WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 214, 10 September 1934, Page 6

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

TOWNS OF NEW ZEALAND. (By A. J. SHE AT.) Mention in tho "Star" recently that the Morrinsville Borough Council is contemplating functions to celebrate the diamond jubilee of Morrinsville town and district this year serves as a reminder that our New Zealand towns got their names in many and various ways. Morrinsville, named after Messrs. T. and S. Morrin, Auckland business men who were the first owners of the sheep and cattle station on which the town grew up, is of interest in that it commemorates the pioneer landowners of the district. Probably not many of our larger towns do that. Many towns retain the Maori names of their districts, others were named after places in the United Kingdom, and still more after men famous in war or politics. Governor ITobson gave a local habitation and a name to Auckland, the colony-planners of tho 'forties put the names of Wellington, Nelson, New Plymouth, Dunedin, Christchurch and Lyttelton on the map, and the names of Mercer and Hamilton tell of men famous in the unfortunate Waikato war of the 'sixties.

Morrinsville will be a name to remind the student of history of the spacious days of last century when most of the Waikato and Upper Thames Valley was a chain of great estates, [some of them extending to tens of thousands lof acres, which were the northern counterpart of the grazing "runs" of the South Island and Bast Coast, or of the outback stations of Australia. In the decade that followed the close of the Maori Wars of the 'sixties the tide of settlement flowed strongly southwards from Auckland, and huge areas of fern land, scrub land and swamp land were marked out as the domains of enterprising men who sought to make the wilderness blossom as the rose. Probably the best known of these pioneers of development in the Waikato was Josiah Clifton Firth, who divided his boundless energies between conducting great business enterprises in Auckland and bringing into cultivation the fertile plains of the Matamata district. It is a pity that Firth's name is not perpetuated in a place name, of the district lie developed, in the same way that the name of Morrinsville perpetuates the Morrins. The great estates absorbed the labour of shiploads of immigrants that reached Auckland in the 'seventies, and so they served their purpose, although they did not bring prosperity to the merchant barons who financed their development. In tho 'nineties a huge territory between Morrinsville, Cambridge and Putaruru passed into the hands of the Assets Realisation Board of the Bank of New Zealand, later to be subdivided when the rise of the dairy industry created a demand for Waikato land.

Anniversary celebrations have been much to the fore recently. Te Awamutu has commemorated a century of missionary endeavour, Hamilton it? 70 years of progress, and now Morrinsville takes pride in 60 years of history since tho Morrins came on the scene.

SAMOA'S EARLY HISTORY.

NEW ZEALAND'S INTEREST. "In the la-st fifteen years of the nineteenth century the small island group of Samoa played a part in world affairs quite out of proportion to its size and importance." There might be added to this introductory sentence of "The Origins of International Eivalry in Samoa, 1845-1884" * the comment that both before and since the period 1885-1900 Samoa has attracted abroad a degree of attention that is, at first thought, difficult to understand. The reasons for it are made satisfactorily clear in this book, written by Sylvia Masterman, M.A., and published "with the aid of the University of London. Professor A. P. Newton, who writes the foreward, remarks that the book forms "an essential historical prologue" to Dr. Felix Keesing's "Modern Samoa." Miss Masterman relates with considerable detail the story of the white man's association with Samoa from the earliest days, until, about the middle of the century, as Pacific trade increased fast, it began to be, realised that the island group occupied an advantageous position between the Pacific slope and Australia and New Zealand; and "the Australasian colonies began to promulgate a Pacific Monroe Doctrine." As early as 1874 Sir George Grey envisaged a Pacific peopled by British and governed from New Zealand, but it was Sir Julius Vogel who most strongly urged the scheme, and particularly the annexation of Samoa. Vogel met with severe criticism from the Colonial Office, whose Under-Secretary characterised his scheme as "a foolish as well as an impudent composition." There was good reason for the English attitude, for it was made plain that Vogel expected the Home taxpayer to bear the expense. ' Put Vogel's persistence had permanent, though not immediate, results: ho so impressed England with New Zealand's interest' in Samoa that in 188G "the feeling in the colony was sufficiently strong to deter Great Britain' from consenting to German annexation." Again, in 1899, "the Colonial Office reminded the Foreign Offico that the Samoa question was one that affected the Australasian colonics very deeply," and in 1914 New Zealand's first action in the war was to seize Western Samoa from Germany.

* "The Origins of International Rivalry in Samoa, 1845-1884," by Sylvia Masterman, M.A., with a Foreword by A. P. Newton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History in the University of London. (Allen and Unwin.)

EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY.

Tlio Liberal Summer School lias always been a sounding-board for fresh ideas, and Sir Ernest Simon used it to contend again that we do not educate our citizens, or educate them half to ibe good members of a democracy (says, the "Manchester Guardian"). It is difficult in these matters to view ourselves with detachment. Wo see Nazis, Fascists, and the like, handing over to nondescript dictators all the independent political will that they ever possessed, but that leaves us unmoved, because, after all, in matters of government can it be thought that we are quite as other meri ? We recognise tlio greatness of the political enterprise that we are about to launch in India because, we eay, India as yet lacks the political tradition which we ourselves enjoy. And it is true that we have that tradition. But we forget that in the last fifty years or so we have transferred power to a vast electorate of men and women to a large proportion of whom the exercise of political decision is a new thing in life. Anyone who contrasts 'the temperature of political interest in the seventies and eighties of last century, as shown in the literature and Press of that time, with conditions at the present day must be struck by the contrast; it is as though a can of liot water had been diffused in a barrel of cold. What we have to do is systematically and in the schools, as well as in the universities, to encourage the liabit of independent thinking, which is the only safeguard against the tyranny of either the demagogue or the 'bully—our modern dictators are often "both'—and at the same time to spread a much wider and more precise knowledge of the conditions of modern citizenship and of the world which the citizen has to manage. ,