"TORPID TARANAKI."

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 285, 11 May 1915, Page 3

"TORPID TARANAKI."

" DRUGGED WITII PKOSPEKITY." Under this sub-heading, Frank Morton writoti as follows in tlie Triad in a discursive article with the general title of "On the Wallaby in '.Maoriland":— "The province of Tnranaki lies drugged with 'prosperity. Jn regard to many matters progress would be speeding and more assured if the struggle for existence were harder. As it is, men sit on their farms or is their offices torpidly content with things as they are. This sort of .content is the most insidious of all the diseases from which modern communities sutler. At its root is the vicious microbe that saps ambition and slowly kills activity and enterprise. Taranaki, in short, needs new blood, and needs it very badly. It is the province of the everlasting drowse. There is scarcely one matter in a hundred as to which it is thoroughly up-to-date. It has a lew energetic citizens and live bodies (of whom 1 shall have more to say later), but it views them with a tremulous pained suspicion.

"Taranaki is one of Australasia's beauty spots, but outside Taranaki few people suspect it. Wc know a lot about Taranaki butter and cheese, and there wc stop. We do not know that Taranaki is not in line with the best practice even in this matter of dairytanning. Nor do we guess that in Taranaki mid-Victorian methods still dominate agriculture in general. But it is so, Tiii! Taranaki dairy farmer in many cases still exploits his children and his womenfolk—one of those, mistakes that America definitely stopped making thirty years and more ago. And this is not due in Taranaki to minimality, but to false ideas of economy. A Taranaki dairy farmer has 110 more need to make drudges of his wife and children than a Taranaki draper lias, but lie's held in bondage by a vicious habit that he sometimes thinks is virtuous and natural. Taranaki is in sore need of a tonic, because money-making, after all, is not the sole or more important business of life. The worst of it is that you simply can't educate the Taranaki rustic or the denizen of the Taranaki woop-woops. He is a cocksure, obstinate and very terrible fellow, lie bases his opinions -on facts so stale that they are olteinoffensively dead, and he stiU regards himself as a prophet or advance guard in occupation of the day after tomorrow. The shock of hard times would shake the blue mould oil' him.' If he could meet candid men and women ol the wider world the contact would do him good. But he meets nobody but his neighbor, and by mutual conspiracy each helps the other's sell-conceit to tower like the Matterhorn. Don't misunderstand me. The rural Taranakiati is generally a good chap, but he is still prehistoric.

"Most of us need ginger nowadays; the Taranaki man needs dynamite, 'lie possesses a rich province, and he is not developing its richness as he should. 111 most eases he's fit for nothing but to grow spuds or become a. member of Parliament. He just dodders through life; when he should seize life in both hands and squeeze the goodly juice out of it. tale is the wise man's orange: it i-i the Taranaki man's pumpkin—too tough lor his teeth. He works hard with his hands and generous Nature repays him bountifully. li he had to work hard with his wits for a few years it would be the best tiling in the world for him. At present he cannot see beyond his nose, and so is cramped by sadly mean horizons."