South Canterbury Times. MONDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1881.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2663, 3 October 1881, Page 2

South Canterbury Times. MONDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1881.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. Whenever two.or three New Zealanders are gathered together into an association for business or other purposes, they seem to be seized with a mania for giving extravagant titles to the institutions they form, forgetting that Juliet was not herself satisfied with her simple sophistry, and that she very presently found that there is a good deal in a name. Everywhere we have small local trading companies arrogating the high-sounding title “ The New Zealand ” this, that, or the other “ Company,” and this sort of thing in the majority of cases not only looks foolish, but may even do positive harm. The assumption of such titles by small companies be-littles the colony. Outsiders may be misled into supposing, for instance, that “ The New Zealand Fire-irons Company (limited),” with a nominal capital of £ISOO, covers (he whole ground ; that their factories, if not found in all the chief centres of population arc at least sufficiently numerous to supply fireirons to meet the demands of the whole people for that particular class of goods and maybe produce a • certain surplus for export. The fact probably is' that the company whose circulars, billheads, and memorandum forms bear the above title, consists of some half-dozen persons, one half of them working partners, and having a man and a boy to help when, on rare occasions, an order of extra magnitude is received, and the company itself is scarcely known to exist beyond a radius of fifty miles. Outsiders must think New Zealand a small place indeed, about as large as a good sized parish, if a company with such a moderate capital is the chief producer—as the name would imply—of articles of such common necessity as fire-irons. We need not go far to find examples of this species of silliness. There are numbers of merely local concerns whose promoters have been guilty of it, and some that hare been projected have failed to come to anything, leaving it open to the critic to say that if the projectors in each case had given their venture a local name as well as sought for it a local habitation, residents in the neighborhood might have got up an enthusiasm about it that would have made what proved to be “an airy nothing ” a substantial reality.