BIG BEAUTIFUL AUCKLAND.

Observer, Volume XXXV, Issue 20, 23 January 1915, Page 2

BIG BEAUTIFUL AUCKLAND.

113,334 People; Hooray! AUCKLAND'S civic pride is stirred by the fact that Auckland's population grows. This town now compares in point of population with some first-class provincial town® of countries fully populated. For instance, its population is only twenty thousand fewer than that of Florence, the distinction being that Florence is one of the cities of a country which has forty millions of people, while Auckland is one of the cities in a country having only one

fortieth of this papulation. In short, colonial cities with "mi-lion dubs" and "forty thotusand clubs," etc., are barking up the wrong tree. It is no evidence 0$ prosperity that Auckland's population is constantly 'augmented, for the excess is drawn from the land and means that there are more eaters and fewer producers. It is an evidence that the people are constantly becoming less seM-suppo-tinsg. ■ ■ « ,It BfeetaiS necessary to say when the world is at war that every centre of population is a weakness and the larger the population dependant on.outside supply "the greater the weakness. People dk> not breakfast on bricks and mortar, lunch on population, statistics, or dine on steel frame architecture. From the military point of view (and this is at present the only point of view) the destruction of cities is of less consequence than the destruction of growing food. The rural community is the ideal community. At the last the city is a mere aggregation of dangers and invitations to starvation. Aucklanders in a state of siege wouldn't bother about the size of the population—it would be seeking for the fattest rats. A community that pretends that prosperity is gauged by the growth of urban population doesn't grasp the first principle of self-protection. You oan't disorganise the indestructible faculty of nature for growth and therefore power of sustenance. You can diisorgianrisa Auckland or iany other city in two minutes with explosives. New Zealand's business is not to cackle over the aggregation of people among heaps of architecture, but to distribute the people over land which grows something more feeding than bricks, stucco, and imported steel beams. * ■ • It lis quite misleading to assert that "the silver bullet" will win the war. The fullest stomachs will win the war and the fullest stomachs belong to> the people who have the largest control or land undecorated with houses' or covered 1 with eaters who grow nothing. A municipality which sools its citizens out of the city on to the land is far more patriotic and sensible than the city which raves for the rural man to come off the land arid! grow piles of brick instead of piles of turnips. The British Tommy in. the wet trenches with an empty belly does not long for Leicester Square or Picadill v. He longs for anything edible andi nothing eatable grows in either place. We rather patronise the horny handed person who oomes to town and enjoys the delights that he himself has really created. Every citizen who becomes a grower of wheat or a breeder of sheep is a more admirable and useful person than he who accumulates a bank balance by selling what the rural man, grows. In the fourth month of an Auckland siege you could have anybody's bank balance for a raw pumpkin and the titles of anybody's warehouse for a kit of peaches. • • • The continued., aggregation of population in given cities which are merely (as is the case with Auckland) distributing centres is a danger for it leaves the burden of support on fewer people. Not a single activity undertaken in Auckland would sustain life in oas& of war. We shouldn't run to the town hall to be fed. We should run to the too sparsely peopled country and should jbe exceedingly, disappointed if the sowing produced a ohuroh or a picture theatre. The continuation of this war indefinitely would meaai the cessation of every unnecessary activity and the utter annihilation of towns. It would! mean that the land would be worth only what it would grow and not what it would fetch (for it would be unsellable) and it would mean that the richest man would be as poor in food as the poorest. Concentration in towns is in a world upheaval an invitation to destruction and' under any circumstances in a young country represents the growing ftabbwiess of the national backbone.