WHY NOT?

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 30, 5 February 1927, Page 10

WHY NOT?

(By "Libra.")

Mr.- George Smith, of Te Aramanutu, arrived in Wellington yesterday from the country. He was met at the station by a xepresentative gathering of the Super-Horticultural Society, who escorted him in gaily-decorated market-gar-den carts to the Town Hall. There he was accorded a magnificent and spontaneous civic reception by a large throng of enthusiasts, whose chief spokesman was his Worship the Mayor, Mr. Magnus Bunipus, complete in Mayoral i-obes and insignia. The tasteful decorations of festoons of fine cabbage testified to the importance of Mr. Smith's most recent achievement. The worthy Mayor, who was received with applause, Baid that there was little need to remind his hearers of the object for which they had gathered. Did not they all know that Mr. Smith had in two c -seeutive years carried off .first prize f^r the 1 largest cabbage grown in the Te Aramanutu district?

"If you don't get up soon," said my wife with some asperity^ "you will miss your train or your breakfast or both." On principle I never argue (with my wife), and it was only after a prolonged stretch and* a yawn that I realised that I had been awakened from a dream of Wellington in the year of grace 1937. I had been reading one of ifs daily papers, and I remembered being struck in my dream with the wonderful progress that the city had made in ten years. TJiere were seemingly b t two blots on tho iandscape, £o to speak—Mr. George Smith arrived at the same railway station that I was in the habit of using in 1927 (and had been using since I don't know when), a- " that the practice of tendering civic receptions to all and sundry had been carried to abßurd (and logical) extremes.

After all, I ruminated as I hurried to the station, the civic reception business in 1927 has already reached a point wh r a halt needs to be called. Is it an honour for those who deserve honour, or is it but an empty formality too often connected with an advertising stunt? Hang it all, did not the two foreigners in succession win a thread-t.ke-'needle race at our local sports; why saould not they be civically received? In my mind's eye I saw myself standing on the Town Hall platform; the Mayor in all his dignity. . . "Hurry on, t>' _se; hurry on." A jolt, a jerk, and a whistle, and the train started. "My dream of well-de-served civic honours faded with the banalities of my fellow-passengers' chaff and small talk. But I made up my mind to write to the papers about it.