THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1909. NEW ZEALAND'S MILLION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3114, 12 February 1909, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1909. NEW ZEALAND'S MILLION.

Commenting on the fact that the population of New Zealand is estimated at 1,008,373, including Maoris, the Sydney "Daily Telegraph" says that those who remember the interest amid which New South Wales neared and passed the million mark will appreciate what the same experience means to the Dominion as a matter of practical as well as sentimental significance. For not mere liking for good round figures or gratification at the achievement of some self set task explains the elation that such an event excites. As well—and of course more importantly—-the new

figures are hailed because in a tacit way they indicate the young country's coming: of age, it 3 arrival ■among the leading members of the polonial family. We live in days of national multi-millionaireism. but at any rate New Zealand now ranks among the millionaires. Her experience in gaining that distinction has been typical for Australasia. The human millionaire proceeds by many and sometimes brightly picturesque broad roads and sidepaths to his seven-figured apotheosis, but in this part of the world there seems to be a regular way for the colonies to get there in spite of their dissimilarities in climate, situation, productivity, and other features. The first sparse haphazard settlement is reinforced by the discovery of gold, and though the inrush of miners has its natural ebb as the pan-out dwindles, some of them stay, and meantime other in dustries have grown up alongside the brief and dazzling one that everywhere allures men. Such was Victoria's experience and New South Wales's, and such has been the outstanding course of, New Zealand's history. Like these States, too the Dominion ha 3 had its bad times and set-backs but it differentiates in having on several occasions been rescued from depression by marked and new-appearing causes. A failure of the fibra crops has brought the flax of the island country into demand ; the perfection of over-sea refrigeration, shrewdly taken advantage of, has enabled the transition to be made from bad times to good ones; and a policy of bringing the people and the land closer together just when the people were ripe for it and public circumstances made it necessary has se+ the country on an upward road which, in point of fact. it is still pursuing. Yet it has taken New Zealand about a century to obtain a million people. It is true that the first systematic attempt nt colonisation was not made until 1825. .when a company was formed in London to settle some land in the far north, but the country was known, and white' Governments were in touch with it long before then, so that it is roundly a fair statement that it has taken 100 years to get a million ppople to a land of exceptional fertility, well watered, highly productive, and rich in all the guarantees of health and prosperity that any good new country can otfer to robust and industrious settlers. We do i,ot suggest that New Zealand is peculiar in this. On the contrary, there, a in so much of the rest of her national progress, she is representative and actually has done better u ai some of her Australian liiburs. But that it is pretty much the same all rcund does not make th» actuality any brighter, but rather the reverse. But no Australian State is on any pinnacle of superiority from which it can decently offer impassion to another. New Zealand has now douoled her population in about twenty-three years, it has taken rather lonjer to do the same thing in Australia, and between them—with all Australia's vast rich spaciousne.. and New Zealand's wonderful concentration of human opportunities—they have less than six milli.na o* people. The fact is anything but a comfortable one to think of, but it is necessary to cite it a.s a. reminder of cue work thai, has to be done—perhaps we should say begun—in peopling Australasia, if only for safety's sake. iVe have a too-low birth rate, and the immigration is exasperatingly slow by comparison with what apparently ought to be its pace looking at the thousands of emigrants who leave Great Britain and the Continent every week. The increase of the population, therefore, is anything but reassuring to those who take heed of Australia's relation an.". New Zealand's to the East; and it will remain so, causing a real and great danger to hang like a cloud over our national future, unless ways can be devised of bringing immigrants in at the rate of about a hundred for every one that comes in