Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1925. PROGRESS OF NEW ZEALAND.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLV, Issue 60, 10 February 1925, Page 4

Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1925. PROGRESS OF NEW ZEALAND.

The Evening Post is to be congratulated both on the attainment of its sixtieth birthday and on the interesting, comprehensive, liberally illustrated and well-produced number with which it celebrated the occasion. "It was," as one of its special articles remarks, "a very small colony and a very small city in which the Evening Post first saw the light on the Bth February, 1865," and the size of the paper was to match. The population of New Zealand at that time was 190,000, which is almost exactly equalled by the present urban population of the Wellington Provincial District and far exceeded by its total population (260,000). By another coincidence the population of the Wellington Province of those days (19,000) was only slightly in excess of the present population of the Palmerston North urban area. The Blue-books do not appear to record the population in 1865 of "the small fishing village on the shores of Cook Straits" which, in the very month of our contemporary's birth, became the capital city of the colony. The transfer from Auckland had, of course, not been effected without a bitter struggle. So intense was the feeling that neither the Government nor the Parliament of the day dare to take the responsibility of a direct choice between the rival claims of Auckland and Wellington. The matter was even deemed too hot to be decided by any New Zealand authority. The procedure was that a resolution was passed by the House on the motion of Mr Domett that the seat of government should bo transferred from Auckland to ssmo convenient place on Cook Straits, and that the actual choico should be made by three commissioners to be obtained from Australia. The secession of Auckland was freely prophesied as inevitable if the change was carried out, and there was a strong separation movement in Auckland for some time after the commissioners had unanimously given thendecision in favour of Wellington. The separation of the South Island from the North was another proposal which found some favour in those days owing to. the southerners who had no Maori troubles strongly objecting to being taxed to pay for the North Island wars. Fortunately both movements peacefully petered out without ever becoming a dangerous menace. Going a little further back than the sixty years' historical survey given in the Post's special article already quoted, it is interesting to recall that the rivalry between Auckland and Wellington, which in 1865 was decided in Wellington's favour by the casting vote of the southern members—some of whom had taken more than eight weeks to reach the first session at Auckland —was even then of very long

standing. It dates back, indeed, almost to the very beginning of New Zealand's history as a British community. Governor Hobson's first duty after hoisting the British flag was to find a capital, and Kororareka, then nicknamed "Hobson's Folly," and since christened Russell, proving impossible, his choice fell on Auckland, while the New Zealand Company's agents and friends urged the claims of Wellington. A fierce controversy arose which in Maori and Pakeha Mr Alan B. Mulgan thus describes: The northerners vaunted their capacious, sheltered harbours on the east and west coasts, and their proximity to a rich hinterland and a very large native population, and decried the dangerous harbour entrance, the hilly location, and the lack of back country possessed by their rival. The latter eulogised their deep, land-locked harbour, their location in the middle of the islands, andtheir large white population, and belittled the remoteness, the insignificance and the acquisitiveness of "Hobson's Choice." Each pleaded its cause in its Home correspondence, the one in Hobson's despatches to Lord Stanley, and the other in letters to the New Zealand Company.

Imagination, of course, played its part in reinforcing the facts on both sides. The dangerous approach to Wellington Harbour was deeply deplored in Auckland, and some veracious eye-witness on the other side informed the New Zealand Association—the Company's predecessor—that "the river which flows into Port Nicholson, now called the Hutt, is as broad as and deeper than the Thames at London Bridge for 80 miles and extends much farther." But Hobson's choice was not shaken, and Auckland remained the capital for twenty-five years. Immense has been the progress of New Zealand since those early days, and the same advantage of position which made Wellington the capital—an advantage which is paraded in the not very elegant Latinity and the decidedly uninspiring moral of the city's motto: "Suprema a Situ" —gave Wellington its full share in the general progress. The Post in its turn has shared the advancing prosperity of the city with which it has grown up; nor has the enterprise of its conductors been content merely to keep pace with the city's progress. In a world of competition, nourishing newspapers are not built in that way. Wonderful indeed is the contrast between which the development of the city and the country, the march of mechanics and the enterprise of the proprietors and their staff combined to make between the infant Post of four pages that was brought out by a staff of five sixty years ago, and the 48 pages of illustrations and letter-press produced by its staff of 171 on Saturday. The contrast will be still greater when the new press now being installed is in full commission. "Sixtyyears," as the Post observes, "make a long spell in the life of a newspaper," but our contemporary carries its years lightly, is still going strong, and has our hearty congratulations.