The Ensign. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1909. NEW ZEALAND'S MILLION.

Mataura Ensign, 25 February 1909, Page 2

The Ensign. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1909. NEW ZEALAND'S MILLION.

Those who remember the intercut amid which New South Wales neareu and passed the million mark (says the .\vdnoy 'Daily Telegraph') appreciate what the same experience meatus to •New Zealand, whose population, including .Maoris, has just been estimated at I.UUS.:S7;i. For not mere liking lor good round figures or gratification at the achievement ol some sell-set task explains the elation that such an event excites. As well—and, ol course, more importantly—the new figures are bailed because in a tacit way they indicate the young country's coming of age. its arrival among the leading members ol the colonial family. Vet it has taken Xi'iv Zealand about, a century to obtain a million people. It is true that the first systematic attempt at colonisation was not made until IBl'o. when a company was formed in Loudon to .settle some land in the Far .North, bill the country was known, and white Governments were in touch with it long before then, so that it is roundly a lair statement that it has taken a hundred years In gel a million people to a land of exceptional fertility, well watered, highly productive, and rich in all the guarantees of health and prosperity that any good new country can afford to robust and industrious settlers. We do not .suggest that New Zealand is peculiar in this. On the contrary, there, as in so much of the rest ol her national progress, she is representative and actually has done better than some of her Australian neighbors, lint that it is pretty much the same all round does not make, the actuality any brighter, but rather the reverse. If only New Zealand had failed to attract the population it should possess, while we might deplore the fact we could find solace in the greater good fortune of Australia. But no Australian State is on any pinnacle of superiority from which it can decently oiler compassion to another. New Zealand has now doubled her population in about °..' i years, it has taken rather longer to do the same thing in Australia, and between them—with all Australia's vast spaciousness and New Zealand's wonderful concentration of human opportunities—they have less than six millions of peopio! The fact is anything hut a comfortable one to think 01. but it is necessary to cite it as a reminder of the work that has to be done—perhaps we should say begun—in peopling this countrv. if oiilv for its .safety's sake. We have a too-low birthrate and the immigration is oxasperatingly slow in comparison with what apparently ought to he its pace looking ai, the thousands of emigrants who leave (■real Britain and the Continent every week. The increase of the population, therefore, is anything but reassuring to those who take heed of Australia's relation and New Zealand'.s to the Fast; and it will remain so, causing a real and great danger to hang like a cloud over our national future unless ways can he devised of bringing immigrants in at the rate of about a hundred for everv one that- comes in now.