HEIRS OF THE AGES.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 224, 22 September 1925, Page 6

HEIRS OF THE AGES.

NOT A BIT GRATEFUL. BUT LOOK FOR MORE. GENERATION'S ADVANCE IN AUCKLAND. ; Have you ever stopped to think how Auckland has forged ahead during the past ten or fifteen years? Things have advanced with such a rush, ami the ehan.ee has been so complete, that it is ; hard to realise the comparative simpli- , city of our ways of life. In the past generation we have shot ahead faster than during the whole of the previous years up to the founding of the city. Perhaps it was the advent of the motor, perhaps it was the war, 'out whatever the reason, things have moved so rapidly, "have got such a hustle on" to use a colloquialism, that we run the risk of getting blase. Of course, people who entile from bigger cities in the Old World and the States, still look upon its a rather one-horse sort of concern, but we know better than that, without bavins? an untitle conceit of ourselves For instance, take this much-discussed ' mailer of roads. To-day they think nothing of talking about concrete in ' miles. ' Henderson, 12 miles out. ' will in a few months be linked • tip by a roadway so smooth that ' you ' 'would feel ' the hum]) of a 1 pebble. Papakura, twenty miles away, ' will also be connected up in the same ; luxurious manner as soon as the dis- ; putants come to a decision on the respective merits of cement and bitumen. Otahuhu lias got to work while less • progressive boroughs have been squabbling, and now you can roll _ along ; silently from .the Richmond Hills to • the Tamaki Bridge, on clean, smooth !' concrete all the way. Just think for a j moment that prior to 1011 Auckland I city had only one paved street—Queen I Street, which was put down in asphalt lin 1902. To-day we have over ten miles !of paving, mostly concrete, a material ' which has been used in Auckland more extensively than in any other city in New Zealand or Australia. In addition, we have some twenty-two miles of streets treated with tarred or bitumenised surface, which is the next best thing to a permanent roadway. Using the Waikato. "Then take the matter of electricity. j Here, the expansion of the past ten years has been nothing short of phej noinenal, and from Town Hall to arti- | sans cottage the citizens find the ctirI rent right at their doors. Going back to IDOO we find that there was a mere ; handful of 1!I3 consumers; to-day they I number over 22,000. Electric * cable poles line the streets and roadways more thickly than telegraph poles, and not ouly in the city but in the suburbs, and even in the country, for only the other day we linked up with Horahora, jso that you probably read your "Star" lof evenings by a light that was generated by the turbulent waters of the I Waikato. one hundred miles away to | the south. In a few years we will be | using the rush of the same stream, onry ; still further away., at Araptini, to light , our homes, and drive our machines, but jwe are not going to get excited about I that; wo are much too used to having | the very latest in everything that it ' would take an earthquake to shake us ■ out of the rather nil admirari frame of mind in which a surfeit of wonders has 1 left us.

But if we go far afield for our current, what about the listeners-in? Sitting in your own armchair in the evening you can hear a Sydney comedian's sallies making the crowd laugh, and by merely turning a few handles isn't there a sheep-farmer down in the South Island who can get two-way communication with someone in England, using no more current than you do in one of the handtorches you feci for in the night when the baby cries for his bottle? We know the precise minute the mail steamers will show up round North Head, and to-day when bidding good-bye to friends off to the other side of tho world we miss all the romance of a good-bye before wireless robbed the sea of half its mystery. Talking to the World. Connected with wireless is the telephone, and who would dream of going back to the "Hello" days of ten years ago ? Now with five twists of a dial you can talk to everyone iv the city or suburbs that is on the list. Still we'take it all as a matter of course, and if wo don't receive an answer within a few seconds wo get annoyed, for getting that instead of being very hardly used individuals we are really rather pampered people. Nearly thirty miles of tramways, motor buses on all roads, and one private motor car to every 10 or 13 ]>eople should surely be enough to transport Aucklanders with the speed wo insist upon to-day, but instead of thanking the gods for tbe good they send, we are looking forward to the time when we will be able to keep our own private collapsible aeroplane in the backyard. Exactly what we will do when we got to the end of the journey does not matterwe will probably rush back again, but the main thing is to travel at the very limit possible. Tho truth is .hat we have progressed .o fast during t l le past generation that we are in danger of not being able to appreciate the luxuries wo nave inherited. Wo quote glibly tho lines about being "the heir a ll tho ages, in tlie foremost ranks of tin,,- "' but we do not really mean it. We ",., wire . less, electricity from a hundred miles away, and miles of roads like a billiard table, but instead of gratitude we simply get an "Oliver Twist" feeling, and beo-fi, to expect something further