Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News. SATURDAY, JUNE 1, 1907.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVI, Issue 43099, 1 June 1907, Page 2

Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News.

SATURDAY, JUNE 1, 1907.

This about all —to thins own self be true , A nd %t must follow as the night the day 7hou canst not then be false to any man Shakespeare.

The first Winter Show held by the Auckland Agricultural and Pastoral Association may be said to have more than equalled the most sanguine expectations of its promoters, although the financial results were hardly commensurate with the merits of the very excellent exhibition which engaged the attention of a section of the community last week. Perhaps it would have been too much to expect that the whole of Auckland would flock to such a show, or that an initial effort of this kind could be financed on the same payable lines as older established shows. For one thing, the public has to tye educated up .to the importance of such enterprises as those with which the Auckland Agricultural and Pastoral Association is charged, and to a knowledge of their beneficial effects and educative influence upon the community as a whole. Then, again, in the city itself, there is a disposition, on the part of very many people, to assume that agricultural shows can have but little interest for the city worker, and there is not, therefore, the same eager rush to see such exhibitions as there would be a football match, for instance, here, say, the All Blacks were playing. Thus, when allowance is made for the drawbacks and lack of general interest, which seems inseparable from new ventures of this character, we think the committee of the Auckland Agricultural and Pastoral Association have every reason to feel satisfied with the success their first winter show has attained. As an object lesson of the possibilities and potentialities of the province, it was all that could be desired; and we shall certainly find in the near future that it has done more to advance the cause of agriculture in the North than we have any conception of. The province is certainly advancing, and, what is more, advancing on the right lines, by developing, as far as the native land problem and our leasehold Government will permit, the rural producing industries which Mr McNab rightly pointed out are the backbone of every other industry in which the colony is engaged. Without the farmer the country would be nowhere, for the tiller of the soil is the man who carries everyone else on his back; his energy, enterprise and skill alone helping to make all other occupations profitable. The city worker too often forgets this fact, and hence he, somewhat unthinkingly, no doubt, is apt to suggest that additional burdens should be fastened upon the sturdy shoulders of the men who seem so well able to bear them ; forgetting that, just as there is a limit to his own endurance of the exactions which he is sometimes called upon to endure, so there must be an end to the producer’s capacity for burden*bearijjg,—“ New Zealand Farmer.”