THE ROYAL RECEPTION

Observer, Volume XXI, Issue 1162, 6 April 1901, Page 2

THE ROYAL RECEPTION

l,et It Be A People's Welcome.

Conoebning the desirableness of a hearty and enthusiastic weloome to the Duke and Duchess of York, there can be □o two opinione. They come to us as the representatives and future occupants of the throne, and in honouring them, we honour our Empire and ourselves. But, conoermng the character of that welcome there may be, and indeed, are, very many opinions. When the Imperial troops visited us recently, the absorbing impulse of the people who had the reception arrangements in hand was to make money by exhibiting them as a kind of menagerie Bide-show through the community.

Something of the same kind of spirit made itself manifest at the outset of the Duke and Duohess reception arrangements in the form of a proposal to hold a reoeption and oharge five shillings a head for the right to shake the royal hands. Fortunately, the proposal was not adopted, but there nevertheless seems to be a disposition on the part of a seotion of the community to seize the royal visit as an appropriate opportunity for grovelling, that ought to be oheoked at the out-

set. No one will grudge these looal snobs the privilege of grovelling, so long as they do the grovel entirely on their own, and not as a part of the public reoeption.

The first actual mistake in this connection was in voting £1000 of the municipal funds to the looal reception committee. It was quite right to spend the money in oonneotion with the reception, but being th 6 money of the ratepayers, it should have been spent by the City Oounoil as the representative institution of the ratepayers in decorating and illuminating the oity for the oocasion. The Council has good executive officers of its own, under whose direotion the £1000 would have been wisely and effectively spent, and there the duty of the corporation would have ended.

To hand over this substantial sum of money to a self- constituted committee of individuals styling themselves leading citizens, who may or may not be leading citizens, is simply subsidising snobbery. Already, there have been several examples of the directions in which this epidemic threatens to break out, and unless the sensible and level-headed individuals on the committee are prepared to keep in oheok the vu'gar ostentation and RrovelUng instinots of the ex-grocers and exbutchers and their wives, who, by virtue of their association with that shabby genteel and essentially vulgar thing known as Auokland sooiety, havegradually persuaded themselves that they are blueblooded and of noble descent, we shall ere long be a mirthful holy show to the rest of the colony.

Auckland, like many other colonial towns, ib afflicted with its vulgar clique of moneyed parvenus, and other parvenus whoße wealth oonßists chiefly of" the 1.0.U.'s they have in circulation, who style themselves society, and who, in the royal reception, are preparing to thrust themselves heavily upon our hapless visitors. If the £1000 recently voted is to be at the disposal of these snobs, and to be spent on champagne dinners or other devices to enable local Society to rub elbows and swap fairy tales of aristocratic connections with the royal visitors, it will be a waste of public fundp. But if we give our visitors a hearty publio weloome, and endeavour to entertain them and not ourselves by showing them our beautiful scenery, instead of staring them out of countenance, or disgusting them with our social proi^ tration, the money will be well spent. Apropos of this, what has become of the, proposed Maori display ? Is the Society grovel to take its place ?