists. It does not of course grow into a thistle or a fig tree, produce tomatoes, or clusters of grapes. What it is it remains generically, but only the seeing eye and the knowing mind avoid confusing it with something else. Must it not be so, mutatis mutandis, with ourselves? Must New Zealanders not be what New Zealand has made them in a hundred years out of the Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen they were to begin with, and must they not in a thousand years carry still further marks of our soil, climate, position, and shape? If there is a principle running through the observations in this survey, or a theory distorting the observations, it is that physical man is an animal all the time, and spiritual man a product of his environment some of the time, however stubbornly he may resist. It would be rash to suggest in the middle of the present war that the future of a country is settled before it is occupied, and the future of millions of human beings before they are bom; but it would be rasher still to put the story the other way round and say that what a nation is it remains, whatever soils nourish it or suns warm it or winds and rains beat on it.
New Zealanders will never be Negroes or Mongolians. They will never grow the wings of angels or the tails of apes. In no stretch of time that our minds can span shall we grow to seven feet or shrink to four, lose our hair, or be left with only rudimentary legs. What we are physically we shall in general remain. But we shall not remain unchanged. Nor have we remained unchanged thus far. The changes of a century are faint. To see them we have sometimes to be a little reckless. But how much more reckless must we be to see no changes at all. A Somerset farmer Z's his S's and 'oops' his 'ups'. He drinks cider and breeds long-horned cows. When you meet him at the market he may be wearing a calfskin waistcoat, and if you are talking to him when the Squire passes he will probably stop and touch his hat. All these things he was doing a hundred years ago. But if he left Taunton a hundred years ago and came to Taranaki you may be disappointed if you call on him now expecting a horn of cider. You will certainly be disappointed if you go looking for the calfskin waistcoat and the long-horned cows, and however important you are he will not doff his cap to you. Even his Z's may not perform for you unless you argue with him and get him excited, and they will retire as soon as he calms down, for he is now just a Taranaki farmer who milks Jerseys, gossips with other farmers at the factory, and talks top-dressing and guaranteed prices. He is a New Zealander. His father was a New Zealander. His grandfather was well on the way to becoming a New Zealander before he died.
These are of course trivial external things by which no true man is judged. The most pallid personality is more than his clothes and his cows and his speech and his manners and his drink. But a New Zealand man is a man you meet in New Zealand, a man who lives in New Zealand, a man whom New Zealand 'bore, shaped, and made aware'.
Until a few years ago, when the vicious habit died, a meeting between a New Zealander and an Englishman on New Zealand soil, or between an Englishman and a New Zealander on English soil, was almost impossible without secret stock-taking, with complacency on both sides and a good deal of Pharisaic satisfaction afterwards. So far apart had they drifted in a single century. Even to-day, when they stand closer together than ever in their history, jealousies forgotten and pettiness purged away in a common woe, little external things—a voice, an accent, the sound of a vowel—can be momentarily disturbing on both sides; no longer an irritation; no longer an excuse for criticism; but a memory flitting through the mind of past differences and a reminder of the duty to forget. Perhaps the responsibility in both cases rests with Providence. A contemporary of Voltaire's, and in his day almost as big a figure, said after a visit to England that even Nature had her affectations. Forests, farms, harbours, rivers, enormous cities, and inexhaustible mines, all in a country of pocket-edition size whose position made it unassailable. But if Nature 'shows off' a little in England, she struts through New Zealand an unblushing exhibitionist. In no other country of comparable size has she abandoned herself quite so wantonly. And since the more you change an Englishman the more he is the same fellow, Nature may have gone to his head, which is our head, a second time.
There is unfortunately no representative New Zealander, or it would be sufficient to follow him for a few days and record his comings and goings. We never meet a man in the street so clearly the pattern and model of us all that we at once say 'There he is!' and see others as variations on him or as specimens who have not bred true to type. But we are not left without any sign at all. We do not often mistake a New Zealander for an Australian, a New Zealander born here for one who has come here, or a native of Otago for a man born in Canterbury or Hawke's Bay. In a hundred years we have fallen into a pattern, faint yet and with broken lines, but recognisable. And if the New Zealander himself eluded us we would know his speech, his coat or his trousers, his boots or his hat. For it could almost be expressed as a generalisation that he cannot combine a and o. South of the Equator no one can unless his skin is brown, and no one yet has explained why. Nor is it easy in New Zealand to forget that the terminal syllables of Sunday and Sydney are different. We can with much practice learn to swallow both, but our struggles write New Zealand all over us. Whether it is climate, geology, and the resulting anatomical changes, or just habit and inherited British stubbornness, it is for science and not these pages to say, but he is a very unnatural New Zealander who does not proclaim himself the moment he opens his mouth. And the signs are almost as marked when we consider New Zealand's clothes. Here we have something less fundamental than speech, but again not entirely independent of anatomy. We are looking at something that has been influenced profoundly by climate, superficially by occupation; that reflects our distance from the fashion centres of the world; and to some extent our distance from the thought centres. New Zealand is a windy country. It is a country that produces great quantities of flesh-forming foods and strong appetites to eat them. Compared with Australia it is wet and cold. Add its mountains and its steep hills, and you are beginning to see why it produces men and women whose bones are well covered with flesh, whose joints through thickness are a little stiff, whose gait is step by step rather than swinging and free, and whose clothes tend therefore to be put on rather than to hang on, to enclose the body rather than to drape it, to keep it warm rather than to give it grace. It must also be remembered that New Zealand has always been Puritan. It was established in the fear of God. Five out of six of its first generation were reared on the Bible. Even where belief has gone tradition still remains, and one of the deepest-rooted traditions of people with white skins is the shamefulness of the flesh. Our bodies are God's handiwork, the temples He has built for our souls; but they are like our New Zealand marble—they will not stand exposure to the weather. Naked we came but covered we go, here and away from here. But as we are not able to cover ourselves completely we weather in places and the weathering shows. We have rough skins where the wind strikes us—not dry, like the skins of Australians, but coarse in texture like the skins of sailors. The degree of this weathering varies with the individual, but the proof of it is the fact that the soft, smooth, waxen skins of some English districts, where it rains but does not blow, are here almost completely unknown. The wind is in fact such a constant menace that we carry the signs even in our eyes, which visitors say we do not open. It is not just a half closing of the lids, as in Australia, to keep out the light, but a puckering up of the surrounding muscles in an effort at adjustment that never ceases. So the calm, bland, wide-eyed gaze of some European countries is seldom seen here. The weather is changing us, and will change us still further, even though a steadily increasing proportion spend a third of their time indoors. It is even conceivable that if we could be completely isolated for millions of years we might be as far physically from our European ancestors as our bush is from a European forest.
But we must not dwell too long on these external things, or see them only. If we do that we shall justify the visitor to Milford Sound who remembers nothing but the sandflies, who can't find Captain Cook at Mercury Bay until he has first found the missing plug of the bath, and who saw nothing when he came to Wellington a few years ago but Mt Cook jail. The story of a country is like the story of a man: the valet knows a part of it and the hero-worshippers a part, but the truth is not with one or the other. New Zealand to some people is a land of so many physical wonders that they would sell it bag and baggage to tourists. To others it is a place where the farmer wastes his manure sacks and leaves costly implements standing most of the year in the weather; where the broken wire you see this year is still broken next year; where mummified rabbits hang in rows by the roadside, pigs stand to their bellies in muck, and the cows in winter (as a malicious veterinary surgeon said from the public platform) wear covers not to keep them warm but to hide their bones. That surgeon does not now practise in the district in which he made that remark, since we are a sensitive people, and do not give prizes for candour. But such a picture of our country, though it would be a foul libel on farmers who have some claims to be the most efficient in the world, would be no more misleading, and very little more irritating, than a picture of New Zealand in which every cow was a prize-winner at a show, every draught-horse a lesson for the Scottish Clydesdale Society, and every fence as straight and tight as those lining most of our railways. The stories we are afraid to tell in full are usually not very full. We are afraid of them because the sordidness and meanness bulk so much more prominently than the decency and generosity. But the story of New Zealand could be told in full if any book were big enough to hold it, and as much as can be put into one small volume can be put there plainly. It is a unique story politically, first because it was colonisation conducted to a previously worked out plan, and in the second place because the colonists, although they soon scrapped the plan, remained so faithful to the spirit of it that the third and fourth generations still speak of a country they have never seen as Home; a strange story economically, because in a hundred years no strong business bonds have been established with any country but that one which lies farthest away; and a reassuring story socially, because privilege has passed from layer to layer through the whole mass without any appreciable disturbance. But those stories have been told. We are concerned with the story that does not get into books: the story the winds are telling, and the sun; the sheep and the cows and the rabbits; the Wild Irishman in the hot-house and the red stag in the bush; the sparrows in the wheat and the grubs in the grass; the soldier on the battle-front and the pacifist in jail; the preacher at the street corner and the crowd in front of the totalisator—the story everybody is telling and nobody acknowledges, because nobody hears it, or stops to listen for it, or thinks it significant, or cares much if it is. It is the story of the New Zealand that everybody knows and nobody, the New Zealand that lies all about us, a place on the map, a lump of earth, a conglomeration of mountains, rivers, valleys, hills, and lakes, a collection of islands, a millon-and-a-half people, a political unit, a British Dominion, a country at war, a community transforming itself socially, a white man's land, a brown man's land, a land lying so far from the controlling centres of the world that no one but its own people can take it seriously; but our land and our life. And if the story must be told plainly it must also be told typically. We must not concentrate on the unusual, as advertisers do, or present only the fault in Cordelia and not Cordelia herself. It is easy to find unusual things and unusual people. The day I was asked to write this book I attended a conference to discuss the whole series: their size, contents, authors, subjects, and general style. We were a professor, a lecturer, a librarian, and two or three government servants with the Under-Secretary of the Department in the chair. Somehow an argument started about the place in our literature held by Tutira, and in the middle of it the telephone rang at the Chairman's elbow. What he was asked I have never known, but this was his answer:
'Two-eleven … What! Two-seven? Rot, man! He never got near it.'
Nothing else.
We returned to Tutira, wandered on to Katherine Mansfield, and were listening to an exposition by the Chairman of the laws of copyright when the telephone rang again.
First the Chairman said 'Damn!' Then he picked up the receiver, listened for perhaps fifteen seconds, and answered at once:
'No, Mac, two fillies only. She never left a colt.'
The next moment he was back on copyright, without a sign of mental disturbance or any indication at all that he thought the situation unusual.
Was that a typical New Zealander?
Or was the farmer typical who joined me that day for lunch? As we sat waiting for our soup in a public dining room he asked me, I can't now remember why, if I had noticed in the newspapers that the King and Queen read the Bible every day. I had not noticed it, and said so, but added that I was not surprised. He clearly was surprised, and even excited. He was in fact explaining how important it was when the soup arrived and brought us back to the table. Mechanically I offered him bread, salt, pepper, everything that I thought he might want. But he did not begin. He waited, I now realise, to make sure that I too was ready, then without a trace of self-consciousness, bowed his head, closed his eyes, and in a firm clear voice asked God to add a blessing.
We parted after lunch and I did not see him again, but I thought when the evening paper arrived that he should also have prayed for protection. He was spending the night in the city, and if he turned, as he probably did, to the advertisement pages to see what to do in the evening, he must have seen an invitation in big print and double columns to go to a certain picture-theatre to 'Meet the Girls', who were 'Great' and 'Gay' and 'recommended more especially for adults'. If he escaped the girls he perhaps fell among the prophets, since the next advertisement, also a double-column display, announced that the 'voice of prophecy was speaking again' and that the fourth of the 'greatest series of prophetic lectures ever given in Wellington' would be heard in the Blank Theatre, where the doors would open at seven, and nothing worse would follow than a 'free-will offering'. If that did not get him there was the announcement in the next eight inches that 'handsome Joe Corbett, under 30 years old, 6 feet in height and 17 stone in weight', who was 'tough as well as pretty' and had defeated such men as Ali Baba, Ed Don George, and Gus Sonnenberg, would open the wrestling season by 'trying conclusions' with 'popular Dick Raines', who had not only beaten Ali Baba but 'drawn with Bronco Nagurski'. And if by reason of strength he survived the girls, the prophets, and the he-men, the politicians probably got him, since the remaining four-inch double space on the page contained an 'Important Announcement' by a new political organisation of a meeting to be held in the Town Hall, and a warning that 'Members and Friends of the Movement' who had 'not yet applied for their tickets', with 'supporters for whom tickets could not be issued for the last meeting owing to lack of accommodation', must make Immediate application at Room —, Floor —, in — Building.
It was a dangerous world, I thought, for rural fundamentalists, and when I left the city myself by harbour-ferry I wondered which of my two hundred fellow-passengers really represented New Zealand. I have since watched most of them twice a day for many months, and I am wondering yet. Some talk all the way (forty-five minutes) and some read. Some knit and some play cards. Some trim, paint, and polish their nails. Some gaze into mirrors and some into space. Some read newspapers and some books, for few find the sea sufficient, or the sky, or can endure their own company for three-quarters of an hour. "We are lawyers, labourers, school-teachers, factory-workers—women as well as men; bank-clerks, typists, shop-girls, public servants. Occasionally we have a minister of religion with us and once at least I saw a Minister of the Crown. But have we a New Zealander? Is there one among us so typical of all that New Zealand comes and goes with him? Not one of them is New Zealand, but all are, and if we are to get a picture of them we shall have to avoid standing too close to the big trees that hide the wood.
2 Appeal to Figures
There is of course a sense in which every man springs from the soil. Literally as well as figuratively all flesh is grass. A New Zealander is a man whom New Zealand earth has nourished. He is the size, the shape, the colour, the weight that climate and geography have made him.
And of these we have reasonably precise knowledge. New Zealand breaks the surface of the world's loneliest ocean. Its nearest neighbour is twelve hundred miles away, and most of it faces boundless sea. Sail east or sail west and you will come to no other land for three weeks unless you lose your course; and then you will hit the toe of South America. Sail south and you will not be stopped till you reach the ice round the Pole. Though New Zealand is a thousand miles long and averages a hundred miles wide, that is such a small area in the Southern Ocean that it looks about as important on the map as a match in a bucket of water. And because much of it is 'uplifted high'— a considerable proportion of the South Island is more than four thousand feet, and a good deal more than eight thousand—it brings down the clouds and throws up the winds. We have much sunshine in New Zealand—an average of at least six hours a day right through the year; but nearly all of the North Island and much of the South Island has fifty inches of rain or more; and there are two or three corners only where the wind does not blow for at least three days in every week. All this sunshine, all this wind and rain, playing on a land surface generally fertile at low level but seldom low for many miles on end, covered the North Island and much of the South with a forest growth at once sub-tropical and sub-antarctic. It was only in Marlborough, Canterbury, and Central Otago that the first settlers found country ready for sheep and cattle. Everywhere else bush stood in the way, a black impenetrable mass. Everywhere else to-day if settlement disappeared the bush would return. We live exposed to all the conditions that made our country half a jungle and half a wilderness before we first saw it, and inevitably we carry the marks of the struggle.
For although it has not been a harsh struggle relatively, such a battle with blizzards as would have been our lot in North-West Canada, or with icefloes and hurricane seas such as we would have met in Labrador, it has been persistent. Our land is rich where it is arable, and if we had not cleared and cultivated it so recklessly most of it would still have been stable. In millions of years it had covered itself with a plant growth perfectly adapted to our weather. Where the rain was forty inches or more there was sub-tropical jungle. Where it was less than that the bush had adapted itself by reducing its evaporation rate; or had given way to tussock. Our battle with our environment has been the kind of battle our muscles and nerves carry on every day against our clothes—not often a violent war, but never for a single moment complete peace, as we discover when the enclosing pressures and irritations are removed. It has been stimulating enough to prevent us from becoming Italians or Spaniards, but it has not battered and blistered us into Norsemen or Nova Scotians. One of its chief effects has been a call to work, unceasing diligence against unceasing efforts by Nature to smother our struggles and absorb us. We are extraordinarily diligent for people who have never gone hungry or cold or been threatened with annihilation by tempest, fire, or flood; for although earthquakes threaten us, few of us believe that they threaten us with extinction, and if we did believe that we would not think it possible to defend ourselves. It is not to outwit Vulcan that we work so steadily but to resist the return of the bush, the sweeping away of our uncovered soil by wind, frost, and rain, the destruction of our plant and animal life by disease, to overcome our distance from our markets, and the unpleasantness of mud, bad roads,
When all his other works (and words) are forgotten, Mr Semple may be remembered as the man who lifted us out of the mud.
hastily built houses, wet clothes, and a hundred other things that harry us without threatening to crush us. We are committed, not at all to a violent life but to a life without repose. We travel, and must travel, like the ships that brought us here—tacking, turning, slowing up, racing on, an erratic course that from the deck itself seems to be leading nowhere, but is a steady journey from one world to another which posterity will see as a straight line.
Already some of the results are on record, for in most measurable ways—occupations, health, numbers, and length of life, for example—we are precisely what our environment has made us. Even our less measurable attributes—educational and social trends, and perhaps even our marriage customs and histories—depend far more on soil, rain, and wind than statisticians realise or will confess. They certainly depend on the fact that we are here, and we are here partly at least because geography has enslaved us and made us feel that it is good to be here. It is literally true that the Lord is our shepherd if we are farmers. Without His sun and rain we do not He down in green pastures. Unless He raises mountains across the course of the winds we do not walk beside still waters. In Central Otago, where the rain is less than twenty inches a year, we do not milk cows. In Westland, where it is more than a hundred inches, we do not run sheep. We are carpenters because we have timber; fell- mongers because we have skins and hides. Gold and coal made us miners. Melted snow made us hydroelectric engineers.
The list could be lengthened indefinitely, but it would be labour in vain. That job has been done. Our best known, most frequently consulted, most eloquent, and in many ways most original book, a book that robs Mass Observation of its novelty and most of its nonsense, counted us, classified us, labelled and disposed of us before all but the very oldest of us were born. It tells us in fact why we were born, and how; what has happened to us since, and who made it happen; what pots we boil, what games we play, what mates we find, what battles we have waged and must wage—for as Einstein reminds us, the domestic war can never cease. And when it has told us all that, the Year-Book gives us one terrifying glimpse ahead—tells us what will kill us, when death will come, and in what corner of the cemetery we shall then lie.
According to statisticians our story is something like this. We are born British if we can be, but only 91 per cent succeed if the test is blood. For the statement so often made that New Zealanders are 98 per cent British means no more than that 98 per cent of them are born under the British flag. If it were permissible any longer to talk of race we could certainly say that we are pure beyond all precedent, but we could not say that our purity reaches 98 per cent. We might claim 92 per cent, but since race is a myth, and the British nation its chief destroyer, it is better to say that 91 per cent of us were clever enough to be born of English, Scots, Irish, or Welsh stock, and 98 per cent of parents wise enough to be British citizens. We should have to say also that it is twice as easy in New Zealand to have English as to have Scots blood, half as easy again to have Scots blood as to have Irish, and fifteen times as easy to have Irish as to have Welsh. It is in fact as easy to be Scandinavian as to be Welsh, and about half as easy to be German, but it is very difficult to be French. It would be easier to be born French than to be born Russian, but as there are more Jugo-Slavs in the Dominion than Russians and French combined, the prospect of arriving in New Zealand to find oneself a Jugo-Slav is almost as good as the prospect of opening one's eyes on parents wholly Nordic. Nor is it nearly so easy as most people imagine to be Asiatic. While the chance of a Scandinavian parent is about one in a hundred, and of a German parent about one in three hundred, the chance of an Asiatic parent, Chinese, Indian, or Syrian, is a little smaller than one in five hundred. But whatever our choice is in parents, and our prospect of getting the blood we want, we are not so anxious to exist at all as we were ten years ago, and not nearly so anxious as we were twenty years ago. In 1919 the birth-rate was twenty-one in a thousand. In 1929 it had dropped to nineteen. To-day it is only seventeen, which means that death is maintaining its pace more consistently than life is. For although the death-rate in New Zealand is low, the second lowest in the world, births have dropped so much faster than deaths that the natural increase has declined in ten years from 12.8 to 8.7. And if that is not sufficient evidence against our statistical New Zealander it is on record that, when he does think it worth while to sample life, he prefers to be a male, likes a father between twenty-five and thirty-five and a mother a little younger, is a little shy of printers and public servants, and prefers farmers to miners, miners to quarry hands, quarry hands to fathers who build bridges.
Once he arrives the young New Zealander has a better chance of surviving his first year than any other baby in the world. He can in fact at the end of his first fortnight expect to live to sixty-five, but if he has had his way and has arrived as a male he has robbed himself of nearly three years. He will of course have to go to school whether he wants to or does not, and stay there for seven years at least, but if anyone would tell him the facts in advance he could have the satisfaction all that time of knowing that he will usually be about seven months ahead of his Australian contemporary in mental age and be costing his father at least a packet of cigarettes a week in taxes. The chance that he will go through a secondary school is about one in two, and his prospect of getting to a university is a little better than one in twelve. But he will sooner or later have to work, and this, if he is not a farmer, will take him into manufacturing as a first choice, into commerce next, then into transport or communications, and after that into public administration or professional work. It will also take him into the biggest tax-paying group, and, if he remains our average man, bring him something between £4 and £6 a week. So he will marry, more certainly and more promptly than his contemporaries anywhere else in the British Commonwealth, and the chances are about fifteen to one that he will stay married. He is also five times as likely to have a religious as a civil marriage, ten times as likely to remain nominally associated with a church as to break away altogether, and twenty times as likely to retain some religious faith as to proclaim himself an unbeliever. He may of course remain statistically religious and not go to church so far as the government knows, either because he has so few companions that a church is beyond their financial resources, or because he worships at a secret shrine that he refuses to reveal, or because he believes that God is a jealous God who resents intermediaries. Similarly he may be outside the ranks of the believers for more than one reason—either because he is a Rationalist, in which case he will have two thousand companions, or an Agnostic, when he will have fifteen hundred, or a Freethinker, when he will have nine hundred. If he is a Confucian, he will find himself in a group that is shrinking almost as rapidly as the birth-rate, and if nothing will satisfy him but membership of a congregation that is growing faster than the natural increase of the population he will have to join the Christian Scientists, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Rationalists, the Agnostics, the British-Israelites, or the Others.
His age is now uncertain, but if he is still under thirty he has a mathematically undefined but still strong claim to a game of football, and for another twenty years at least, and probably more, he will remember with some pain what the Springboks did in New Zealand in 1937. Even if he turns his back on football and goes to the races he will remain sensitive to national calamity,
Phar Lap's sudden death in America in 1932 shook us almost as much as the death of Kitchener in 1916.
and if a further football disaster threatens he will stay away from the racecourse for a whole day to lend moral support to what his evening paper once called 'mastodons straining in the mud'. But for all his fidelity to football statisticians find him elusive, and hesitate to say on how many days in the year he will be found on the bank, how often inside the enclosure, and how often he will have slipped away without excuse or reason to cricket, tennis, bowls, or the dogs, or even into the wilderness to shoot or fish. If he goes to a hut in the bush or the tussocks he will not however lose contact with the serious side of life unless it is one odd hut in a hundred, but will go to bed with Phar Lap looking at him from the walls and Tom Heeney, the Brownlie brothers and Mark Nicholls, George Nepia and Dave Gallaher, and will know that all the others looking on—cricketers, scullers, hockey girls, and gun-club champions—are helping to keep the world healthy for democracy.
But the day will come when he begins to feel stiff in his joints. He will grow old, and if his digestion does not give him trouble his circulation will, or his respiration, a cyst—we have one special to New Zealand—or a malignant tumour, and one day he will die. He will die because his heart has failed, or because of anarchy in his cell tissue, or because his arteries have become brittle or his kidneys are tired, or he himself is too tired and too slow to jump out of the way of a speeding motor-car; for one of those reasons, and perhaps for two of them; but there are many other possibilities for him if those do not open a wide enough door. If it happens in his fifties he will be a little unlucky, since the sixties are a good deal more dangerous, the seventies worse, and the eighties-and-over worst of all; but although there is about one chance in ten thousand that he will even go safely through the nineties, he will die sooner or later, this man who has never existed, and all that lies before him then statistically is a choice of burial services. It is certainly a very generous choice, with the chances about one in two for the Church of England, one in four for the Presbyterians, one in seven for the Roman Catholics, one in twelve for the Methodists, one in sixty for the Baptists, one in ninety for the Brethren, one in 120 for the Salvation Army, and at least a dozen other possibilities that may not be entirely ruled out. For we treat our statistical population well in life and in death until the Treasury hears about them, and even then we are kind to them if they have lived and died average robots. It is quite likely that the Treasury will forget him, since the deceased, having married someone younger than himself, and having in any case a shorter expectation of life than females of his own age, will probably have left a wife; but if more than a pound in a hundred is taken from his estate he climbed at some time during his statistical career into a class to which he did not belong, and New Zealand does not like people who do unexpected things, or climb up in the world and forget their friends. So it drags them down afterwards, and puts its penalties on record. It also likes to think that whatever people leave behind them—for even statistical men take nothing with them—they leave to beneficiaries standing close to them in kinship. If for example our statistical man, finding himself a widower, decides to leave everything to his mother-in-law, she will pay from 5 to 10 per cent for his devotion, unless the estate is very small. So if the wind and the weather, the sunshine and the soil, make us do unexpected things while we are alive, they will make the community do unexpected things to us after we are dead, and thus keep our idiosyncrasy curve under safe control.
Figures of course leave a good deal of us unaccounted for, but that is not the fault of the statistician. He measures us when we give him the chance, and the results go accurately into his books. But he does not post a he-detector to us when he sends us a form to fill up, and honesty in most of us is relative to the time and the place. We may be safe with the pound note that a friend gives us for the totalisator, but our memory may fail a little when we are filling up an income tax return. And how is the statistician to know, and the Year-Book to say, how often 'it will do' is substituted for 'it is done' in our factories, on our farms, in our kitchens, and even in our schools? In a country in which labour is dear and raw materials are cheap the temptation to scamp work is too strong to be resisted every time. The farmer who has dipped ninety-nine sheep will sometimes forget the hundredth if it jumps out of the yards at the end of a long day and joins the ninety and nine when he is not looking; the carpenter who splits a board may not replace it if the accident happens at five o'clock; the reporter who is covering a meeting may decide, if he is rushed, that Johnson will do for Jonson, Johnston, or Johnstone, and that names are only labels in any case; the woman who has scalded the milk twenty days on end may decide on the twenty-first day of the heat wave that it will not this time go sour. We can hardly blame the statistician if figures do not always mean what they say in his lists, but we shall certainly not see New Zealand accurately if we shut our eyes to facts that every visitor notices—our tendency to be casual, to drop the hammer when the nail needs one more blow, to trust to luck, and to assume, in big things and small, that Nature can now and then be mocked. There is an Italian proverb that the devil shows us how to make the pot, never the lid. New Zealanders make strong pots, but they are too busy sometimes, and sometimes too tired, to give the lid the same attention, if indeed they have any taste or talent for lids. We must therefore remember when we read the Year-Book exactly what we are reading. But if statistics are sometimes not true they are never false, and they are 'near enough' to the truth in most cases to support an argument. As a picture therefore of the official New Zealander they 'will do'.
3 Appeal to Facts
The New Zealander we have followed through the last twenty pages is the New Zealander nobody knows. He is accredited by authority, weighed, taped, and tagged, but if he had stamps on his fingers and brands on his toes we would still not recognise him as a countryman if we met him on the highway. Statistical man is what we have called him, a robot. You do not eat with him, drink with him, talk with him, marry him, quarrel with him, or put him into parliament. Nor does he interest himself in any way in you—collect your rent or build your house or make your clothes or send you an income-tax demand. No one ever heard him sing or laugh or preach or pray, for science has left him without brains or bowels, dumb, blind, deaf, and completely inert. But you keep your weather eye on him. Before you add cubits to your stature or flowers to your family tree you remove yourself from the company of those who know him too intimately. In this chapter therefore we try to avoid questions to which an answer can be given in figures. We discuss, not those measurable things for which statisticians can draw a graph, but intangible and imponderable things, tendencies, probabilities, and appearances that elude or defy tabulation.
Nor is it the relatively simple problem of judging the tree by its fruit. We have to decide what flowers and fruit the tree may bear when its roots have driven deeper into the soil. The men and women we know, the people we think we are, though they may yield to statisticians in the mass, are as intractable one by one, as moody, and generally as unpredictable, as our weather. They do one thing in the North Island, another thing in the South Island, different things on two sides of a mountain in the same island. Just as the same plant in our bush may be a tree in one place and a shrub in another, or completely change its leaf habit when it reaches a certain height from the ground, so people of the same stock may be found radical or conservative according to the direction of the winds and the depth of the soil, or conservative in New Zealand after being radical in England; or vice versa. When Professor Stapledon visited New Zealand a few years ago he noticed that many immigrant grasses had become 'wilder' than the natives, so that only experts could now say confidently which were indigenous and which exotic. The human stock is not going 'wild' quite so rapidly, but it is showing variations. If the people of New Zealand had to be flattened down into a single generalisation, and the generalisation squeezed into a phrase, we might have to say still that we are Britain transplanted, by contrast with Australia, which is beginning to be Britain re-born. But that is one of the many compressions which conceal the truth. It may be with difficulty that we are becoming ourselves, but we have ceased to be anybody else. There has, for example, been a less rapid assimilation of those British immigrants who have arrived during the last twenty-five years, not because they are different material from those who came earlier but because we are different from our parents and grandparents. When the soil is loose and open there is easy absorption of rain. When a crust has formed a good deal of rain has to fall to soften it, and in the meantime a good deal runs away. We know that a proportion, not large but noticeable, of those who came here between 1920 and 1930 returned disgruntled, and although one reason for the exodus was the fact that it was easily possible—many pioneers would also have changed their minds if the chance had come—another was the difficulty of breaking through our hardening crust.
The question is: what are we beginning to be beneath that crust? We know of course that we are addicted to sport, and that the noise of our rejoicing fills the land. We may even admit that we rejoice a little too heartily, play too intensely, and take our pleasures too purposefully. The philosopher's remark to the boy who beat him at billiards, 'You play well, young man, far too well', would in fact worry us if we had any faith in philosophers. But when we remember that the alternative to kicking a football might easily be kicking one another, and that countries which neglect racehorses usually neglect liberty too, we think one race-meeting a day and two or three hundred football matches a week a reasonable price to pay for democracy.
We know too that we are law-abiding, for although we pass laws that we do not obey, and obey some that we do not enact, the faces of our policemen are clear enough proof that their vigils are relatively peaceful and their dreams untroubled. But there are some signs that we like legal argument—that we obey when we must but question when we can. The number of people who have been in Court either as complainants or as defendants is certainly high; but this means, not so much that we are litigious as that justice is prompt, sure, and relatively cheap. People who do not go to law may go with a brick behind a hedge, take to mud-slinging, or even to the gun rack. One of the signs that anarchy has had no appeal for us is the almost complete absence from our story of appeals to the 'unwritten law'. Even when settlement outran the machinery of order, as it did in the goldfields and occasionally in the bush, direct action for personal injury was rare enough to be a sensation remembered for two generations. Yet thousands of miners came here from California at a time when anarchy was the rule.
Related to this respect for reason, and perhaps arising out of it, is our readiness everywhere to confer. We have an almost universal belief that talking does no harm if it does no good, so spend large sums of money and an incredible amount of time on religious, political, social, and economic conferences, which we no sooner bring to an end than we arrange to call them again. Historians may see in all these meetings a perpetuation of the folkmoots of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors and a proof that democracy never dies. It is at least a fact that the fundamental idea in both cases is that assembly is the beginning of wisdom; and to the extent to which the habit is not British it is American, which makes us safe both ways.
Wisdom of course implies some skimming and some maturing of the brew. If fermentation were enough, the wisest communities would be those with the biggest halls and the cheapest travelling facilities. But big meetings depend for their success on multitudes of little meetings, and since these in their turn depend on the ideas assimilated by ordinary individuals, it is necessary to ask where those ideas come from in New Zealand at the present time. Ultimately of course they come from some thinker's brain, but they reach ordinary brains by two or three well defined routes, and of these the daily newspaper still carries the heaviest traffic. Radio provides news and entertainment but not yet, in New Zealand, ideas. The newspapers on the other hand are more influential than they have ever been before, since radio, as a state monopoly, is under a controversial ban, and there is widespread distrust of academic minds. Thought necessarily rules in the end however the seed reaches the soil, but cleverness is not always wisdom, and unusual cleverness is nearly always an impediment to the flow of wisdom by a direct channel from the intellectual to the uninformed. If the freest channel of communication in New Zealand is therefore the newspaper, that is because newspapers break down the heady stuff of thought without revealing, and often without knowing, where it originally came from. Nor is mistrust of intellectuals a new phenomenon in New Zealand. It runs right through our political history, and is clearly marked in the history of education and religion. William Massey inspired more confidence than Francis Bell; Joseph Ward more than John Findlay; Richard Seddon more than Pember Reeves; the dullest of his contemporaries more than Captain George Grey.
There are of course overseas parallels. Washington inspired more confidence than Jefferson, Botha more than Smuts.
It is doubtful if it could ever be said of any nation that it has been collectively intellectual, but it has never been possible to say it of any British community. And in that respect we are more British than the British. We follow our instincts, trust our emotions, mistrust theory. So we mistrust, and even fear, men who march to strange music.
And just as we fear the man who hears voices that our own ears do not register, we mistrust the man, wherever he comes from, who uses a strange tongue. Aliens are still 'foreigners' to nine New Zealanders out of ten, and eight out of the nine are uneasy about them. It was unmistakable last year that although it was a blow to our hopes it was not a shock to our minds when France capitulated. Our faith in our ally had been the faith of the father of the afflicted child who cried out in his misery: 'Lord I believe; help Thou mine unbelief'. We thought we believed, and tried to, but the moment the blow came we knew that we did not. So it is with alien refugees. We want to be hospitable, but we find it difficult. Our charity consents to their appeals, but seldom our reason. And in this respect too we are the sons of our fathers for twenty generations. When an Englishman goes to the Continent he wonders why the people remain so foreign. Coleridge is said to have given public thanks to God, at the close of a lecture, that he had been protected from all knowledge of the French language. But we shall misunderstand this suspicion if we fail to realise that it rests (very dangerously of course) on our reverence for trustworthiness. We may be rogues, liars, humbugs, and opportunists as individuals, and especially as private individuals, and still be able to enjoy our meals. But trustworthiness is still the supreme public virtue. We worship stability, and when men or things are not what they seem the ground rocks. So we reject adventurers, keep ourselves free of political scandals, and boast, and believe, that graft is impossible whatever government holds the cash box. It has in fact been suggested that the general absence of masked balls in New Zealand is the result, partly of our Puritanism, but chiefly of our hatred of the unknown.
Although New Zealand is not the only country in which public men realise that the appearance of evil is almost as bad as evil itself, we have taken the lesson deeply to heart. Cobbett attributed the popularity of one of the Prime Ministers of his day to his habit of going to church every Sunday with a large gilt prayer-book under one arm, his wife on the other, and a brood of children at his heels. But if we learnt that lesson from England, we learnt it easily. For it is a complete misconception of the situation to suppose that when a candidate for parliament is careful to have his wife on the platform with him he is remembering that women vote. He is remembering that we are respectable, observe and value the conventions, and place no virtue higher than domesticity. Women did not have votes in Cobbett's day. Children have no votes to-day. But Perceval the Prime Minister knew that marriage was the rock on which the social virtues rested, the institution that made society stable and generally kept it kind and clean; and we know it in New Zealand. We know more: we realise that an uprooted society scarcely a hundred years old depends far more on such influences than societies with their roots centuries deep in religion and tradition. Our wives mount the platform with us, and accompany us on all our campaigns, first because they want to, second because in a country with a universal franchise they have a right to, but chiefly because an overwhelming majority of men and women feel that it is better that the background of a candidate's life should be known, and very much better that it should be a stable background of generally approved design.
So it is with religion. When you enter a church you do not get the impression that zeal for God's house is eating us up. Congregations are small, collections very small, and a majority of those present are not young. Though there has been a noticeable change in all these respects during the war, only a blind man could suppose that most New Zealanders go to church. The proportion who regularly go is smaller than it has ever been in our history. But religious is as religious does. We still go to church to get married. We go to get buried. We have our children christened. We swear by God and the Bible. We turn back to religion in sorrow and in trouble—as anyone will see who watches the growth of congregations during war, examines the origins of religious movements outside the churches, follows the public notices in the newspapers, or listens to the multitude of counsellors on the war itself. Even if war had not come, religion would have kept our waggon hitched to a star. It would have gone on building churches and schools and hospitals and orphanages, maintaining through all its lapses and failures the dignity of man, preaching (and generally practising) charity. For although the pace had slackened, there was no indication at all that the impulse was coming to an end. Religion was the only force still strong enough to take bread on the way to our mouths, shillings on the way to our pockets, indulgences woven into the very fabric of our lives, and convert them into brick and stone and good works. Forces that work miracles before our eyes are not social, political, or economic. They are however Christians of great confidence who see in the Oxford Group movement and national days of prayer, in the practical Christianity of Rotary, or in public calls to national repentance, signs of a wholesale return to faith, and who believe that we shall again see the day when an unbeliever will be pointed out in the street.
I was told this story by the late John Hardcastle of Timaru, whose father had a farm near the Rangitata. He was sent as a boy to get a horse shod, and when he reached the smithy saw a stranger leading a horse away and the blacksmith standing at the door watching. As soon as the stranger was out of hearing the blacksmith said: 'See 'im? 'E don't believe in Gawd!' The stranger's name was Samuel Butler.
But social and economic forces may of course co-operate with religious forces and pay tribute to them. It is interesting to observe the connection in New Zealand between the miracle-working force of faith in God and the stabilising force of faith in ancient institutions. Superficial observers call us a radical community, and point out the obvious signs—socialism, here or on the way; the political and legal enfranchisement of women; working men on the Treasury benches; education, health, and security legislation; and a hundred other breaks with tradition. But the appeal to the past is still strong. We cling tenaciously to what we have. When we part with customs, privileges, or restraints, we cast lingering looks behind. The most influential newspapers are sober in dress and expression, printed in the morning, and firmly based on property and the flag. The Right wing of Labour dominates the Left wing. The broadcasting services are the most cautious in the world. Labour Day is certainly a national holiday; but saints' days are still observed by banks, and in Nelson they also observe the first Monday in August (though few know why, and some suppose that it celebrates, as it certainly facilitates, the first planting of potatoes). Nor is it quite without significance that the most memorable things in our art galleries (with some landscape exceptions) are portraits of pioneers. Just as we judge Scotland by Raeburn our children will judge us by Nicoll's portraits of 'old faithfuls' who set our feet in the paths that they cleared for us to follow.
Nor will the impression gained be a very violent travesty of the truth. We are just about as sober as those faces suggest. The visitor who detected 'a knell in the Englishman's voice', if he had lived long enough to visit New Zealand, would have detected an elegiac note in ours. We are not Puritan enough to take our pleasures sadly, but we take them very seriously, and are not naturally gay. We have little wit, and we have produced few public or private humorists. It is one of the paradoxes of Nature that a climate so sunny as ours is by comparison with Britain's has put less brightness into our faces and far less liveliness into our speech than has been produced by the smoke and overcrowding of London and Manchester. Our soldiers noticed in the mud of Flanders that most of the jokes came from Cockney regiments and most of the growling from their own trenches, or from those occupied by Australians. To say that we are melancholy would be giving us a more positive quality of gloom than the facts justify, and to say that we are dull would be a libel. But we are certainly not vivacious; and while our silence must not be confused with moroseness, it is marked enough to suggest that we are aesthetically inarticulate. We have no bush or tussock literature: musterers and swaggers but no Henry Lawson; roaring camps but no Bret Harte. We have never had a 'Banjo' Paterson. Nothing like the Sydney Bulletin has ever been possible; nor has it ever been possible for the Bulletin to move, mould, or rally us from Sydney. We are a sober, diligent, Puritan community in which the seeds of irreverence sprout slowly. And we live of course in a small country, doing everything on a small scale. The man who drains the swamp and breaks in the tussocks, milks his cows and shears his sheep, is certainly a subject for poetry. He may inspire the greatest poetry in the world. But he is not a spectacular figure in the meantime. We do not stop to look at him, start talking about him, point him out to others, and break into song about him. Nor shall we as long as he is as busy as he must be and we remain as busy as we think we ought to be. We have, and at present can have, no leisured class. Even when we make enough money to feel justified in taking our ease we do not know how to be at ease. The retired farmer, like the retired business man and the superannuated public servant, looks round for committees to sit on, stands for parliament or a local body, plays bowls until he is in the competition class, or exhibits fowls or flowers. Poetry of course will out in the end. When the heat becomes intense enough we shall see the smoke. But at present our feet are in the furrow and our eyes on the ground. We don't cry out because we are not excited, and we are not excited because we have passed out of the pioneer period, have never known any life but the life we lead, and are neither depressed nor exhilarated by steady, healthy, all-the-year-round labour. For we live exactly half-way between the Equator and the Pole. Physically we neither bake nor freeze, and because there is no hibernation period, no sudden arrest to the activities of man or beast, our mental temperature is as carefully conditioned as the air about our bodies. After all the wit of Ireland may be a defence against the rain, the liveliness of the Cockney his adaptation to a dismal environment. But season in and season out we go on with our work, not talkers or chatterers, and not unqualified admirers of those who are. If we are a little dumb, a little lacking in grace and poise, may the answer not be Latitude Forty-five South?
4 North Island
Year in and year out Wellington has two thousand hours of sunshine. It has also, intermittently, days without a breath of wind. You fall asleep to the groaning of trees and the rattle of windows and doors. You awake to a stillness that makes you wonder where you are. If you have the imagination for such alarms you think at once of 'earthquake weather'. If you have not forgotten Wordsworth you think of 'Westminster Bridge'. The hills, the houses, the harbour, the dingiest streets are not merely beautiful but touched with a benignity for which you have no words. It was Patagonia yesterday. This morning it is Lemnos or Norfolk Island.
But such miracles are rare. As a rule Wellington is gusty and bleak. Its harbour is choppy. Its hills are bush on clay. When rain comes with the wind, as it does on two days in every five, no other city in the Southern Hemisphere can be quite so dreary. It is difficult a hundred years later, when axe and fire have let in the sun and drainage has conquered the mud, to realise how depressing their first winter must have been to the original white settlers put ashore on Petone beach. It is however on record that many of them would have sailed away again if that had been possible, and when it is possible many people move away from Wellington now. For it is less true of Wellington than of any other city in New Zealand that men come here to live. They come to work, and when their work is done they go somewhere else to live unless age and habit have brought on inertia. There are certainly brave spirits who like Wellington for its own sake: the 'tempest's howl it soothes their soul', as Burns says it does to Scotsmen. They like its moodiness, its wildness, its sudden rages and equally sudden surrenders; they are Wellingtonians. All others are Wellington residents,
I have however heard one of these 'residents' speak of Wellington with arresting fervour. It was not merely the 'only place in New Zealand in which to work', he insisted, but the only place free of the inferiority complex that demands 'eternal protestation of glory'. And Athletic Park was 'probably the only ground in the world', he added, 'on which the visiting team got louder cheers than the home side'.
and on these at least the climate and site have been fatal to cohesion. Time will of course win in the end. More and more people as the years pass will spread out into suburbs and conquer exposure and bareness and transfer their affections to these precious patches of clay. The proportion of dwellers is increasing, of residents decreasing, and so it must continue as long as there is growth.
But the fact remains that people do not take root in Wellington as readily as they do in Auckland or in Christchurch. When allowance has been made for the fact that the seat of government must have a bigger boarding-house population than other cities, the number of temporary residents in Wellington is disproportionately large. The number who talk about their future plans is large, even for a city in which superannuation dominates the mental horizon. But although the proportion is large it is not surprising. Men and women are animals who love the sun, and shelter even more than the sun; they like peace, and as the years pass over their heads they like repose; they dislike noise. They like to be able to talk without raising their voices, to walk without fighting for their balance, to wear clothes without a challenge and their hair on the right side of their heads. So when the day's work is done they leave Wellington. They leave when their life's work is done. They leave for their holidays. The first words their children learn are 'Five (or seven or three) years more!'
And with that thought so big in their minds there is less room for many sordid worries. The house could do with another coat of paint. But whose house is it? The hedge is rushing up instead of out, and is now all draught-holes. But it was tending that way when they first took the place. The garden should be trenched and generously manured. They know that as well as you do; but a real garden—the kind they will give themselves in Havelock or Nelson—is the work of several years. They have only two more to go. And why buy pictures until you know on what walls they will finally hang? Why collect books? Pianos are just impossible things until you come finally to rest. Well made furniture will not go with jerry-built houses.
It is not mere patter. Wellington carries on its houses and in its houses, on and in its people, the wind that blows above them and the clay that lies below them. It is careless materially because it has no alternative; it is careless mentally because one thing leads to another. Because so many do not intend to stay, there are more here than anywhere else who can never be worked up into those absurdities of parochialism that at times make other cities ridiculous. While Christ-church is Canterbury and Dunedin Otago, Wellington is not much more Wairarapa or Manawatu than it is Marlborough or Nelson. It is almost true to say that there is a typical New Zealander after all and that Wellington is his home. You will certainly find the unbranded New Zealander here more easily than you will find him anywhere else; the New Zealander without a local warp; without pride of place or slavish delight in his misfortunes. If it rains in Auckland, Aucklanders like it so; when it freezes in Christchurch, Christchurch likes cold fingers and dead feet. But the people of Wellington do not pretend that they like being uncomfortable. Their reaction to their climate is a decision not to remain miserable all their lives. They are quitters, but they are honest and free. And in the meantime they are tolerant. It does not worry them that twenty thousand of their number should have hived off and established a city of their own ten miles away. Twenty thousand near Auckland but not in Auckland,
I remember, as I write this, that there are in fact more people in Auckland suburbs than in Auckland city—123,880, the latest returns show, out of a total population of 230,680. But they are all emphatically Aucklanders.
on the flank of Christchurch but not under its seal, would mean Royal Commissions, public agitations, appeals to parliament, and sooner or later a municipal campaign of protection. Nothing like that happens in Wellington. The Hutt is Wellington, but if its people choose to give it another name Wellington does not worry. It almost applauds.
But it is one of the paradoxes of Wellington that this widely held desire to leave some day is in conflict with the physical facts. The encircling hills are unfinished but they are there. You do not feel in Wellington harbour as you do in, say, Lyttelton harbour that the hills, with the Lord, shall endure for ever; that they were 'set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was'; when 'He gave to the sea His decree, that the waters should not pass His Commandment; when He appointed the foundations of the earth'. You feel that they could have been made by men, millions of men throwing up clay and puddling in round stones. And yet no other city in New Zealand is so effectually enclosed. If Kupe had been an explorer and not a navigator he would have been hard put to it to escape to the north. It was years before the first white settlers knew their way out. And even to-day, with all our road science, we are limited to two routes—both depressing. Whether you take the Hutt Valley or the Ngahauranga Gorge you go out through gorse, and the gorse means that the soil is too cold and too mean to clear. You are well into the Wairarapa or the Manawatu before you feel that the farmer is working with Nature and not against her, and before that stage is reached you have lost the feeling that New Zealand is a young and fertile country with its big days yet to come. "When you recover it you are well into the Wairarapa and the Manawatu, and even then you find yourself wondering what the story might have been if, instead of being South of England, the first occupants of Port Nicholson had been South of Scotland; if the Scandinavians who reached the Manawatu in the sixties and Hawke's Bay in the seventies had started from Petone in the forties; or if the whole colony cornered in Wellington a hundred years ago had escaped then over the ranges and not crept out one by one over a period of fifty years.
But since the land makes the man before the man makes the land, the traveller north by the eastern route finds himself at last among a sheep-raising gentry while the western route keeps him among cows. In both cases he passes through a Scandinavian belt without any sense of strangeness, though he sees signs here and there of an un-British respect for pigs; for in seventy years the Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes have suffered the same bush and mud changes as the English, Scots, and Irish, and only their names remain to remind us where they came from.
Now you are well into Hawke's Bay on one side and approaching Taranaki on the other, and from this stage on the story does not change. As far as you can go on one side you will find yourself among sheep and on the other side among cows. You will of course find cows among the sheep and sheep among the cows, but these will not deceive you. You will realise that you are watching a social-economic war for which the stage was set when New Zealand took its present size and shape. For the history of New Zealand is not so much a struggle between different races of men as between two great families of domestic animals. It is the battle of the sheep and the cows, which began as soon as white men came here to settle, and will go on as long as New Zealand is lifted up in the centre and lies across the track of the ocean winds. And the battle of the sheep and the cows, if it is not quite the battle of two civilisations, is the battle of two social systems. Sheep make gentlemen and cows unmake them. Sheep leave you with clean hands and clean feet, but cows drag your pride into the mud. Sheep leave you free, cows enslave you. Sheep make you a big farmer, cows make you a small farmer. Sheep leave you with Abraham and Jacob—though Jacob learnt something about cattle too—cows compel you to cultivate men of science or lose your labour. For although it is four hundred years since More's 'nobility and gentry, and even those holy men the abbots', amused themselves by teaching sheep to devour men, the practice still goes on. Sheep are still 'naturally mild and easily kept in order', but wherever they are kept in order by fences and not by the labour of their owners the human population decreases. The humble shepherds who watched their flocks in the plains of Bethlehem remained humble. The shepherds who came to New Zealand put up fences and climbed over the top wire into a new world. The social differences between the east and the west in New Zealand are to-day unmistakable; and sheep created those differences. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the history of the North Island is the story of those differences; and exaggeration is just truth a little out of focus. Until about thirty years ago, when the bush-farmers along the Main Trunk railway began to bridge the gap, the North Island was slowly splitting in halves. More's 'naturally mild' sheep were creating an eastern gentleman class, 'living at their ease' and (their western rivals thought) 'doing no good to the public', while the seven-days-a-week cows of the West Coast were converting labourers into farmers and farmers into politicians. When the gods wished to destroy our ancestors they first drove them mad. To-day they turn us out to grass. Although the sheepfarmers of Hawke's Bay were the first in the Dominion to demand political independence, they are the servants to-day, and will remain the servants politically, of their more numerous (and far more vocal) neighbours who milk cows. The most they can hope for is an uneasy truce with dairymen under the pressure of Labour, or an alliance with Labour to control the 'cockatoos'. If this were not a story without a moral, we might find ourselves suggesting that long fences mean short dynasties.
There is of course a little more in the North Island story than the social rivalry of cows and sheep. The men and women who followed the Main Trunk railway, for example, wove a social fabric of their own that their children have not torn up. You do not feel in Taihape or Taumarunui that it matters much whether they milk 'ceows' or 'caows'. It matters that they have sharp axes and a wholesome fear of fern. They do not lose caste if they eat in the kitchen. They lose everything if they are careless about second growth. For the corpse of their enemy will not stay dead. They have conquered the bush but they still sit in anxious occupation of the stumps. And because they were far too busy when the battle was on to polish their nails every day and scrape their chins, some are now too old and some too proud to change. The day will come when the traveller will pass from, the Rangitikei to the Waikato without knowing where he is socially. But he knows to-day that he is among ruder, stronger, simpler, and for all their cultivation of the ranker sins, essentially cleaner people than inhabit many more sophisticated settlements. Ask one of the older inhabitants to-day what he does in Taihape to amuse himself, and he may give you the answer you deserve: 'Watch fools like you going past in the train.' Ask one of the younger generation, and he will tell you with a tremendous grin that he drinks beer and knows a girl or two. Thirst and lechery are exalted in casual conversation into the high-spots of life, although the signs are everywhere that the chief sin is hard work without time to stand and stare.
And there is of course a reason for all this. The coast was settled by men of all ages and of all conditions, but whether they were young or old, penniless or relatively rich, they came straight from a settled and ordered society. Behind them lay a thousand years of Britain, a thousand years of Church and State with all their social balances and checks. The men who settled the King country had lost their traditions. They were the sons and sometimes the grandsons of men and women who had been half a century uprooted, or Irish immigrants who had strong national and religious reasons for not carrying on the old tradition. With few exceptions they were poor, and it was an accident if they had received a liberal education. They were hearty, as adventurers usually are, but they were also a little defiant, because many of them were the unlucky numbers from the first scramble, settlers who had not succeeded, artisans and labourers who had known soup kitchens, and who now went into the bush with many of the resolutions and resentments with which their parents had left Britain in the first place. The first money many of them ever saved was paid to them for work on the railway. Without that railway they would in fact have been submerged, but they succeeded so quickly with it that they are still in a sense nouveaux riches, confident and contemptuous, slap-dash, by no means a legion of the lost, but a legion, it is difficult not to say, of frontiersmen, who chopped and burnt their way to liberty in twenty years and found fortune in a bag of manure. You must not expect them to have social graces. But you have lost the faculty of distinguishing grain from chaff if you think that they and not you are barbarians.
When you reach Te Kuiti you are in a new drainage area and low country all the way to the end of the Island. If you turn off to Rotorua and Thames you will rise a little and fall a little, but whether you turn right along the Bay of Plenty or left along Auckland Peninsula you remain among cows, with the great flocks of sheep behind you or to one side of you across bush-clad mountains. Auckland worships the cow as devoutly as Wellington, Canterbury, and Otago worship the sheep; nor is its devotion a divided allegiance as geography has made Wellington's. A sheep north of Taupo has about the same place in the hagiarchy as a milking cow has south of Palmerston North: you uncover before both, and may even make sacrifice, but you do it furtively, and only when your other deity has failed you.
And because you are now in the country of the cow, and pass monuments to her every few miles—they stand as thick in the Waikato as in the greenest patch of Taranaki—you soon see the signs of a cheese and butter economy. From Kawhia to Hokianga, and from Opotiki to Keri Keri, though you are aware now and again of the influence of timber, of coal, of gold, and even of gum, you enter no township and follow no road that does not bring you sooner or later to a dairy-factory. You live cows, think cows, talk cows, breathe cows everywhere but on the rocky hump of Coromandel Peninsula; and even there you come on cows as often as you drop to the creek-flats and swamps.
In Thames you certainly forget the present as you linger among the signs of the past. Thames stops you. It has so many houses for so few people, and such good houses; so many churches and so many hotels, ancient and modern; so many poppet-heads and so many heaps of slag, that the past tugs at your elbow. Thames stands dreaming on its feet like a dray-horse that has emptied its nose-bag. It has worked hard, you know it will work hard again, but as you see it resting there with its head down, asleep on its legs between the propped up shafts, you wonder if it will ever wake up and start forward again into the collar. And those thirteen churches and thirteen hotels! Who built them, who supports them, which came first? They will tell you in the churches that sin built them, the consciousness of sin in those who fear God, and that they continue partly at least because the hotels continue. In the hotels, if you ask in lucid places, you will be told that they are the answer to the 'unco guid'—that the bars provide the charity and warmth that the rigidly righteous refuse. And although you may think yourself that both are the answer to the same prayer—the lonely and lost crying for escape—you wonder why Thames should be so eloquent and bigger towns so dumb. But so it is. The gold that made it still speaks. It speaks not only of days past but of days still to come, and here and there if you keep your eyes open you will see men disappearing still into holes in the hill, and doing incredible things in that dripping blackness now that gold is worth 168s an ounce. Gum you will find no one digging any longer, though there are many who know where it still lies; but if you are unlucky you will see something that makes you sick inside—caterpillar tractors climbing mountain ridges to drag down centuries-old kauri trees. It is not safe in 1941 to be sentimental, but it is difficult to avoid some internal disturbance when you come on the fresh stump of a tree that was standing before William conquered England, before Kupe left Raiatea, perhaps before the cross was set up on Golgotha; and know that the tree itself is on its way to Auckland to make wash-tubs and troughs for scalding pigs.
But it is time to get back to the cows, and if you return by rail you will arrive again at Hamilton. You will also pass from one age into another. In that short journey back to the Waikato you say goodbye to everything that was New Zealand once and make acquaintance with nearly everything that is New Zealand now. If Thames is many times older than its age, Hamilton is many times younger. Thames is as old as age can be without being decrepit. Hamilton is as young as youth can be and still sit at table with grown-ups. It will some day be mellow and beautiful, as every town must be that lies long enough on the high banks of a deep clear river. But it is not mellow yet. It is new—clean, vigorous, bustling, alert, but almost indecently young. And just as travellers find it difficult in Bournville to believe that they are in England, and not easy, when they remember where they are, to be sure that such a place should exist—meliorism, they will tell you, can itself be a menace—so the South Islander suddenly entering Hamilton wonders where all those shops and offices came from, who built them, who visits them, and what right the Waikato has to be so flagrantly prosperous. For it clearly makes little difference to Hamilton in normal times whether it hails or rains in Otago, whether frost or the north-west wind sears Canterbury, whether there are floods in Marlborough or drought in Hawke's Bay. As long as its cows calve and its bulls gender money will flow into its pocket and petrol fumes rise like incense from its main street. Canterbury can charge it a little more for wheat, North Auckland or Central Otago extract a little more for their fruit; but there is not much more that the rest of the Dominion can do to it, and the thought is hard to bear.
And as it is in Hamilton, so it has always been, for a hundred different and a thousand identical reasons, in Auckland. Auckland is not what it is just because its citizens are what they are. It is not the Queen City because two hundred thousand people keep on saying so. It has left Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin behind because it lies degrees nearer to the Equator; because it has always had land for its people to build their houses and water in which to swing their ships; because it is in the track of trade to Australia, the first point of call from America, and the nearest point for trade with what we still foolishly call the South Seas and the Far East. Timber has helped it, gold, coal, sugar, and gum. But nothing means so much to it to-day as butter, cheese, and milk. It is a rich garden fertilised from the cow-shed. And because cows are the foundation of its economy, the grocer, the butcher, the draper, and the baker are the guiding stars of its municipal life. Auckland is a city in which you buy and sell things and hope that you will not lose by the exchange. It has the short-circuited economy of the dairy farm itself—grass to-day, cream to-morrow, and your cheque at the end of the month. It has of course many rich men, but most of them have become rich in trade, which means exchange, and keeping things moving, and not having too many poor men. Auckland is a prosperous city—prosperous rather than comfortable. It moves, its pots keep on boiling; however full they are, they are not pushed to one side of the stove. They overflow, they splutter, they rise and fall, they bubble, the contents never settle. So privilege never gets a long grip. There are no entrenched families or parties. The man who serves behind the counter, in the courts of law, or in the doctor's surgery, who fights for his union, or keeps watch on the waterfront, becomes more influential than the man whose prosperity involves no personal contacts. It is not so much service before self—though any prophet could have foretold that Auckland would become the home of Rotary—as service to build up the self; and it is never forgotten in Auckland that they who build up can also take down. He that exalteth himself shall be abased unless he goes on holding himself up by useful work. Cows make you work. They make you remember the source, as well as the secret, of your prosperity. Auckland wears the secret on its brow. It has no false pride; only what the Scots call a good conceit: no superior ways; only a tendency to become self-centred: no superciliousness; only a frank parochialism. It has no need to worry about the south, no desire therefore, and no disposition to pretend.
Nor is it much more interested in its own north. Auckland peninsula means very little more in Queen Street than it does in Lambton Quay—once you have made allowance for its cows. Run a fence from Dargaville to Whangarei, and Queen Street will give you the rest for history. It is pleasant to think that our civilisation began there, pleasant to live there, comforting to know that when Queen Street becomes too noisy there are quiet bays up north and still waters studded with islands. But Auckland does not eat, drink, or grow fat there. It makes holiday. And when it is not there making holiday Auckland leaves the 'winterless north' to retired Empire-builders who do not think her thoughts and to European peasants who do not pursue her ways. When pride of place asserts itself at intervals and insists on a separate identity, Auckland smiles indulgently. If Northland sounds sweeter than North Auckland, Northland it shall be. But the cows still look south at milking-time.
5 South Island
From the North Island to the South Island as the gull flies is fourteen miles. From Wellington to Blenheim as the plane flies is fifty miles. But from a North Island cowshed to a South Island woolshed as thought flies is all the way from one world to another, and the only hope of reducing the distance is to reverse the direction of flight. For mind moves from south to north in New Zealand, and not from north to south. The South Island has to go on thinking about the North Island to keep its anger warm. The North Island remembers the South Island only when the interest falls due.
And for all this, if you examine the facts closely, you will blame the Southern Alps. If the mountains had inclined to the east coast south of Cook Strait as they do north of Cook Strait the Strait would have been a stormy ditch cutting a single country in halves. But for every drop of rain that falls south of Wellington two drops fall to the north, and for every blade of grass that becomes flesh in the south two or more in the north become fat. It is curious in so short a distance to see economy turned upside down, but the South Island is almost as reverential to wool as the North Island is to milk. Even when it follows the plough it likes to see a fat lamb watching through the fence. It is also curious that the South Island, though it is in fact younger than the North Island historically, seems very much older. In part this is meteorological. The more rain there is the more greenness there tends to be, so that the North Island seems always spring and the South always autumn. In part it is the result of religious and cultural associations, the dry lands of Egypt and Palestine having got into our minds with the Bible, the sun of Italy and Greece with the culture that we commonly call classical. It is in fact difficult to associate history and rain unless it is modern history. If we look past Australia the driest places on the map of the world seem to be the oldest places, and in the same way the driest parts of New Zealand seem a thousand years older than the wettest parts. Nowhere in the North Island—unless perhaps on Coromandel Peninsula—do you feel that history is behind you. Nowhere in the South Island—unless perhaps in the irrigation areas—do you feel that 'the best is yet to be'. Walking through Central Otago you could easily be among the hills of Judaea or on the road to Samarkand. You know in sober fact of course that history has hardly begun yet in one island or the other, but if you go south from Nelson through the Buller Gorge you will enter the only area in New Zealand where rain talks to you of things past. Between Reefton and Ross you will not think of the days that are coming, as we should everywhere in New Zealand, but of the days that not even our children's children will ever see again.
The more you see of the "West Coast and talk to West Coast people the more worthless worldly prosperity seems and the more vulgar your own standards. But the more conscious you also are of the 'tears in things'. For there is this difference between Thames and Karamea, say. Thames has fallen into a doze. Karamea and Reefton and Hokitika and Ross are all wide awake. They do not leave you to your own sad, and probably foolish, thoughts. They pull you up, remind you where you are, ask if you have been there before, and if you would believe that where you are now standing there was once a bank, or a school, or a jail, or a church, and gold flowing past you in the gutter. Then they give you a drink, and still another, and another, and when you finally drag yourself free you are not sure whether you have been present at a wake or at a christening. You do know, however, that whatever it is to you it is a christening to the Coast—that hope springs eternal there, and that real diggers never die.
But Westland is Westland, a world of its own, isolated by mountains and deep pride. A Westlander is not a New Zealander, and does not wish to be. If you want to see the South Island that is New Zealand you must go east from Nelson into Marlborough and from Marlborough by the only open road into Canterbury. And as soon as you get round the northern end of the mountains you find yourself thinking again of sheep, and of a past that is as remote politically as Westland's hectic days are economically. It is as true in the South Island as in the North, though not quite so obvious, that the man who milks the cows or grows the wheat will sooner or later make laws for the man who shears the sheep. Nothing can alter this but a rainfall so low that cows and cultivation are both contra-indicated, and in the whole of New Zealand there are two areas only, neither much bigger than a squatter's hand, where the soil receives less than twenty inches in a year.
Mile after mile therefore as you cross Marlborough and turn down the coast you meet political ghosts in sheepskin looking almost as forlorn as the economic wraiths of Westland. New Zealand owes them much, far more than it realises, infinitely more than it has ever publicly acknowledged. But they also owed New Zealand much, and they forgot, having little in their past to remind them, that the earth is the Lord's, and that although Caligula made a consul of his horse no Christian ever made a sheep into an elector. And when you enter Christchurch you see a sheep in the Cathedral and fleeces of wool on the city's coat of arms. For if it requires courage to call New Zealand the Britain of the South, it requires almost as much to call Christchurch 'typically English'. It has an English cathedral and an English name, English trees, and what could be, if it were not artesian, a sleepy little English river. Many of its streets bear English names, a handful of its citizens have been to English schools, it has one school of its own passing on a form of English speech and an ancient but never general English tradition. It has a newspaper that, if it were not all about New Zealand, might have come out of one of the three offices in Fleet Street that maintain its standards of intelligence and taste. But except that winter comes in winter and summer in summer there is almost nothing else in Christchurch that was ever England. The real story of Christchurch is as un-English as flax and cabbage trees, and begins, not with the arrival of the first four ships, but with the first challenge to squatters by shop-keepers. It is of course as true of cities as of the individuals who inhabit them that their actions are never as simple as they seem. No man builds a house or marries a wife or learns a trade or enters a profession for a reason that would go easily into one sentence. So Christchurch has not built its cathedral, preserved its park, given itself flowers, and factories, and race-horses, and twenty-seven religions, merely because it lives on mutton and wheat and goes both to Church and to Chapel. But no one studying the city to-day or examining its yesterdays can fail to realise that there has always been conflict between squatters and shopkeepers; between a minority, predominantly Church of England, who had land and some education, and a majority, largely Methodist, who followed trade and said 'baa' to the wool kings. It was not exactly the Cathedral against the Chapel, and it was never the country against the town. It was not even conservatism per se against radicalism per se, for some of the entrenched minority were more deeply liberal than most of the attacking majority. It was not wool against wheat or old world against new world. It was not even the thoroughbred against the trotter, although that often seems to be the line of division to-day. But it has been all those things in part, and since they are in general irreconcilable things, there is still no peace. Superficially the conflict has ceased, for now of course the majority rule. But the difference remains. And it is a New Zealand difference, woven out of the finest wool. If the Alps had risen a mile or two off the east coast instead of a mile or two from the west coast the story of Canterbury would have been the story of the Waikato and the Manawatu, and the story of Christchurch the story of Hamilton writ a little large. But the Alps said that Canterbury might have an inch of rain in a fortnight, never on an average an inch in a week, and that it would sleep on shingle and not on peat. The Alps kept the bush away, except here and there, and said that tussocks and Wild Irishman were sweeter than all the lianes of Malay. So they established early Canterbury firmly in the worship of sheep, and more and more sheep, till it seemed necessary to rise in the world not to get lost. Canterbury rose. Its squatters were the best, and most foolish, men New Zealand ever imported, for they had no sooner performed miracles of enterprise and endurance than they forgot that they were the creators of a brave new world and sent back to England for their top hats. It was a challenge to all the low hats, and at once there was a shout of'Snob!'—a foolish cry but fatal. For snobbery is of course no respecter of persons or of pockets, and in itself is merely pathetic. But if you talk about it you create it, like excess or lack of colour in the face. If the visitor is more conscious of social distinctions in Canterbury to-day than in Otago, Wellington, or Auckland, that does not mean that there are more snobs in proportion to population, or fewer, since snobbery is biological, like blue eyes or curly hair. It means that snobbery has been the subject of heresy hunts since the abolition of provincial government, with the result that some maintain a defiant uppishness when in fact they are only genteel, and others go about suspecting themselves and slipping unintentionally into a patronising friendliness. It may sound harsh to pile all these evils on the back of the sheep, but no one ever heard of top-hatted dairy-farmers or potato-growers or market-gardeners. To wear a top hat you must have leisure as well as prosperity, and there is more leisure between fleece and fleece than between calf and calf or seed-time and harvest.
With a few worthy exceptions the old families of Canterbury stand proudly aloof from politics, if not quite aloof from trade. They are still the best farmers in the province and the best neighbours—if neighbourliness is keeping your fences tight and your stock at home and your hand in your own pocket and your nose on your own side of the road. But they are not charitable institutions. They know how many pounds make five and how many weeks with its mother make a thirty-six pound lamb. If they owe you half-a-crown they will pay you half-a-crown, but when they hand over threepence to a newsboy they wait for the change.
There is on the other hand a West Coast legend that a prominent man who offered a boy threepence was known for the rest of his life as 'The Split Sixpence'.
After all nothing is more embarrassing than charity, and the Canterbury tradition is the just price. It is also the Canterbury belief that everything has a price. It at first shocks and then annoys Otago people, who enjoy being bantered about their thrift, and do not want to lose that privilege, to discover when they visit Christchurch that the superfluous kittens given away in Dunedin are in Christchurch offered for sale in the newspapers, with stray pups and superseded false teeth. Which all comes perilously near to saying that there is something in Canterbury that the other provinces lack. It is certainly true that if Canterbury is New Zealand Wellington and Auckland are something else.
Even Otago, which lies so close to Canterbury, shows no signs of merging with it. After ninety years of coming and going, and especially of buying and selling, the Waitaki river is still a boundary. It is not merely that sheep, as you move south, share the field with cows; that wheat gives way to oats; and relatively dry plains to relatively wet hills. It is not gold alone, or religion alone, or race alone. It is all these things working against the caste system in social affairs and turned to the uses of Puritanism in moral affairs. You may think it odd that oats and John Knox are more potent than wheat and the Thirty-Nine Articles when the rainfall rises; but the whole history of Otago proves that they are. No bishop has ever been so powerful in Dunedin as the famous Dr Stuart of Knox Church; no maker of starched shirts ever rose in the world so fast as the makers of working boots. You are not a paragraph in the history of Otago if you have owned a cup-winner and sat half your life in a racing club; but your grand-children may find you in Who's Who if you have been Chairman of the Education Board, on the Council of the University, or the leader of a movement for or against licensed drinking, mixed bathing, or Bible in schools. It would be ridiculous to suggest that the moment you enter Dunedin you feel John Knox's hand on your shoulder. You do not, unless you arrive on a Sunday. You are in fact more likely to feel the hand of Robert Burns, since the Octagon lies across your path whether you enter by rail or by road, and the poet looks down on it from one side and the monument to his nephew, Otago's first Presbyterian minister, rises up on the other. But long before you leave it, if you stay years and not days, you feel that the day you crossed from Canterbury to Otago you moved from England to Scotland politically and from the parlour to the kitchen socially. You also feel that life is very real in Dunedin, and very earnest, and that getting on is always one of its goals. Even in the University, of which Otago is so justly proud, 'Get on' is the motto though 'Get out' must so obviously be the result. Ever since the Dominion's population began to move north Otago has been bleeding itself intellectually through its University. For the influence of its Scottish founders remains. The students attend to pass examinations, and pass them; they go there to get degrees, and get them. But the rest of the Dominion gets the graduates when they offer their degrees for sale, and sometimes the rest of the world gets them. In spite of the fact that it is the only university college in the Dominion that has something like Dominion status and a Dominion-wide prestige—for the special schools in the other colleges do not approach its medical school in influence—it remains the nearest thing to a crarnming school under a New Zealand university roof; which might not matter much if Dunedin were not stationary economically. But with the goldfields worked out, the coastal fringe of bush disappearing, the soil getting thinner, and the winters no shorter, the cultivation of brains is Otago's only unthreatened industry, and forced cultivation means increased export and speedier exhaustion of supply. Pessima corruptio optimi.
But the real Otago, you may begin to think as you move south, starts when you leave it. Railways, radio, Sabbath-breakers, and jazz bands have left their mark all the way to Balclutha, and it is only when you enter Southland that you see Otago as it used to be. There are certainly some reasons for regarding the Clutha River as a boundary between two societies. It is a frontier, to begin with, over which permanent movement has been predominantly one way. Land is still cheaper in Southland, quality for quality, than it is anywhere else in New Zealand, unless perhaps in South Westland, and this means that of all those who have settled in Southland since the whaling days only a negligible percentage have moved out again. It is also the case of course that Southland has a long winter, and that Scotsmen endure cold well when cold and endurance are both good business. Four out of five of its farmers have always been Scots. It is almost safe to say that they are New Zealand's most typical Scots, since they pushed farthest into the wilderness when Captain Cargill turned them loose in Dunedin, and have been reinforced from time to time by those with the strongest noses for cheap land. They have certainly remained as stoutly themselves as any community of any origin now established on New Zealand soil. For it must be remembered that Southland was only for a very short time a separate unit politically. Whatever separateness it has to-day is the separateness of individuality, and not even Westland has more of that. For you can't shut your eyes on the West Coast to the self-consciousness of the West Coast tradition. There is no self-consciousness in Southland. The people are never 'Southlanders' (except once a year at football) as the people of the West Coast are 'West Coasters'. Southland was never Southland romantically, or even economically. No one ever heard of a Southland tradition. But it remains Southland in thought and speech, and retains some peculiarities in action. It votes Prohibition, for example, but makes illegal whisky. It wears sober clothes, but will pay forty guineas for a tartan kilt. It breeds the best draught horses in New Zealand, and perhaps in the world, but it can always find five hundred pounds for a tractor. It goes regularly to church, even when there is no church and it must meet in a school, but it remains one of the few areas in New Zealand in which anyone who can hire a film, borrow a projection plant, and buy an old car, can make wages by taking Mae West and Deanna Durbin to those who would otherwise not see them. It is for sociologists, or perhaps anthropologists, to say why the people in New Zealand who live nearest to the Bible and nearest to the soil, who can fatten pigs on grass and extract gold from skim milk, know more about Hollywood than they do about Massey College or Lincoln. But they do. A standard-of-living survey made in Southland three or four years ago established the fact that farmers there work longer hours than any other industry in the Dominion, and longer than any other group in their own industry. But they know who Charles Laughton is, and if he appeared suddenly at the Invercargill Show he would be offered a place in the parade between the leader of the pipe band and the ghost of Harry Lauder. He would also be shown the Municipal Theatre, and might even in a day or two be asked to go fishing. But if he squeezed through a fence into a paddock where cultivation was going on, the horses would not be stopped to greet him. The driver would make at least one more turn to gain time to think, and would stop his horses only when it seemed clear that this was not another of 'those fellows from Wellington'. It is doubtful if there is deeper suspicion anywhere south of the Equator than a government official arouses in Southland before his mission is known. Once he is himself known every door is open to him, but the day he first stops his car beside a gate and walks in he discovers what a gulf separates the man who 'works' in Southland from the man who only 'talks'; how little of what he says is being listened to; and how plainly that slouching figure is saying to him, 'Now tell me what you do want'. He will be lucky if he makes any impression that day. But if he survives the discussions at the factory next morning his troubles are over. No one is so hospitable, so warm-hearted, so genuinely friendly, as a Southland farmer once he drops his shield, but a talker must be living by his wits or he would be working.
You may however not follow the coast to Invercargill. You may turn up one of the river valleys followed by the gold-seekers, and if you continue into the centre of Otago you will find yourself farther away from the rest of the Dominion than you would be in Samoa or Fiji, and will discover that it is easier to talk about Ballarat and Bendigo than about Taupo and Tauranga. Two generations have come and gone since there was any exchange of population between Victoria and New Zealand, and one since gold was an important industry in Otago, but Clyde, Cromwell, and Arrowtown are still 'the goldfields', and it is still a shorter mental journey to Castlemaine than to Christchurch.
And if, now that you are on the gold trail again, you follow it all the way to Westland, you will make another discovery. You will find that "Westland does not end, as you thought, at Ross, but begins there. There are in fact two Westlands, one following the railway north and the other following the motor road south. Go north, and you will find people living on gold, coal, and politics. Stay south, and you will see cattle grazing on the river flats, miners still fossicking for gold, or dredging for it, timber workers feeding saw-mills, and the swagger exploiting his last paradise. You will see mass evacuations to Greymouth to watch a football match and news of your own movements racing you along the single highway. But you will also see the most cheerful, the most independent, and the most secure group of settlers and workers in the Dominion, all with at least three strings to their bows, and indifferent which one circumstances make them use. Slogans are not so potent as they used to be anywhere in the world, but if ever any one had the hardihood in New Zealand to say 'Go west, young man', he would have to add, 'and then turn south.'
6 Questions Without Answers
Children and fools ask more questions than old men and oracles can answer. But that is not always a reason why their mouths should be stopped. If enough fools had asked us fifty years ago why we were burning down our children's houses to make room for cows we might have had eight million acres more native forest, and not learnt yet how to spell erosion. For we can't plead the excuse of Bo-bo in Charles Lamb's dissertation on roast pig. Bo-bo burnt down the house every time the sow farrowed. But he did not start the first blaze to give himself a taste of crackling. He started it because he was a fool, a great lubberly boy who had not learnt the danger of playing with fire. And when his secret was discovered, and he was brought with his father to trial, he was acquitted because he had given his countrymen a new delight and delivered them from seventy thousand ages of eating their meat raw. We can perhaps plead ignorance for our first forest fire, and necessity for many of the fires that followed for thirty or forty years, but what kind of a defence can we make for the millions of acres we have burnt or felled since 1890? Bo-bo went on burning because he had discovered that burning was good. We went on burning after it had been established that every fire was a theft from our children for countless generations, since some of the trees the flames destroyed had stood for a thousand years.
And who can tell us why we go on washing the ashes into the sea? Is it to prove that Britons never will be slaves—even to chemistry? It was reported recently from Russia that a famous agricultural chemist, with thirty of his colleagues, had been 'liquidated as a saboteur' because he insisted that the soil of Russia lacked nitrates although the politicians knew that what was missing was potash. But that is a story without a moral for us unless we are prepared to apply it. For the Russians at least take chemistry seriously. Do we? Has any New Zealander yet died in defence of the dung-cart? Is it not clear to anyone who looks down on the plains of Canterbury, say, that they will not go on forever producing lambs and wheat and wheat and lambs unless we put back what we are taking out? Do we require to be philosophers to know that if we ship away a hundredweight of frozen meat and bones every year it is just a confidence trick to pretend that we restore the balance if we give the soil two hundredweight of fertiliser in return which we have already stolen from it at some other time? The Russian story may be a myth, although it is written in a book;
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940).
but it could never have been invented in a country that thinks Nature can be mocked. If a fool arose in our midst who insisted that excrement should be spelt with a capital E, would we laugh at him or listen to him?
Let us question the oracle a little further.
Home
When Paul was about to be scourged in Jerusalem he resorted to magic. 'Civis Romanus sum,' he said to the centurion who stood by, and at once there was excitement and alarm. The centurion hurried to the captain, the captain hurried back to Paul, the scourgers disappeared, the captain hung about anxious and afraid. It was an outrage to bind a Roman citizen. To scourge him was an atrocious crime.
This was about 60 a.d., when Rome, though declining, was still strong. It is in fact clear that the privilege claimed by Paul would have been valueless if Rome at the time had been weak in Judaea; he had been scourged seven years earlier in Macedonia, and does not appear to have protested until afterwards, when he saw that the authorities were troubled. For Roman citizenship could be opportunist as well as devout. It could mean, and in Paul's day usually did mean, that he who invoked it did so for prudential reasons. The Devil was sick, the Devil a saint would be. The citizen was in trouble, the citizen a Roman would be. It could have been in rare cases only that 'civis Romanus sunt' meant 'I am proud of Roman justice and of Roman virtue'. It would be rash to say that it meant as much as that to Paul. He remembered that he was a Roman when he was threatened, as a British, American, or German citizen remembers his nationality on foreign soil. And the value of the remembrance of course depends on the strength of the nation remembered. Nationals are as safe as their country is strong, as unsafe as it is weak. But there is a citizenship whose value is entirely independent of a nation's power to exact redress for injury, and that is the only kind that New Zealanders can possess in their own right; as, in present circumstances, it is the only kind remaining to Frenchmen, Danes, or Czecho-Slovakians. Citizenship is in fact not a good word for it, but it would be a good word if the thing itself were more real and more common. And we know what it means whatever we call it: love of country, with all that such a phrase implies—awareness of one's country, physically and spiritually; belief in it; pride in it; glad acceptance of it, though not necessarily of all it does or has done; loyalty to it; a desire to stand by and help it when calamity comes, even if it comes as a punishment for folly.
Before we ask how many citizens New Zealand has by that test we must consider what creates that kind of citizenship. For although men are made to love as well as to mourn—and will love the strangest things, animate and inanimate—it is not at all clear that love for one's country has much to do with its beauty or ugliness, if there could be any standards by which such qualities could be measured. It has on the other hand a good deal to do with early and long association with some corner of that country as home, and in that respect our circumstances are far from favourable. To begin with, we are not old enough to have what are commonly called historical associations. Of those who have lived all their lives in New Zealand, as most of us now have, far fewer than half have lived here for fifty years. If there could be an average age of New Zealanders it might be about forty—certainly no higher than forty-five, and perhaps as low as thirty-five. But even if it were fifty-five there would be only one generation in most cases behind it, and it is very unlikely that there would be unbroken association with one place. We have no old homes, and relatively few homes that are even reasonably permanent. Wordsworth's observation on his dalesmen neighbours that many had 'a consciousness that the land they tilled had for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of the same name and blood' is almost incredible in New Zealand. Neither our land nor our houses nor our occupations nor our possessions pass normally from father to son. If we have homes of our own we remember when we bought them, and if we possess land the chances are about one in three that it came to us by inheritance. Nor is the likelihood any greater that we shall retain it for the rest of our lives, even if we are not driven out by misfortune. For land in New Zealand is a commodity that we buy and sell as often as we see a chance of gain. We have no sense of perpetuity in the land itself or even in land tenure. What we call lease in perpetuity is in practice a lease that is perpetual only on one side. The land cannot be sold, but the right to occupy it can be, and almost invariably is. We are not so much farmers as dealers, producers who see a chance and move on. Not more than ten per cent of our farmers say 'Here I am, here I stay'; and some who do say it afterwards change their minds.
And just as there are few farms that have been in the possession of the same family since they were first occupied, so there are few buildings, public or private, that have been seen by three generations. A church here, a mission house there, a wattle-and-daub relic that has somehow escaped replacement, a school somewhere, a jail, an overlooked shop, an early stone barn. Not much more, and however romantic we are, not much more is yet possible. We built to begin with to keep out the weather, and we have not had the opportunity yet to build against time—if the human race will ever again attempt anything so futile. But although this leaves our consciences clear, it also leaves our hearts and minds clear of all those emotions that long association usually implants. First Church in Dunedin perhaps, the Cathedral and old Provincial Chambers in Christchurch, Grafton Bridge in Auckland—these and a very few other things made by hands have mingled with our thoughts and become a part of our unconscious selves; but in general we have escaped contact with such ensnaring things and ended our first century heart-whole and mind-free.
Perhaps it is good, perhaps it is bad. The question here is: how far have we travelled yet towards nationhood, or to that emotion of nationhood that expresses itself in love of country? Do we know why Burns and Shakespeare and Scott and Wordsworth and Browning felt their hearts leap when they thought of England or Scotland? Or are we aliens still in the land that gave us birth, feeding our bodies from its soil, and preserving carefully disentangled minds? Is our citizenship opportunist or touched with emotion — landless, homeless, and rootless as we have so far been?
Neighbours
It follows, and must follow, from some of the facts glanced at in the preceding section that New Zealanders lack cohesion. If we are continually changing our homes—not only our houses but what Americans call our location—we are continually changing our neighbours. We come and we go, they come and they go, whether we farm, or deal, or make boots, or teach, or preach, or help to run the railways or the post office. There is in fact an almost universal tendency in New Zealand to nod to every man we meet in a dining-room, or a tram, and every second man we meet in the street, in case we have once met him and forgotten him, or lived beside him, or travelled in the same bus or boat with him in some other town. Visitors to the Dominion have often remarked on our readiness to shake hands, the charitable among them attributing it to our kindness, the uppish to our lack of breeding. But they are both wrong. We just can't remember whom we know and whom we don't know, and like good bishops bless everybody. What they do in America to maintain the Revolution, and in Australia because the sun has entered their souls, we do in New Zealand because there is a limit to the number of sizes, shapes, colours, and contours the untutored mind can register accurately. Psychologists thought it remarkable during the last war — remarkable enough to get a place in their books—that a New Zealand soldier should have been able to repeat the number of every man in his platoon, the initials of every man in his company, and more regimental figures and facts than any head had ever carried before. It certainly was remarkable. But the psychologists did not know that he was only doing magnificently what every New Zealander has to be able to do fumblingly, or spend half his time writing letters of apology. For we not only come and go. We go and return again, doubling on our tracks like foxes and hares, and half hoping and half fearing that when we go back from Greatdene to Littledene there will still be some familiar faces.
But none of this means that hospitality is growing warmer and richer. It means, on the contrary, that it is wearing thinner and becoming more casual. Hospitality is a flower that feels the wind. It flourishes among friends, and is most fragrant when cultivated by strangers, but the here-today-tomorrow-away heartiness of casual acquaintances soon kills it. Forty years ago it was an offence to pass a farm-house in an isolated locality without calling in. To-day you have to explain yourself—not merely because distance no longer means distress, or because you are within an hour's journey of a hotel, or look like a government inspector, or should know how many others have preceded you. There are many reasons why you should know better than to call, but one reason why your reception may be embarrassing if you do call is that the habit of hospitality is disappearing and being replaced by something more mechanical. Not so many months ago I was tramping with a companion on the East Coast of the North Island. The weather was bad, the road recently metalled, and by a miscalculation we found ourselves passing what our maps told us was the last house for fifteen miles, hungry and wet, and carrying heavy packs. With some hesitation we decided both to ask for a meal and to offer to pay for it; but although payment was refused and the meal was provided it was a most embarrassing half-hour for everybody. What was given was given freely. There was no niggardliness, no stint. But why had we called? Surely we must have felt that it was an extraordinary thing to do? There were hotels these days, and if trampers chose to take these back roads, surely they carried tents and food? Yes, it was a long way to the next refreshment house, but still you came this way? Of course these things were not said. Almost nothing was said, and what did escape their lips was kind. They themselves were kind. They have probably given a bullock and two or three bales of wool recently to a patriotic society. But they had forgotten how to entertain strangers unawares. They were worried, almost alarmed, not because they suspected us, but because we had made such an extraordinary request in Hawke's Bay in 1939.
Or is it simply that we are retiring into ourselves with our decreasing need of one another? Two years ago you would travel from Land's End to John o' Groat's with an Englishman without discovering his name or his occupation or his tastes or his opinions or, if he had any, his needs. To-day you would be brothers. He needs you, or you need him, or may need him.. The great tribulation has come and the barriers are down. Fifty years ago we needed one another in New Zealand, or any day might. We were hospitable. Have we lost the habit, or do we really mistrust strangers, being English after all?
Animals
Somewhere in his autobiography Sir William Orpen tells this story to illustrate the quality of Irish wit. Noticing that the horse drawing the cab he had hired was a bag of bones he remonstrated with the cabman:
'I am astonished to see an Irish cabman driving a horse like that. I thought the Irish prided themselves on their blood horses?'
'So we do,' the cabman said at once, 'and this is the bloodiest of the whole bloody lot.'
The real moral of the story of course is that an Irishman would sooner drive a crock of a horse than no horse at all. So, until twenty years ago, would a New Zealander. He would mount a horse to bring in the cows even if to catch it he had to walk farther than the paddock in which the cows were grazing. He felt that he lost caste if he drove sheep on a public road without at least leading a horse. He collected his mail by horse. He sat on a horse while he gossiped with a neighbour on the public highway or over the fence. Dr Johnson, it will be remembered, made very good use of a horse on his wedding day, teaching his Tetty a lesson which he had never again to repeat. But the cases are innumerable in our own brief history of honeymoons spent on horses, of brides reduced to tears by the discomforts of the journey, and so thoroughly tamed by riding through flooded rivers that we never again hear of them. And now that the farmer and his wife have abandoned the horse, the flapper and her companion have hired it. In all our cities there are riding schools, not indeed for young ladies, but for sophisticated misses who want a new excitement. But among them there are many genuine lovers of animals. It may even be that they are driven back to the saddle by a deeper urge than they know—something as deep, however unconscious they may be of it, as the 'desire of the moth for the star'. It is certainly the case that man has been associated with, and generally deeply devoted to, the horse through thousands of years of history, and that even the Maori, though he had been separated from horses farther back in time than his legends carry him, no sooner met the horses brought to New Zealand by the pakeha than he became, and has remained, a centaur. It is difficult to believe that so sudden a passion followed a first encounter. And if we were turning back to horses before war again descended on us, may we not turn back afterwards with a deeper devotion as to 'something afar from the sphere of our sorrow'? For one of the few consolations of modern war, this madness of mechanics that is now on us, is that the only animal involved is homo sapiens.We have thrown in our women and children but withdrawn our horses and dogs.
It is of course open to a cynic to ask if New Zealanders love horses or race-horses, and if they love the race as much as they love what happens before and afterwards. The answer is in the Dominion Museum. We have not yet put a horse into parliament, but we have brought
I have discovered since this sentence was written that we did not send for the bones but had them sent to us by the American owner; which of course emphasises the point. He was so sure we would wish to possess them that he returned them as naturally and as spontaneously as the Duke of Portland returned the bones of Carbine to Melbourne.
the bones of a horse from the other side of the world, jointed them again affectionately one by one, and set them up to speak to our children's children. It could in fact be argued that even our betting has been moralised—exalted into a kind of financial test of probability, and sometimes even of probity. It is certainly the case here, as Emerson just a hundred years ago found it to be in England, that we back our opinions with our money and accept the consequences without complaint. When we disagree violently enough about a fact, we challenge our opponent to put up his money. We seldom say simply 'You are wrong'. We say, 'I bet a pound you are wrong'; or ten pounds, or twenty. Members of the legislature challenge their critics to resign their seats and take a gamble on their chances of return. Philanthropists deposit cheques with referees, undertaking that the money will go to charity if they are proved to be foolish or ignorant or uncandid. If betting has thus become a test of courage, of accuracy, of good intentions, and even of moral right and wrong, some credit must go to the horse.
But there are of course other animals. New Zealand feeds itself, clothes itself, shelters itself, and gives itself cakes and ale with animals. Five-sixths of our wealth comes from animals directly or indirectly, and the question is, can we say with the author of Proverbs that 'a righteous man regardeth the life of his beast', or must we cry in shame with Joel, 'How do the beasts groan'? We cannot conceal or deny the fact that we live, as farmers have lived from time immemorial, by murder and mutilation. If we thought that we would one day appear at the Judgment Seat (as the historian Froude dreamt that he did) to find it ringed about with the accusing faces of all the animals we had cut off in their prime, we would humble ourselves like Nebuchadnezzar and eat grass. But we do worse things to animals than cutting them off in their prime. We keep them alive just as long as we wish and for just as short a time as we wish, fattening some of them to kill them, holding others from slaughter to multiply as we, and not they, decide. We rob them of their young, drive them like slaves to work, or harry them ceaselessly from camp to camp, for as Professor Stapledon points out (in a book written after a visit to New Zealand), just as 'their resting-place has been trodden to familiar design, just as homing becomes a delight and not a dread', we drive them out to some new terror.
Can we do all these things and go on doing them for generations without any mark on our characters? Is there something in the mind of an animal farmer that is not in the mind of a fruit farmer or a grower of grain; something in the New Zealand mind that is not in the mind of China, say, or of most of India? The answer is outside the scope of this survey, but if we were pursuing the subject further we should find a good deal in our surroundings to console us: the contentment of most of our farm animals most of the time; the fact that they fatten; the fact that if we did not use them as we do they would not exist at all; the fact that the worst things we do to them are modifications of what they do, or in a wild state would do, to one another; the enormous credit balance in human and animal happiness that our control of them so clearly leaves us. In other words, the biological compulsion on us to use them as we do brings a biological compensation that greatly outweighs its price. But it might be a useful research for our psychologists and students of education to consider what effects, if any, remain on country children's minds from experiences like these: the sale or slaughter of pet lambs; the forty-eight hours moaning of a cow for its stolen calf; the sight by day and sound by night, for three or four months on end, of truckload after truckload of lambs rolling on to the freezing works; the sight and sound of pens of bobby calves waiting at a gateway for the butcher's lorry; dogs left for a week on the chain; dogs (very rarely now seen) doing boundary duty; lambs being tailed and unsexed; cattle being branded and dehorned; horses being docked.
Time, we know, heals most raw places. Use brings the necessary callosities. It has always been a little horrifying to English people that Amundsen reached the South Pole by eating his dogs; and not only by eating them, but by planning in advance to eat them. But Scott ate his ponies. So sheep-farming children who are horrified by the slaughter of a heifer look on calmly at the weekly killing of the sheep. What have they paid for that indifference? If sensitiveness dies, can sensitiveness also live? Or may we count on some such law of compensation as Nature has provided for the blind—an intensification of other sensibilities to balance those we have lost?
Places
Biologists know, and can sometimes say, how living things grow. They will even, occasionally, suggest why they grow—tell us about the 'life force' and 'biological urges' and the solemn mysteries of genes. But no biologist has yet told us why towns grow, though the reason is often hidden from economists and the consequences are often disastrous to politicians. Was the biological urge of Palmerston North, for example, always stronger than the urge of Feilding, and would it have become the capital of the Manawatu even if the Gorge had not opened a way through to Hawke's Bay? The answer of Palmerston North itself to this question is not the answer you will get in Feilding, nor will Wanganui, if you go there, tell you the same story about New Plymouth as the people of New Plymouth will tell you. The case of Masterton is a little too obvious to justify questions, but they will not agree in Carterton and Greytown, Pahiatua, Woodville, or Dannevirke that there is nothing more to be said. Then we have the case of Hastings and Napier. Economics alone may explain the triumphs and tragedies of the Manawatu, Taranaki, and Wairarapa, but how is the challenge of Hastings to be explained economically, or Gisborne's continued non-belligerency in the presence of two fighting neighbours? Similar wakings and sleepings, retreats and sudden advances are as typical of the South Island as of the North Island and usually as difficult to explain. It is clear enough why Nelson and Blenheim have slept in beauty together without strife, but it is not wholly clear why Timaru has made a small town of Oamaru, Rangiora a township of Kaiapoi, Gore a village of Mataura. If biologists say that towns as such have no genes we must accept what they say, but without the aid of genetics it is a little difficult to fit economic theories to some of those very human facts.
And if we could explain the biological mystery, we would still not know what lay back of the mystery. We know that the kauri towers above the beech, the beech above manuka, and manuka above tauhinu, and always will; but we don't know why. For the explanation biologists give us leaves everything unanswered. 'Dogs delight to bark and bite, for God hath made them so'. It is the nature of the kauri to soar, but when is it the nature of a town to wake up after a long sleep, or to pine and droop after a long advance? New Zealand clearly has too many towns. It is everywhere agreed that it would be more efficient and more economical to have fewer small areas under separate control. But even if some towns could join their neighbours and others disappear there would be one serious problem remaining: how to stop the towns, big and little alike, from stealing the brains of the country. For that theft goes steadily on. With a few exceptions every farmer's boy who does well at school leaves the country: every young man or young woman who takes a university degree; every bright boy who wants to 'see the world'; very many specially alert girls; nearly all first-class artisans, teachers, musicians, engineers, accountants. From the beginning of the year to the end the procession never stops; and the consequences are cumulative. The agricultural colleges are throwing some weight back into the scale. A little more is thrown at intervals by the rare individuals of high intelligence who turn back home from the professions. Much is contributed by the boys and girls who are too intelligent ever to leave. But none of these groups, nor all of them combined, make up for the annual loss. The country is getting steadily squeezed. It is paying tribute to the towns under a pressure that it seems impotent to control. It is paying far more than it can afford—treating itself as it would never treat its machines or its animals or, knowingly, its soil. It demands, and gets, free or reduced freight for fertiliser. When will it demand its children back, its blood and its brains?
People
Public Servant.—If he had gone into politics he would have ended on the Treasury benches; perhaps in the centre seat. Instead he went into administration. He is a public servant, so capable that it is difficult to understand why business did not steal him, so loyal that you will never discover his party. Perhaps he has no party; perhaps the people are his party, the State, all parliaments that try to do what they were elected to do, all governments that govern and don't fumble. You will never know. He is a public servant, and public servants keep their mouths shut. They hear everything and say nothing—not through fear of the consequences, because in New Zealand to-day public servants are also citizens, but because discretion is their job and their tradition. In his case public service is not merely his job but his vocation and his life. Although you wonder why he has been allowed to remain, you cannot imagine who could tempt him away or in what other world he could live. Because he does live. He does not just work and draw his salary. His salary is in fact not big. By commercial standards it is absurdly small. But if it were 50 per cent higher or 20 per cent lower you would still not think of it as a rod by which to measure him. Neither would he. He eats and drinks and wears out clothes and pays interest and rent like other people, but if you offered him the choice between riches and his job, he would retain the keys of his office. Idleness would be misery to him, independence meaningless. Independence of what, he would ask you, and go back to his work without waiting for your answer. But don't suppose that work for him means dictating letters and signing them, interviewing ministers or other high officials, directing a staff, thinking a little and planning a little and nothing else. It means all those things and nearly everything else that you can imagine an able, well-educated, and well-read New Zealand Irishman doing who lives near to the government and to all the other enterprising people, professional and lay, who hover about governments. He could do well in the courts as a barrister; he could edit a newspaper; he could represent New Zealand in a foreign capital; he could write a sensational book of personal and political memoirs; he could organise a health campaign, conduct a race-meeting, pick a team for the Olympic Games. And because he is all these things and many more—a student of New Zealand literature, a cyclopaedia of New Zealand sport, an admirer of good printing, and the radiator of good-fellowship—his days are as full as days can usefully be if busy-ness is not to be muddle. There is no muddle and there is no irrelevance. Everything that he does, nearly everything that he reads, and most of the things he says and makes others say, are grist for the official mill, which is never forgotten, and can't be, since he and it are one. For we end where we began. He is a public servant. With his energy, ability, and bold imagination, he could have had half a dozen careers and made half a dozen reputations. But he entered the public service. He remained in the public service. He is the public service, in the sense that he is the perfect answer to those who fear bureaucracy and the dismay of those who love it.
To call him representative would be rash. To forget that he is here, that Westland bred him, Wellington educated him, the public service developed him, and government after government has used him, would be what shepherds call keeping a dog and doing our own barking. But if democracy gets the rulers it deserves, how did we qualify for him?
Teacher.—There is a legend that our schools seventy years ago were places of violence and terror, and that the only teacher our grandparents knew was the rod. But it is doubtful if the rod was ever so potent, so feared, or so long remembered as the moral precept. Most of us have forgotten our floggings, but we do not forget our moral alarms. We wrote morality in our copy-books. We read it on school and bedroom walls. We got it in church and Sunday-school. We might even, if we were lucky, get it to eat. It is certainly the case that confectioners and pastry-cooks knew how to serve it up in sugar, so that the reward of virtue might be a 'conversation' lolly carrying a text, or a biscuit endorsed with the Lord's Prayer.
When I was seven or eight years old I stayed for a few days with a German-Norwegian family working on the goldfields. At night I slept in a bed recessed in the wall, and on the opposite wall was a huge white lolly—it still seems to me that it was as big as a saucer—carrying the Lord's Prayer in pink letters. The temptation was strong, and about the third night too strong, but although I was sure that God would punish me, I cannot now remember that He did.
School was of course a place of terror when the two methods were combined, and automatic. The teacher who hit at sight and nagged without ceasing was emotionally and probably mentally deranged, but some apparently relentless task-drivers were just missionaries eaten up with zeal. There was never a more humble, devout, self-tormenting teacher in New Zealand than John Stenhouse of Lawrence, but when he entered a class room he looked so grim that frivolity went out like a candle. I like to think, however, that he yielded to one temptation—that what first interested him in New Zealand was gold, and that what brought him to his tremendous decision to emigrate was a sudden attack of gold fever. No one will ever know. What we do know is that he arrived in Dunedin when the gold fever was at its height and was caught in the rush that was carrying everybody to Gabriel's Gully. There he stopped, and there he stayed, and there seventy-seven years later he stays still; but when the administrative history of New Zealand is written his shadow will lie heavy on the second half century.
He started to teach in 1864, and for forty years without a break he drove, pushed, flogged, and frightened three generations of boys and girls out of the street into the examination room and sooner or later into government jobs; for local opportunities were few, and he made his school a source of supply for what was then called the Civil Service. In a few years there was hardly a railway station, or a post office, a Magistrate's Court, or an office run by Lands, Customs, or Taxation officials, that did not know about him; and from that time on the supply went out with increasing volume and momentum until the sluicing claims failed and the population began to decline. But even then the flow did not cease, and for years it did not seriously shrink, for his school was now a power in the land and his name a portent. If you were a miner you saw the writing on the wall and sent your boy to be made into a teacher or a government clerk; if you kept a shop or patrolled a water-race—and outside the claims there were not many other things you could do—you had exactly the same anxieties. It was the Civil Service for your children or labouring, and you chose the Civil Service if you (and they) could. So you handed them on to 'John', and in two, three, four, or five years—time was nothing if you got there—John handed them on to the government. School for the upper classes began at 8.30. At 9.30 the lower classes started, so at 9.15 all were assembled, seniors and juniors alike, in the biggest room, where John 'read a chapter' and the whole school sang a hymn and repeated the Lord's Prayer. Then they went back to work, but before John returned he disappeared into a little office that contained a chair, a table, and the bell-rope, and it was the universal belief of the pupils that he shut himself in to pray. It was probably true; for much prayer was needed in those days. Young or old, you 'toiled beneath the curse'. Right was what kept you out of trouble, wrong what brought punishment—floggings and detentions at school, humiliations for years to come afterwards. A schoolmaster was a policeman, and a policeman was the Hound both of Heaven and of Hell. So John concentrated on Heaven, his Heaven, which lay all about those who had good jobs, and hard hats, and a chance of still better jobs with a 'Well done good and faithful servant' at the end. Though some of his pupils were sheep and many necessarily goats, he headed them impartially for the same fold, barking so fiercely at their slothful heels that it was more comfortable to move on than to loiter. If they suspected sometimes that his bark might be worse than his bite, only the boldest had the courage to put it to the test. Years afterwards a few realised who and what he was, but it was impossible at the time not to brood over what they themselves were, or would speedily become if they ignored his exhortations. If they happened to be of the same faith they did not escape him even when school closed. He saw them in church and assembled them again in Sunday-school, where he prayed for them with his eyes open, dragged them to the front if they opened their own eyes, and left them nothing but the Shorter Catechism to think with. Anyone in Lawrence will show you where he lies to-day, but his monument was not built with hands. If you look back through the records of the Education Department you will find also that it was not based on grading marks. There are better scholars to-day in every sixth form. But he stayed. Pupils came and went. The town grew, stood still, declined. He went on with his job. He was a teacher, and teaching was a trust. Can it ever be anything else?
Farmer.—I could not get him to agree that his position was unusual or unfortunate. If he was poor after fifty years of work and worry that was the fate of farmers; and had to be. Farming was a calling and not a job; a privileged calling. For obviously the farming population was always limited. You couldn't increase the number of acres. You could only subdivide them further or make a further use of some that you now neglected. The number of farmers of all kinds was only one in ten of the total population, and it was his firm conviction that it would never be much more. For it was just madness to go about urging a return to the land. The land was not short of farmers: farmers were short of land. And as time went on science would intensify the problem. Two men would produce what three produced now, with less effort, and at a lower cost to the consumer. In the meantime farming was tough. Whether you kept cows or pigs, sheep, bees, or hens, whether you drove a tractor or swung a shovel and a hoe, you would not find it easy to increase your holding, to balance your budget, to bath and shave every day, read the newspaper regularly, get bankers to take off their hats to you, or go to bed with the birds. And if you were ever so cranky as to get mixed up in politics you would put your neck in a noose and the loose end of the rope into the hands of your enemies.
For every man was your enemy (he went on after a pause) who thought he understood you and didn't. The people in the towns thought that farmers lay awake at nights listening to the wheat falling out of the ears in a nor' wester. They did not realise that if farmers worried over the things God did to them they would go mad. They worried over the things they did to themselves, the things they should have done and didn't—the broken gate when they heard the horses in the garden, the sheep they had not put into the shed when they heard rain on the roof during shearing, the stacks they had not weighted against the wind, the creeks they had not cleaned before the floods came, the cows they had not culled, the bulls they had used, and the rams they had felt too poor to feed to the dogs. Farming was like war or navigation—you did what you could, but if it ever happened that you had done all that you could your mind stayed above the battle.
And it was just preposterous nonsense to think that you could, or should, accumulate money. In fifty years (he smiled to think that this was his jubilee) he had made almost no progress at all. His graph had been horizontal for twenty years, risen sharply for three years, fallen again, risen once more and stayed high for five or six years, but now would stay flat to the end. Why should he worry? Farming had always been his choice as well as his fate. He had perhaps hoped when he began—he could hardly now remember—that he would make money quickly and retire; but if folly like that ever possessed him, it was as far away now as other adolescent absurdities we don't talk about. Every day of his life had been a happier day than if he had spent it in any other occupation. How could that be expressed in money?
And how (he threw out as a final challenge) would land ever be occupied and worked if his story was not the common one? "Would his sons follow him unless they wanted to—to-day when they saw clerks and carpenters working five days a week and wandering off every week-end with girls? One of his sons probably would not follow him, or not follow him far, for wheels and cogs were his hobby, and this would never be a mechanised farm. The other had been so glad to leave school that the farm already had him; but to encourage him he had given him some stud ewes. The reward of farming was farming, interest in the crops and stock, and joy in the job. But where was the hardship? Only a certain number of farmers were required. Only a certain amount of land was available for profitable production. Only a certain amount could ever be paid by the consumer for his bread and milk and butter and meat and cheese. The farmer could not have it both ways. If he chose the joys of farming he had no right to the compensation paid to those sentenced by fate to unnatural lives.
I looked up to see if he was laughing. He was quite serious. But he laughed when I asked how many votes he would get if he stood for parliament. Then he asked me: How many eggs would a hen lay if she knew what was in an omelette?
Policeman.—Partly because he was big and strong, and partly because he was Irish; partly because his initials were P. C.; partly because he had always been respectable; partly because society in twenty-six years had found nothing better for him to do than shearing, swagging, harvesting, and ditching, he wrote a letter one day asking to be taken into the Police Force. But that was forty years ago. They took him in, they kept him in, and now with something like real sorrow they were letting him out again. The mayor sat on one side of him, the old doctor on the other side. Half the town was packed in the hall in front of him. It was good-bye. But as one after another rose to praise him his face cried out for mercy. He had arrested them, he had prosecuted them, he had broken up their parties, spied on them, collected evidence against them, warned them, threatened them; once or twice, to save them from something worse, used physical violence against them—and there they all sat smiling and clapping and thumping their feet and shouting the most fervent 'hear-hears'. And then suddenly the last speaker sat down, the clapping was over, and he was himself on his feet—trembling, speechless, and all at once crying. The doctor, who was equal to most emergencies, was a moment too late with the 'jolly good fellow' chorus, and before we reached the cheering the Sergeant was back in his chair sobbing helplessly.
That was five years ago. To-day he is seventy-one—lonely because he has outlived his wife and his daughter, shy because it was only the official part of him that was ever confident, courteous because there was never any rudeness in him from birth, and completely bewildered because people go on smiling at him, seeking his company, dragging him into their offices and homes, and running after him if they catch a glimpse of him in another town.
I think it was Thoreau who said that the occasional failures of rich men restored his faith in God. When I find it necessary to bolster up my faith in ordinary men I think of Sergeant C.— never smart enough, or pushing enough, or confident enough to rise, or wish to rise higher, but so kind, so sincere, so modest, so helpful that he became a kind of touchstone of decency for a whole community, and yet remained so efficient that the town for twenty years was under-policed. If he did not smile at you, you began to wonder what you had done. If he did smile it was such a shy smile, so humble, and yet so warm, that you wanted to run after him and shake his hand. But in place of the smile there could be a pained and anxious look, and then you knew that you were a transgressor—that you had been driving furiously, or cycling without a light, or emerging too often after hours, or working on Anzac Day to the scandal of your neighbours, or beating your wife, or neglecting to clean your chimney. And you wondered how he knew—as a boy wonders how his father knows about the stolen apples or the secret cigarette. Fathers do know, and Sergeant C. knew. Having no son of his own he had adopted the whole community, and through all the years of my acquaintance with him our welfare was his first concern. I am sure that he was always a most punctilious filler-in of forms, an officer without black marks. It would follow from the simplicity of him, the modesty, and the loyalty. Who was he to disobey orders, any order, whoever gave it? But I am equally sure that he did none of those things to please his superiors or to gain promotion, although it was his nature to please everybody if he could. But duty came before pleasure, and the welfare of the two or three thousand people for whose public conduct he felt himself responsible came before any thought of the consequences to himself. For he was not one of those guardians of the law who think that they guard it best by exposing and punishing every breach. If you ended in Court you were incorrigible. You would have been warned. Long before you were warned you would have been advised. Long before that, probably, you would have been made to feel off-side. There must be scores of men, and even a few women, in that district to-day who never read the Court news without realising that they had kept out of the dock by the grace of God and Sergeant C. For it is the nature of man to err; especially in youth; especially in country towns. It is his nature to pass through stages of insolence, of rowdiness, of exhibitionism, of animalism; to mock at reproof, and to play the petty gangster. It is his nature as he grows older to contract debts, to incur and then neglect social obligations, to abuse privileges, to lose his temper, develop dangerous appetites, quarrel with his neighbours, ill-use his animals, travel too fast, light unauthorised fires, let his dogs stray, or his sheep, or his cattle, or his affections, or his tongue; and so for a hundred possible reasons any year, and almost any week, he becomes a subject of private annoyance or public complaint. If the Sergeant had been quick to mark iniquity, which of us would have stood; but he was our father and our friend. He was paid to guard the law, and he conscientiously earned his money. But he knew that a foolish farmer sleeping off his excesses in his own bed was a better proof of police efficiency than ten foolish fellows in Court; that a youth hurrying away with a flea in his ear was better justice than a Borstal sentence; that runaway girls and prodigal boys can be brought safely home again; and that a secret but genuine fright may be a better teacher than a public fine. But if nothing would stop us short of arrest, if we were fools, louts, ingrates, or deliberate outlaws, too stupid to learn or too insolent to listen, the smile would fade and the face suddenly fill with thunder. It was not Sergeant C. we were challenging then, but the law and the State—the decencies of life and all those who valued them. But when the storm passed no wrack of malice or meanness remained behind—unless of course you resisted still. For then you were a bad one, and with all his charity he had none to spare for rogues. What good man has?
Soldier.—If you had met him in the street you would not have looked back. If you had been picked up by his car or had picked him up in yours you might have thought afterwards, if he returned to your mind at all, that modesty is still a fragrant flower. He never wore a face of destiny, or of mystery, or of impending great events. His closest friends detected, once they began to realise what was going on inside, that he was becoming a little quieter and occasionally abstracted and abrupt; but the moody and obsessed are always with us, and they assumed that his devil would die. He was a small-town lawyer within big-town range, and clients therefore could not be neglected. He had a wife and a young family, and life for him began at home. It is in fact certain that his wife and children were always half his story. The other half was conscience and romance. War was madness and had some day to be ended, but marching feet were music. A patrol moving off at dusk or dawn tightened his muscles and took all his words away. So drill was never tedious, routine never meaningless. When war broke out in 1914 he was only seventeen. His brother went away, but he had to wait two years. The day he reached the trenches in 1916 his brother was killed. A year later he was severely wounded himself. It was the end of one war for him, and the beginning of another. He returned to New Zealand convinced that the struggle was not over, and felt sick inside when he saw us throwing away our rifles and our uniforms. He joined a territorial regiment, and endured in silence the taunts of the ignorant and the defection of the careless. No one was so ridiculous in those days, so derided and so despised, as the man who ventured out in uniform. At last the strength of the battalion was about half the normal strength of a company. Nothing was possible but shadow drill, carried out by skeleton units. But he did not give up. He held on to the few men who still paraded, and countered his own depression by reading and hard study. They would be wanted some day, all of them, and if the call came suddenly and there was no foundation to build on there would be a catastrophe. Long before Munich he was an authority on all the campaigns that have changed the world since Napoleon, and more familiar with Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, and Scipio Africanus than most readers of war books are with Foch, Haig, and Joffre. Military history was a passion, but it was also a preparation, and when the day came that he had so long brooded over, he just put on his uniform and walked into camp. It is the opinion of some who knew him well that he ate better, slept better, and worked better every day afterwards. The conflict inside was over. The awakening outside had begun. Three days before he left Egypt for Greece he sent a friend this message: 'We have not wasted our time. We are ready. My men will do their whole duty. I need no other inspiration.'
7 Things to Come
The History of prophecy is full of warnings. Daniel was thrown to the lions; John the Baptist, with less luck, to Salome. Even Isaiah, though he prophesied for sixty years, had to console himself in the end with the thought that the righteous would one day glut their eyes on the carcases of their enemies. And although some of these dangers have passed, some remain. Whoever talks of the future takes risks; of any future; for the future has of course not happened, and to say how it will happen is to challenge Time to do what it has always done to those who try to pierce its veil. As soon as we try to look ahead in New Zealand we realise also that we must look from two positions. New Zealand is developing a dual mind. It has always been two countries climatically, and it is beginning to be two politically and socially. Even its economic development, though it is the function of business to build bridges and break down barriers, is not a harmonious story or a record of cheerful co-operation. The North Island takes its bread from the South Island because it must. The South Island sends north for fruit. But each resents the other's monopoly and obstructs when it can. It would be rash to say that time will remove these jealousies, and that they are in any case of no importance. They are important enough to continue, to be active, to influence politics, and even to have some effect on law, for as soon as you admit the principle of local protection in your legislation you invite appeals to the courts and questions about the Constitution. Civil war is not visible on any possible horizon, but a mild degree of civil strife will continue as long as the North Island gets little or no frost and the South Island relatively little rain. For there is the further difficulty that the North Island is twice as strong as the South Island politically, an insult without an injury, since a bushel of wheat means infinitely more in our economy than a plate of lemons, and the South Island is still impregnable economically. It is easy to exaggerate these differences but dangerous to ignore them, since they are in the nature of things, and it is also in the nature of things for the human animal to be jealous and unreasonable. As long as grass grows all the year round in one island and only two-thirds of the year in the other, as long as wheat is allergic to continuous rain and lemons to frost, as long as an acre of land in one island exchanges for only half an acre in the other, Cook Strait will be a barrier rather than a bridge.
In the meantime two-thirds of the population have moved to the North Island, and since they have moved impartially from both Canterbury and Otago the North Island is becoming a national melting pot into which the South Island is throwing its provincial and racial jealousies. But in proportion as we move to the north we move deeper into the shadow of the bush, mentally as well as economically. It is not just playing with words to say that the bush has been pressing on our minds for a hundred years as well as obstructing our arms and our legs. Holcroft has shown in The Deepening Stream what the 'primeval shadow' of the forest means to a poet, but we are all poets some of the time, all superstitious and subject to irrational fears. Australia, which is older than New Zealand and somewhat more articulate, has always been conscious of the shadow lying across its mountain gorges and spreading along its rivers to the sea. But in Australia the bush is incidental. Here it is fundamental. In Australia the sun strikes through the forest ceiling and throws spangles of light on the floor. Here the ceiling is impenetrable and the floor always damp. It is impossible to believe that we have lived for a century with that shadow all about us and not felt it as a menace. If the migration north continues we shall lose some angularities and take on some softness; cease being Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen, and become New Zealanders. But the further north you go in New Zealand the nearer you get to Polynesia.
It is also possible that the drift north will be a tide flowing south again when irrigation puts Marlborough, Canterbury, and Central Otago back into grass and world forces dam our rivers and harness even our lakes. For it has happened to us through Hitler as the Scots laird told Dr Johnson it had happened to kings through Cromwell: we have discovered that we have a joint in our necks. We may in time forget, but our reaction for a generation or two will be a struggle to grow a second neck in some safer part of our anatomy. How soon the change will be achieved will depend on how fast population flows our way when the war is over, but the second neck will be in the South Island, and will grow out of water and coal power and the fear of isolation. Meanwhile we are drawing closer to Australia and closer to India and the East, and realise that we shall have to short-circuit our external economy and broaden the base of our security at home. 'Back to the land' is already a voice in the wilderness. Those who are on the land now have only to rationalise their methods and their machines to glut all the channels by which raw produce can flow from the soil. We shall of course when our soldiers return invite some thousands of them to be farmers, but we shall remember that when we provided 'land for heroes' twenty-five years ago one hero stayed and another left, and another was ordered off. Heroism has a poor chance against interest, labour, taxes, rates, and the losses due to lack of experience. Even romance can seldom hold out against the memory of easier, more familiar, and generally more secure ways of earning a living. So the farmer-soldier who has a second string to his bow sooner or later pulls that string. He returns to his trade or his profession or his office or his shop or his school and leaves on the land those heroes only who like it so much that even the mortgagee cannot drive them off, and those others who have only worse places to go to. We must expect, being human, that the story of 1918 will be repeated in whole or in part, but we may also believe without being too credulous that our disappointment will have a lower curve.
Farmers are born before they are made. Unless they have soil in their blood and in their bones, grass in their ancestry, and animals in their heaven, farming is an enterprise which they undertake for gain, and abandon at the first proof of loss. The dead hand of mortgage lies heavily on most of them, darkening their working hours, and returning in the watches of the night to remind them of past blunders and follies. It is an interesting example of the difficulty of killing a phrase that the popular cure for the depressed classes on the land is to increase the number of their competitors. We forget when we advocate a return to the land that the vast majority of people have not been on the land since the very beginning of history, don't want to be on it, and would not know what to do if they were. There is no need, and no excuse, for a wholesale return to the land. But the fewer farmers we have the fewer there are among us feeling the succession of the seasons, the realities of sowing and reaping, of lambing and calving, and holding their minds steady in the presence both of life and of death. 'Teach me to live,' we sang as children, 'that I may dread the grave as little as my bed'. But if only ten per cent of New Zealand's people work on the land, ninety per cent miss the best teacher of that lesson and see Nature through a glass darkly.
There is little to indicate that the soldier when he returns from the war will rush about looking for a farm, but we must expect him to be a different man wherever he again comes to rest. He will not think that he has fought for nothing: he will know very clearly what he has been doing. But he will want to know that other people know also, and that their knowledge is moving them to action. He will be a more difficult problem than his father was in 1918, partly because two wars in one generation are one war too many, and partly because his wife or sweetheart will feel that she has been in the firing line with him, and will know that in every pound of explosive showered on both by the enemy there was an ounce of injustice supplied by our social system and an ounce of encouraging nonsense by our intelligentsia. For mind works under a handicap in this Ultima Thule of thought and shows painful evidence of a time-lag. We send too many of our brightest spirits abroad to leave the stay-at-homes safe. So, although we are not amused when visitors tell us that our thoughts are the thoughts of London and Manchester delayed a year or two in transit, we are not sufficiendy alarmed. We soothe our irritation with the knowledge that the charge is not true, since time and distance change everybody—Carlyle when he goes from Craigenputtock to London, Livingstone when he moves from Edinburgh to Central Africa, Wakefield when he sails from Plymouth for Port Nicholson. It is not half true, or a quarter true, to call us imitators and nothing else. But it is true enough to be disturbing, and it is most disturbing when the dependence is by people old enough to have minds of their own. For it has not happened to our mental as it has happened to our material environment. We have not gone 'wild' intellectually, lost our memories, and leaped violently forward to the confusion of visitors and careless observers. I was astonished once during a walk round Coromandel Peninsula to discover that even the Maoris had ceased to know native from imported trees. Twice on the same day I was told that hakea was a native, although it is quite unlike anything else on the peninsula, and has features that New Zealand could never have evolved. But I was assured by a very intelligent Maori, educated and observant, that it had been in New Zealand longer than man himself. It seemed a surprising loss of identity in so short a time, since hakea must have been brought over by mission-aries or settlers from Australia, but it was neither so surprising nor so serious as the blurring, in considerably less time, of so many of our mental signposts. The pioneers knew who they were and where they were going. Their grandchildren stand bewildered at the cross-roads, not quite sure whether to advance or retire; whether they are strayed Europeans or white Polynesians; immigrants, travellers, or natives. What would have happened if we had enjoyed a century of peace it is not possible now to say. We might have moved farther away from Britain or we might never have awakened to the fact that Britain began by neglecting us and as soon as we complained turned embarrassingly maternal. But we have seldom had peace for more than a generation at one time. The Maori wars made us feel very much abandoned at first and then very much less than masters of our own fate. The Crimean war did not touch us materially but disturbed us mentally. The war with the Boers disturbed us sufficiently to rally us to Britain's side, and since then our two wars with Germany have alarmed those even (a negligible number) who thought it no sin to dream of separation in their sleep. For a stretch of years that no one would now name even tentatively separation will seem nonsense to us. Fear, affection, admiration, and horse-sense have turned the prodigal home again, really alarmed and genuinely penitent. But the story of the prodigal does not end with his return. We must consider what happens to him when he begins to feel his father's house a little quiet, a little oppressive, perhaps a little stuffy. We have glanced already at our absent soldiers. They will return. Our intellectuals, who have worked too long in a vacuum, will fall out of their glass cases into the street. Those who are running round in a circle at present like frightened sheep will find leaders who will know where to go. Let us not assume too hastily that it will be the shortest way back to London.
Whatever happens there will be an increasing awareness of the United States and of Canada, of both of which so far we have been aware only at intervals. For as long as most of us can remember both countries have supplied us with farm implements, and for as long as younger people can remember the United States has flooded us with films and motor-cars. But it has never really occupied our minds or, until quite recently, and for other reasons, stirred our emotions. Nor did it even then stir us by direct action. Our emotion, though deep and sincere now, came to us first from London, partly because London is the starting point at present of all our excitements, and partly because we have usually looked past America to Europe when we have been thinking of anything but film stars and jazz bands. But we shall not in the future look past. As long as we are a democracy we shall think of the United States and Canada as walls that tyranny cannot pass from the East and as fortresses for our defence if danger threatens from the West; and as we become more conscious of America politically we shall draw closer economically. It has been a quite astonishing fact so far that the industrial penetration of the United States has created no excitement. We have seen huge assembly works established by motor-car manufacturers, bought and used the cars, worked in our thousands in the factories themselves, and thought very little about the situation although it was so obviously the arrival of a new industrial era. Our unawareness of America has in fact been almost as remarkable as our unawareness of the sea, which lies all about us, but has never penetrated our minds. Although most of us have lived all our lives within sight and sound of the sea, although the sea brought us here, and has been our only contact with our markets and our sources of supply, spiritual and material, we have not become sailors, or so far showed any marked inclination to do so. We shall change when circumstances make us change, when pressure at home or danger abroad puts the sea into our hearts and minds. But it is not there at present, and we may leave it to economists, biologists, and politicians to say what is most likely to put it there—distress at home, our amphibian ancestry, or a sudden feeling that our cargoes are not safe while other people carry them.
Meanwhile we are children of circumstance. If those philosophers are right who say that 'geography nudged mankind into history', our course is already laid down. Sun, wind, mountains, and rain are pushing us faster than some geographers think frost, drought, and coal pushed our European ancestors. But we are doing something ourselves, and becoming something. We have reached the end of the easy living that virgin soil and unlimited elbow room made possible. In other words we have come to the end of blind living. We can no longer dig gold out of the ground with a butcher-knife as Gabriel Read did, or put a match to the bush and wait till the rain and a little fertiliser bring gold out of the ashes. We have to think, and we have to plan, and 'much is to learn and much to forget' before we can feel again that the earth is ours. And we may not be as well equipped for the new battle as our forbears were for the primitive struggle they carried on. There are many observers who think that the democracies, when the German hurricane struck them, were slipping into softness. Others have said that they were already effeminate. 'Some time between 1914 and 1940', an American newspaper said last year, 'John Bull became Britannia and Jacques Bonhomme became La Belle France'. It is a charge without much substance during a war that is killing as many women as men; but it is not quite meaningless. We take the easy road when we can, put goloshes on our boots to keep even the soles clean, and fight cold with hot-water bottles instead of with our muscles. But if everything that has been said about our recent past were true it would be profitless to dwell on it. The past is dead. We stand at the beginning of a new era for the world as well as of a new century for ourselves, and pessimism's other name is cowardice.
Necessarily, too, when we peer into the future we peer into the lives of men and women now in the cradle, or unborn. We can picture their lives only to the extent to which we can see into the minds of the generation nearest to them in time—the men and women who have most recently matured. And it is not easy to gauge minds that are still fluctuating violently and nowhere yet on permanent record. What man reared last century can feel that he knows the men and women born this century? The Mediterranean proverb that it is a clever child who knows his own father tells us a good deal about the Mediterranean. But when Launcelot Gobbo turned it round in the Merchant of Venice he told us something tragic about the whole human race. A father can never know his own child however wise he is. He treads a different road and hears different voices. But when a country is only a hundred years old, cumbered about many things, and largely dumb, there are not even books, magazines, pictures, poems, and songs to tell one generation where the other is worshipping. It is impossible to know, and foolish to pretend to know, precisely what the call to war meant, for example, to New Zealand youth in 1939. We know what their answer has been in deeds, but he is a bold observer who would claim to know what is still going on in their minds. Is there more or less doubt of the wisdom of their elders than there was twenty-five years ago? Every observer must be influenced by his own experiences and confused by his own uncertain memories. There was certainly a deeper scepticism in general in 1939 than there was in 1914; for the fumblers in office and the sneaking scoffers in counsel had done then-work well. But is it quite certain that the particulars of faith are now as firmly grasped as the generalities of doubt were two years ago? We must not be confused by the fact that war is no longer an adventure into which youth can rush with excitement. It would have been a horrible spectacle if our sons had come forward in any mood but sadness, touched indeed with bitterness, for it would have meant that we had communicated nothing at all to them of our own melancholy conviction that war is the last abomination short of slavery. Nor must we judge the whole by the part. The confused there must always be; the nervous; the selfish. There must always be in youth as in age a substantial proportion who think only of their own interests and feel deeply only what hurts them personally. The war facts—the acceptance of universal service and the prompt response of an overwhelming majority of those called—prove that as the crisis deepened the hesitators rallied. But we must also realise that if the degree of conscientious objection has been found to be about two per cent, the furtive, devious, equivocal behaviour of perhaps five per cent more means that under absolute freedom about one New Zealander in ten or twelve would not defend his country. It is not an alarming revelation. It may even be the most encouraging story of its kind of the whole war; for although it is impossible to know what the figures are elsewhere, we do know that our unity in action is almost complete enough to be absolute. But since the problem is to know where youth is going—'news of your son, old man'—we must not shut our eyes when we see him stop and look round.
Nor must the fiend of doubt at our elbow kill our confidence in him. We brought him into a darkened world, reared him in doubt because we had no faith to give him, and just when he was beginning to find a way for himself asked him, on the word of a generation whose past words time had mocked, asked him to go out and die. Shall we blame him if, for the space between two heart-beats, he paused and looked us over?
Many things will come to New Zealand during the next hundred years and many things pass away. But liberty will not pass away while our grandchildren can spell Olympus.
A Note on Sources
It Has been explained in the preface that this is not a book about other books, a book based on other books, or to the author's knowledge a book that other books have inspired. He cannot therefore name the sources from which the material has been gathered or, without impertinence, recommend a course of reading for others that he has not taken himself. But it may be permissible for him to say what he thinks would be a useful beginning if anyone should wish to study the New Zealand scene formally.
The official Year-Book is easily the best all-purposes volume about New Zealand for those who can thrive on iron rations. The Bible is still the best explanation of the New Zealand way of thinking. The student who can turn to these two books with an open mind will find the facts in one and the cast and colour of our minds in the other.
After them the best approach to any of the questions raised in the present volume is provided by the ten volumes in this series that precede it. In each case there is an admirable guide to more intensive study.
Simultaneously all students will be reading the newspapers. They will be meeting the men and women who get into the newspapers or try to keep out of them. They will also, willynilly, be listening to the radio. If they want to see and hear New Zealand, there it is. If they want to see and hear it more specifically, a useful prescription would be: any church, any school, any parliamentary debate, any racecourse, any football ground, any picture theatre, any camp, any conference, any wrestling match, any street corner, saleyard, railway station, woolshed, sewing meeting, tea-room, or backblocks hut.
If then they wish to bring some order into their minds by systematic study they may turn to Guthrie-Smith's massive Tutira, a profoundly satisfying study of a New Zealand sheep farm, and Somerset's Littledene, a subtle miniature of a country township.
If they still wish to go a little further there are two supplementary sources of information for those who have the money to buy them. Both are official, both authoritative, and both more interesting than fiction. The first is Dr G. H. Scholefield's Dictionary of New Zealand Biography in two volumes, now on sale. The second is the magnificent Centennial Atlas now in course of preparation by the Centennial Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs. With either or with both they will find it useful to combine the thirty Pictorial Surveys, Making New Zealand, and the many provincial and local histories produced last year.
The Type Used in this Book is MonotypeAldine Bemboof which the Text is Set in 13 Point * The Typography was Arranged ByJ. C. Beaglehole * The Whole was Printed and Bound in New Zealand ByWhitcombe & Tombs LimitedChristchurch