The New Zealand Graphic AND LADIES’ JOURNAL. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1891.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 36, 12 September 1891, Page 368

The New Zealand Graphic AND LADIES’ JOURNAL. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1891.

Seeing that there is a tendency to reform and alter everything that exists, it would not be surprising if some of our legislators were to start up and suggest that the name of this colony should be remodelled. If the attainment of the beautiful means aught, it should begin with the conferring convenient and euphonious labels upon the persons, and more particularly the places, of our environment. It cannot be said that the forefathers of these colonies have ex* hibited much taste or discretion in selecting the names which decorate the map of Australasia, though in this respect New Zealand has somewhat the advantage of her big sister over the seas. The United States present a still more remarkable instance of slovenliness in the choice of appellations for places and towns, few of them having any meaning or relation to the characteristics of the locality. The story goes that a whole region there was furnished with names by a public minister in forty-eight hours, who having exhausted Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary and his own imagination, solicited contributions from his friends.

The nomenclature of the United States is, however, on the whole superior to that of Australia, especially where it has been drawn from Indian, Spanish, or French sources. The Southern States of Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama show all three influences, and not only are the names of these States beautiful and wieldy, but their localities are euphoniously labelled. There is Atlanta, Savannah, Tallahassee, San Augustine, Pontchartrain, Baton Rouge, and many others. It would be difficult to find prettier names than those of the other States—Virginia, Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, California, and Oregon. If there be aught in a name, it is better to be designated ‘ an Oregonian ’ than a ‘ New South Welshman.’ There is a noble roll about the former which makes the mind straighten up insensibly, and gives dignity to the citizen of Oregon. California is, however, the State which possesses the greatest proportion of sweetly-sounding names, and this tends, with its indulgent climate and productiveness, to give it a smack of romance and intensify the tendency to ‘ blow ’in its inhabitants. Such are Marin, Mendocino, Martinez, Benicia, Sonoma, Alameda, Sacramento, Monterez, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and countless others. In other States, on the contrary, a commonplaceness or want of taste has been displayed in baptizing the young community, equal to or even surpassing those shown by the early settlers of Australia.

Some five years ago it was proposed to the people of New South Wales that they should change the unmeaning and clumsy name of their colony to one more beautiful and more wieldy for purposes of writing and conversation. The outcome was a good deal of senseless ridicule and a collapse of the idea. Two pretty substitutes were suggested—Perousellia and Aurolania —among many other crudely-sounding title, and one correspondent wittily proposed the name of • Convictoria,’ which he said would have quite a historical and geographical significance.

If human beings were not so sluggish and custom-bound, every one of these Australasian colonies, except those of Victoria, Queensland, and Tasmania, would change its name to one in which there was the best combination of historical or geographical meaning, of beauty, and of convenience for the purposes of speaking and writing. Maoriland, Maorilandia, or Maorioria is, after all, a more truthfully descriptive name thAn that of New Zealand, which is mongrel Dutch. Even Zealandia, though historically obscure, would be a great improvement on our present ap-

pellation. Or following the Spanish example of calling Cuba Hispaniola, we might call New Zealand * Britaniola.’ • New Zealand,' though useful in the form of N.Z. for the purpose of addressing parcels, is in extenso hopeless for the objects of literature or national designation. How absurd does the title to Manning’s book, • Old New Zealand,’ strike a reader for the first time. South Australia and West Australia, too, are makeshift sort of names, while New South Wales is the clumsiest and most unmeaning of all. Nothing shows the poverty of ideas among new-comers from Europe more than the incessant reproduction of old-world names with the prefix ‘ New ’ or North, South, East, or West. In New South Wales, however, we have the climax of this absurdity. What resemblance has that colony with its heat, its great plains, its subtropical fruits, and its countless herds with a moist, hilly, green, misty little principality one thirtieth part of its size ? Similarly New Zealand and Holland are the two most conceivably unlike lands, the former being perhaps the most varied and the latter the most monotonous on the earth.

Young countries, towns, and localities ought to assume the right of naming themselves when they have arrived at years of discretion, and cease to be satisfied with those given to them by their forefathers. It has been done even in an old country like England, and the ridicule cast upon those who desired to re-label New South Wales seems very surprising in a country which professes to disregard tradition. Within New Zealand also there are some places with native names inelegant or clumsy to the European ear and eye which might be advantageously altered. By means of a plebescite, and the co-operation of the post-office and the newspapers it would not be difficult to retrace the past.

In a certain city of New Zealand which shall be nameless, there is a debtor who has been guilty of paying his creditors. Among the native curios this one might very reasonably be paraded as being, if not unique, at least of increas ing rarity with each successive year. It therefore behoves the community where he exists to be discreetly silent regarding his name and locality, and rest content, swelling with conscious pride. Dangers threaten us everywhere, and possibly some earthquake or eruption may be spared to the fortunate community out of consideration for this one righteous debtor.

At the rate things are going the righteous debtor will soon be as extinct as the dodo. There is still enough of the old-fashioned respect for honest insolvency to point with something like admiration to the man who has made a frank and speedy breast of it to his creditors and paid their claims in full. Our forefathers were inclined to judge the insolvents harshly, and affix a social stigma upon him. The oldest Roman law gave his creditors the right of cutting him up. But in America and Australasia humanitarianism has so advanced that he is not only not * cut ’ during life, but in death he * cuts up ’ at a figure most satisfactory to all the claimants concerned.

Improved modern methods have clearly reduced the art of secreting ‘ a little stocking somewhere ’ to a height undreamt of by our great-grandmothers. Now, as then, the ladies of the family manage the trick, and when the debtor is standing disconsolately with a rueful visage and his pockets turned inside out, appear like guardian angels bearing a hidden store mysteriously emanating from vacuum. As people say at the conjurer’s stance, ‘ How is it done ’’ Woman has a genius equal to every emergency clearly, and the most melancholy feature about the bankruptcy of the righteous debtor above mentioned was that he was a bachelor and uncared for. Poor fellow ! he had no help-meet on whom he could profitably unload in the day of extremity. On this point even his creditors were sympathetic; he had won eminence at too dear a price. The meeting therefore charitably suggested that he should be released on condition of taking unto himself a wife in order to obviate the recurrence of so lamentable a contretemps. Who shall say after this that romance does not rule even in the world of business-men, when they advise their debtor to divide the joys of prosperity and the sorrows of bankruptcy with a lady, at their expense. There is a book entitled * Cn-sar’s Column ’ which is just now being much read in New Zealand. It is written by a

well-known American, living at Minneapolis, the fastest growing city of the Far West, and in that region where the tendencies of democracy in the Great Republic are least controlled by what slight dead-weight of custom exists on the Atlantic sea-board. Americans are very sensitive of the criticism of foreigners upon their institutions, but nothing proceeding from an outsider could add to the lurid intensity of the hand-wiiting on the wall contained in this American Jeremiad upon the social and political conditions there. Inasmuch as some colonists have an indiscriminate admiration of and desire to copy the L nited States, ‘ Cresar’s Column ’ comes at an opportune moment. The fortunes of New Zealand are being re-shaped for good and evil on a new model, and a consideration of the difficulties which beset a larger and more rapidly-developing community may be instructive to one of smaller things.

In • Ciesar’s Column ’ an attempt is made to depict the state of society which must logically proceed from the drift affairs in America, if no effort is made on the part of society to control them. The life led in New Zealand is to the rushing life in America as a soft summer breeze is to a tropical cyclone. The rapid aggregation of wealth, the intense worship of riches, the feverish haste in order • not to get left,’ the blind hurrying after the almighty dollar is concentrated, as in a burning glass, at such cities as NewYork, Chicago, and Minneapolis. They are all * rustlers ’or real live men ’ there, according to the current phraseology of their business enthusiasts, and to be a rustler and real live man is the aim and object of existence. That any evils can result from the spirit of competition and the race for wealth has so far been unsuspected by the patriotic American, unless he be of the philosophical dreaming sort scouted by the practical mind. The author of • Caesar's Column ’is one of these seers, and he has the advantage of possessing both an historical knowledge of the fate of past societies, and a practical acquaintance of the working of the greatest of modern times.

For a century there have been in their day persons who pointed out the rocks towards which America was drifting. Some were natives, some were foreigners. If the wishes of the more far-seeing of the founders of the Independence had been regarded, slavery would have been abolished eighty years before it cost the nation a thousand millions sterling and a half a million of lives. Macaulay and Carlyle, both advocates of justice and freedom, warned America that she was fostering viperous institutions which would some day turn and corrupt her. The reply was always an appeal to the marked material prosperity of the States. Carlyle once roughly said to an American, ‘Ye’re a wonderful people, because you’ve got a large countiy and very few people in it.’ Now, as land becomes more scarce and population more dense, thecoming problems alarm even thoughtful Americans themselves. Yet the population is twelve times less dense than that of the British Isles.

The moral pointed in ‘ Casar's Column ’ is that the gospel of wealth, if blindly preached and blindly practised, must first brutalize and ultimately dissolve society. The maxim that every person in a society is free to do as he or she likes is implicitly denied. Competition, if unchecked, must produce a condition of inequality, in which the conscience of the rich is callosified by prosperity, and the conscience of the poor benumbed by bitter poverty. Then the two classes fly at each other’s throats and civilization perishes. The whole secret of the dilemma lies in the fact that no man or woman can be honest and honourable if necessity treads too closely on their heels. The lash of want is less effective for the purpose of symmetrically developing the character than the lesson of love.

In America the huckstering spirit of mere gain has been idealised at the expense of the virtues of truth, self-sacrifice, and honour. The person who regulates his action, even spasmodically and imperfectly, from motives of professional dignity and contempt of gain, is regarded there as either eccentric or weak. ‘He gets left.’ The result is to create an aristocracy of glorified hucksters, a body of professional men with which gold is more potent than honour, a body of judges purchasable by wealth, and a body of low politicians controlling theelections.andareadyinstrumentin the hands of the plutocracy. Such, according to ‘ Caesar’s Column,’ are the gods of America. Let us hope that the democracy of New Zealand will not fall down and worship them.