THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1911. OLD COLONISTS' REUNION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14867, 19 December 1911, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1911. OLD COLONISTS' REUNION.

Among the earliest and most commendable uses of the Auckland Town Hall, the reunion of Old Colonists, held yesterday, is worthy of remembrance. For if those who helped to lay the foundations of our once uncertain and struggling settlement take pleasure in the constantly growing evidence of the strength and soundness 1 of their building, how much ' more must those who . enjoy the fruits of that work take pleasure in honouring the pioneers now passing so rapidly from our midst. As every - year brings round again this pleasant and venerable reunion

—moved somewhat, in 1911 in order that the new Town Hall might! be opened for civic guests whom the city delights to honourwe are constantly reminded of the historic youth of this City and this Dominion, which have been created amidst savage wilds within the memory and by the aid of living men. In 1842, when the first immigrant ships dropped anchor in Waitemata, only the boldest imagination could conceive the great port which has arisen on ' its then desolate shores. Nor could any but those gifted with the power to see visions and dream dreams conceive that with their own eyes they would see New Zealand take its place in the great sisterhood of free and .self-governing British States. Yet ,wo can .say with pride that New Zealand did not come by accident, that neither Auckland nor Christchurch, Wellington nor Dunedin, were the children of chance and good fortune. New Zealand became a State Auckland and its sisters became ports and cities; because the men of the '40's came to plant a nation and' prospered deservedly in . their planting. .

We often hear it said that the British temperament is lacking in the elements which make for artistic greatness, that it does not possess to any appreciable degree the imagination which is supposed to flower in the Gallic mind, and to be displayed to perfection in the musical genius of the older Teutonic people. Yet the colonising imagination of the British has driven our people for ages to high quests and noble adventures. Raleigh died on the scaffold because he dreamed of and wrought for a wider England ; and the Isthmus of Darien became the grave of coolseeming Scots who sought to plant the. Scottish life in a distant land and in a deadly clime. The Puritan settlements of New, England were built as temples wherein persecuted men might worship ■ after their own fashion. The Canadian West was won from the wilderness and the savage by organised bands of English, Scotch, Irish and Welsh, who swarmed overseas ■ when pioneering was a serious thing and return almost impossible. The New < Zealand movement, one among many settlement movements— a score have failed where one has succeeded —was deliberately, and consciously designed by men whose artistic imaginations dealt in something more than paint and words and harmonies, whoso minds could grasp the scheme of nation-building, and I whose hearts could lift to/the danger of it. The heroes of Balaclava, where all the world wondered;" the men who hewed their way to Lucknow; the men who went with Scott and Shackleton to , their "Furthest South;" as : every other band whose work has given safety and brought : knowledge to their fellows: are in appearance very ordin-

ary men. But circumstances and conditions sift the brave from the timorous, the self-reliant from the unreliable, and give to a nation that is virile the men and women it needs at the time it needs them. Our New Zealand pioneers were very ordinary men in appearance, but they likewise had been sifted by conditions and circumstances so that they were a body of .men and women fitted for the work before them, and destined to become the founders and the planters of a great State and a grateful people. * .

When the pioneering ships came to Auckland there were neither wharves nor landings, neither roads nor railways, neither court houses, millinery shops nor town halls. There was not. a bridge in the North Island. There were none to speed the King's Writ and few to muster for the keeping of the King's Peace. But there was land, and thq hunger for land that is in the blood of every pioneer, that mixes with lust for gold in the heart of every adventurer, drew them across wide oceans to their goal. To-day, by some strange aberration of political judgment, by one of those peculiar twists of the national intention, .re have practically declared that the British settler shall find little more land in' this barely settled and sparselypopulated country unless he will become the rack-rented tenant of a Maori landlordry, bolstered by law and made hereditary by statute. As a consequence, New Zealand-born are emigrating from the land ■to which their fathers came, and we have lost the attraction for landseeking Britishers which once secured to our distant and isolated and savage New Zealand the pick of the British stock. Yet we may hope that before the Old Colonists' Reunion' of 1912 the end of Hereditary Maori Landlordry will be in sight, and that those who seek, by hard and strenuous work, to become yeoman freeholders in a British land will no longer need to emigrate from New Zealand.