Auckland and commerce.

Auckland Star, Volume XLII, Issue 212, 6 September 1911, Page 8

Auckland and commerce.

A THOUGHT OF THE FUTURE.

(.By a NEW CHUM.)

You talk of progress, you Aucklanders You dream of the time yhen you will be great commercially in "the eyes of the world: When you have so many hundreds of factories, a delightful harbour made one great wharf, a town one vast pile )f business houses, and a sky overcast with a cloud of thick grey smoke. Given these you will joyfully exclaim. "Ah, progress! See what we have done. We are a great town." And with enthusiasm you will count the millions of money your wonderful businesses earn you; you will gaze on the great forests of masts and hulls in the harbour, go over the statistics of your marvellous ' inflow of immigrants, and again burst forth with pride in this thing you have done, this progress you have perpetrated. And, mayhap, when that enthusiasm has passed the novelty stage perhaps you will say to yourself, "What has been the cost to beautiful Auckland! What have I as an individual gained by this commercial progress?" There will be your vast fleet of ships, your smoking factories, your crowded streets, your packed tenements, your miles of shops, your increased death rate, the struggle of stern competition, the poverty of landscape—and all of these advantages have been got by prosperity. . . Auckland a "workshop of the world." Auckland with its magnificent traditions, its glorious air of ideal suburbia, its green-capped mounts, and its glistening sun-sprinkled harbour wending its way to the drabness of the Sheffield cutlery districts, or the coal dust-laden atmosphere of Wigan. . What an absurd fancy it seems to-day. Will this much sought after commercial prosperity mean better wages, easier living, health, happiness, eontentedness, or the opposite? The answer is left to you.

With too great commercial prosperity comes many evils, inestimable and souldestroying. We become machines, mere mechanical figures devoted to the worship of mammon and machinery once we become business maniacs. We eliminate fresh air and substitute smoke; sacrifice trees and fields for ugly buildings, replace our once healthy youngsters with a breed of pasty faces and weak chests—in short, most of the joy of animal life is denied us because we are one of the "workshops of the world." The youth 'm fascinated with the intricacies of the machines and he becomes eventually a creature with not a thought above the shop, the honest plough and the open fields are forgotten—the false blaze of the city hypnotizes and holds him for always.

Take any of the workshops of the world and 6ce what they have done for humanity. As an example, take the Attercliffe district of Sheffield. What is it like? Why, one region of squalor, vice, drunkenness, dwarfed human beings, consumptive children, wretched "homes,'' and tumbledown tenements. A place where the sun rarely penetrates—an inferno indescribable, composed of men and women of mixed station from the wretchedly poor and honest worker down to the lowest and vilest dregs of society. Ali of them rubbing shoulders with one another—the vile canker of "prosperity" eating into the lives of young children and helping to criminalise them through wretched environment. That is one of the results of being one of the workshops of the world; that is the awful penalty exacted by business* prosperity. Instead, let Auckland progress in another way. Let her pride be in her splendid natural beauty, her robust sons and her educational system. Let her forge her way ahead as the model town of the world, and leave others to be the workshops.