NEW ZEALAND HISTORY

Southland Times, Issue 22999, 19 September 1936, Page 13

NEW ZEALAND HISTORY

An Economic And Political Survey

New Zealand: A Short History. ByDr J. C. Beaglehole, George Allen

and Unwin, Ltd., London.

REVIEWED BY ALICE CANDY.

(Lecturer in History at Canterbury College.)

This is not a history of New Zealand, but a commentary on the evolution of New Zealand largely from the political aspect, and on some of the main personalities that have swayed our destinies. It should appeal to the general reader as it is brief—l6o pages only—and written in an easy flowing style that holds the attention from the first moment when on December 13, 1642 “a sailor straining over the waters saw at midday a great land uplifted high,” down to the spectacular victory of Labour in the 1935 election. One could have wished that the author had given us a few more of the facts on which he founds his judgments, with a confidence that rouses our envy, and with a determination to shake us out of our complacent insularity. He points out that the pride of the New Zealanders in their handling of the native problem has little basis in fact; that the confiscations which followed the wars bred a sullen despair which was in no sense alleviated by the rapid and easy sale of Maori lands in the following 30 years; and that the regeneration of the Maori in our own day, in fact, has been the result, not of pakeha but of Maori efforts, inspired by Sir Apirana Ngata. “Only within the last decade, almost, has a movement of the pakeha conscience reconsidered fundamental injustice.” Again he denies that New Zealand has ever led the world in the sphere of social experiments, maintairiing that even in the ’nineties tho New Zealander was only an average man, and 50 years behind the Old World, and that in “perspective New Zealand is seen, not as the example but as the parallel of the rest of the world.” Nor does he, despite the fervent protestations made by a Seddon or a Massey, believe in the solidity of our vaunted Imperialism, for “the oratory of empire often rages in inverse proportion to the weight of Imperial responsibility sustained by the owner.”

Women’s organizations will not agree with his dictum that “as a specifically political factor the intentions of women have been negligible.” He does, however, admit that in the sphere of social improvement their influence has been powerful. It will be reassuring to many to read that “the nomenclature of Socialism

has never meant anything to the average New Zealander but a scheme of dark horror or alternatively the apotheosis of rioting inefficiency”; that indeed the word is so little understood that even Mr Coates was considered by some the worst Socialist in the country. State regulation there has been, by reason of the early difficulties of settlement in a new colony and the tendency to call on the Government in every crisis, but this is by no means Socialism. There is a very interesting comparison between the crisis of the ’nineties and that of the years from 1928, and the palliatives adopted in each case. He shows that while Pember Reeves had to deal with a problem that was internal only, and in a period of rising prices, the task that confronted Mr Coates had no limitations at all, and was conditioned not by rising but by falling prices. Reeves’s object was merely to humanize the social system; Mr Coates was trying to save it. He attributes the failure of Mr Coates to the fact that he was trying to solve the problem along the old traditional lines of economic individualism, whereas the future lay with the party that no longer believed in the old social system, and he thinks that the defeat of Mr Coates at the election was “the defeat, the judgment of a system.” Dr Beaglehole is disappointed that New Zealand did not immediately evoke artistic standards of its own, that it did not show “the originality, the vitality and the disrespect of youth.” But the efforts of pioneers are conditioned by the rigour of the new life and the ideas which they bring with them to a new land—if it is a choice between galvanized iron and no home at all, even Dr Beaglehole might find it difficult “to transcend the aesthetic limitations of his time.”

The survey ends with a short reference to the present political situation. He does not think it either possible or desirable for a Socialist party to go indefinitely forward on the line marked out by Seddon, despite the tendency to proclaim itself his heirs. “The assumption of Seddon’s frockcoat, the out-flung arm, the expansive Seddonian gesture—might be histrionically and critically effective. But they had no future.”