Victoria University College an Essay towards a History

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VICTORIA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE an essay towards a history J. C. Beaglehole Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in Colonial History <figure xml:id="BeaVictia"><graphic url="BeaVictia.jpg" mimeType="image/jpeg" xml:id="BeaVictia-g"/></figure>WELLINGTONNEW ZEALAND UNIVERSITY PRESS1949published for Victoria University College by the New Zealand University Press university house corner bowen and mowbray streets wellington c.t printed by whitcombe and tombs ltd. wellington

Victoria University College

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Preface

No one, truly, could be more conscious of the defects of this book than its author. To write history is always to receive fresh instruction in the inadequacies of one's own knowledge, the shortcomings of one's own research and imagination; and to write the history of a college is, in this way, no less instructive then to write the history of an empire. The book is larger then it was meant to be; it was begun only after prolonged thought (I can say that) over the best method of solving the problem which it presented, and in the end, I freely confess, it took charge of me. Our college is a difficult, an intransigent institution for the historical analyst; inconsiderable as it may seem to gods on Olympus, its history is pretty nearly as complex as theirs, and can be written only in a mixture of generalization and detail that can hardly fail to cause some dissatisfaction. No doubt if I had another twelve months I could make it shorter, generalize more lucidly, choose, perhaps, more illuminating detail (for some detail one must have— ‘ce superflu, si nécessaire’), give it a form somewhat more elegant, round it off. But I suspect, nevertheless, that the college is not very susceptible to rounding off. I also suspect that no person who has had anything to do with college life will regard the book as very satisfactory for his own period. Other persons may feel like Virginia Woolf, who remarks, writing on Addison in The Common Reader, that perceptive, enchanting book, ‘Any historian will explain; but it is always a misfortune to have to call in the services of any historian.’

I have tried to write a history of a college, not of individuals, and have even deliberately refrained from mentioning names except when they arose inevitably out of the narrative. Young as it is, the college has been exceedingly rich in character, and once that sort of description was embarked upon, beyond the strictly necessary, it would both have been never-ending and have landed me in strange quandaries of tact. So the critical, once again, may find what seem like important omissions. I have also tried to see the college not in isolation, living a life merely its own (which would be manifestly untrue) but as part of the community, conditioned by the world, a particular manifestation of New Zealand, bound to it by obvious ties, but also by innumerable more subtle filaments, one side of a process of continuous action and reaction; a reflection, as it were, in a particular mirror of our general uneasy and complicated twentieth century life. I can only hope I have not too much misjudged, over-simplified, distorted the relation. I have omitted any consideration of Adult Education in the Wellington district, though that has been managed through the college; for it is really an autonomous subject, and though many professors and lectures have devoted a good deal of time to it, and been nearly concerned in its fortunes, it has impinged little on the life of the college proper.

Nor have I said much (I find with a sense of sudden horror— have I indeed said anything?) about courses of study, ‘stages’, options, syllabuses, set-books and text-books, and all those other invaluable, inevitable, indispensable adjuncts of the learned life, which form so large a part, properly, of the life of any serious and well-intentioned college. I have no doubt I should have thought even longer, been more careful to give a just proportion of attention to important things. But somehow the college seems to have consisted of human beings, men and women, whose relations to their fellows have been so interesting as to divert me from those other, grave matters; in the end I seem to have said more about students than about anything else. I acknowledge the emphasis and the lack of emphasis; and it may be that in the end the men and women have, too, a real importance.

One cannot finish a study of the history of the college without forming fairly decided views as to how its future development should be guided—as to where, for example, administrative bodies might be profitably revised, or departments profitably strengthened. But I have not regarded the elabortation of such views as part of my duty as historian, though here I cannot resist saying that the college has by no means yet outgrown the prescription given by Stout in 1886, while it has done no more than take one or two of the first necessary steps in the arts (not the ‘arts-subjects’) which now its duty is, I think, to cultivate.

The documentation of the book will seem to some readers otiose, and to others (principally perhaps those advanced students of the History Department who may do me the honour to read it) shamefully inadequate. In fact I set out to do away with footnotes altogether, as unnecessary in a sort of celebratory memoir; but they kept breaking in, There is a good deal of quotation untethered formally and specifically to a source; here, however, I think it will be obvious from the context that college records, or Spike, or Salient, or some other organ of opinion and enlightenment is being quoted; and I have done my best to verify all such extracts.

The illustrations form a somewhat random selection. Most of them are from the early days. Adequately to portray these fifty years would mean the presentation of an enormous heap of photographs—a whole album, or rather a series of albums. Nevertheless those that are given will, I hope, illuminate some facets of the college life, even though the originals do not uniformly allow of first-rate reproduction. The names of individual persons in most of the groups are deliberately not given. They are typical of their generation of students; those who knew them will need no printed list, and to later generations in the quick succession mere names would mean but little.

After a good deal of hesitation, I have refrained from giving a formal bibliography. The history of the college is very much bound up with the history of the University in general, and on that there are two bibliographies already in existence; that in my book on The University of New Zealand (Wellington, New Zealand Council of Educational Research, 1937) and the other in the well-known Bibliography of New Zealand Education by Mary Mules and A. G. Butchers, the second edition revised by H. C. McQueen (Wellington, New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 1947). This has a separate section on the college. In addition to the sources listed therein the college archives have of course been indispensable; and I have to thank the Council for giving me free access both to its own Minutes and to any other papers I wished to consult. The student publications, Spike, Smad, Salient, have been indispensable also; and nothing could have been more admirable than the long-suffering patience displayed by the Library staff under the unscrupulous demands I made upon their resources. The New Zealand Parliamentary Debates have yielded their usual sad fruits of eloquence, and some revealing details.

I am indebted for information, beyond the printed word, to many persons, my seniors, contemporaries, or juniors, who have read my drafts, or submitted cheerfully to cross-questioning on their memories or observations; who have given me ideas and hints, and altogether enlarged my comprehension of the college beyond my early expectations, They have never attempted to determine my judgment. I am especially grateful to Sir Thomas and Lady Hunter and to Professor von Zedlitz; to Professor Kirk, who in the last months of his life wrote for me notes that shone with an undimmed spirit; to my history colleagues Professor F. L. Wood and Mary Boyd; to Denise Dettmann, who shored up the ruins of my Latin; and to certain students of my own who have not merely helped me with a general criticism but have also done their best to improve my prose style. I must record, also, a particular gratitude to Nancy Taylor and to Frances Fyfe for proof-reading, and for making the index.

I should add that nothing would have been possible had not the college Council freed me for a year from the load of lecturing; and I hope that its members will not now think that I could have been better employed.

J.C.B. January, 1949.

Contents page PREFACE vii I FOUNDATION 1 II THE MISSIONERS 23 III ADVANCE ON ALL FRONTS 45 IV A HOME OF ITS OWN 83 V REVOLT OF THE PROFESSORS 131 VI WAR YEARS 155 VII THE TWENTIES 181 VIII THE THIRTIES 209 IX THE FORTIES 231 X THE CLAY AND THE FLOWER 257 APPENDICES 289 PICTURE GALLERY AFTER 303 INDEX 305

Victoria University College

I Foundation

The university of new zealand is an institution on which men have recorded their sentiments from time to time with fury, loathing, and despair; but never with the passion of love. It is not in the nature of administrative machines, indeed, to bring forth the softer human feelings, and the University, through all its troubled career, has remained a machine—functioning with less or greater efficiency, but essentially a machine for the distribution of paper, the paper on which the examined write, for none but examiners to read. True, it has also distributed money, though less money than paper; but in neither case has its ministry been rewarded with that free movement of the heart, that perdurable warmth which men and women feel for the nursing mother. Alma mater is no phrase for so large and remote an entity. The life of the mind, nevertheless, in our country has had its parents, its nurses, its fostering care; its expansion has been not unaccompanied by a just and attentive emotion. That emotion, unfelt for the University, has been bestowed upon the bodies known abstractly as the ‘constituent colleges’. What they constitute has always, since the phrase was enshrined in an act of parliament, been uncertain; as in the larger spheres of the British Commonwealth within which they have grown, the ever-proliferating facts have refused to be amenable to the constitutional theory. Nor has a Chancellor been the equivalent of the Crown, gathering up all loyalties in a semi-mystical devotion. ‘Constituent’ has too often been a synonym for ‘dissident’.

Meanwhile the ordinary citizen of this academic empire, the simple-minded and sentimental student, has, without worrying about the theoretical, the complex relations of Boards and Committees and Sub-committees and Senate, given his affecttions to his own college. There he has had his real friends and enemies, there the objects of his admiration or contempt; there he has been hero or sublime ass or merely average sensual man; there he has learnt the elements of scholarship, tasted the heady delights of the independent intellect, played the fool and wrestled with his soul, assailed authority, proclaimed fundamental truths and undying convictions, experienced love and jealousy and the limitless sarcasms of Fate and the hollowness of all human endeavour, discovered the fascination of beer and bawdy and poetry and philosophy and science; there he has been revolutionary and Tory, romantic and realist; has been Keats and Shelley and Freud and Newton, voyaging on seas of thought alone and often enough thumping down on inconvenient and indestructible rocks, there he has engaged in a most free discussion, there he has denied God and challenged, the heavens to fall, there he has pursued holiness with a humble and contrite heart; and there he has merely gone for a degree. There, in all these manifestation, He has been also she. He and She have been the life of the mind, He and She, with a number of professors and lectures sometimes admired, sometimes deemed of inconsiderable value, have been the Colleges. They, or some of them, have seen the Colleges as temples of Minerva; they have made the Colleges, so their critics have frequently said, sinks of sedition and dens of iniquity. They have gone from the Colleges to die in battle; and they have returned to the Colleges to convert them into uneasy simulacra of an uneasy world. These Colleges, indeed, regarded by the public of New Zealand sometimes with a faint awe as ‘the University’, more often perhaps with amusement or irritation, have been a fairly accurate reflection of the civilization of our country— a civilization disturbed by the ancient tradition of learning, but moulding, inevitably, all institutions to its own needs and with its own eccentricities; a civilization affected, too, in some measure, by the retaliation, the counteraction of the thought and the standards which the Colleges, with a varying degree of disinterested stubbornness, have managed to maintain. New Zealand has had four of these Colleges; and it is to the first fifty years of the latest-founded of them that this essay is addressed.

The latest-founded: there were those who did not in the beginning think highly of Wellington's chances of higher education. Sir William Fox, that eminent colonist, speaking as Premier on the first university bill of 1870, affirmed that parliament was setting up in Dunedin a real university: ‘we may have’ he added, ‘hereafter, others of the same class established in Auckland, in Canterbury, and even in Wellington—if poor Wellington should ever rise to such a height of prosperity as to entitle it to have a university of its own, or even rise beyond mere elementary teaching’.

It is necessary to recur to the University of New Zealand, that odd (though by no means uniquely odd) institution. For our college was founded as part of a System, it had to fight vigorously for independent life, and its fighting was a main factor in wrecking this System. Its motto, indeed, over one period of its existence might well have been, not the dignified Latin truism to which it has tried to bear witness, but that more belligerent and Voltairean exhortation, ‘Ecrasez l'infâme!’ The University, after much scuffling and a certain measure of backstairs intrigue, was set up under an act of parliament of 1874, on the ruins of another act of parliament of 1870, as a body for the prescription of courses of study and for the management of examinations. It had a Chancellor and a Senate, but it had no students, no teachers, no library, no habitation, and very little money. It came into being almost at the end of the period of provincial government, when provincial jealousies were never more exacerbated, and the wicked fairies who presided over its shaping (one can hardly say birth) were provincialism and the nineteenth century University of London. Provincialism was indubitably there, but was shoved, rather ineffectually, into the background; but the University of London, with her sinister gifts, was clothed in shining garments and brought forward as a reigning queen and an exemplar. The University of London was even, in some sort, identified in function with the University of Oxford. It was a triumph—the triumph of what was called the English System over the Scottish System; the triumph of Canterbury over Otago.

In plain words, what happened was this; the province of Otago, rich and, in comparison with the North Island, well-populated, and with considerable educational ambitions, had determined to set up a university which it was confident would serve the whole country. Against this pretension the men of Canterbury, with allies elsewhere in New Zealand, firmly set themselves. No one province, they argued, should have the monopoly of university education, and in modern days and under colonial conditions what was needed was diffusion and not concentration of culture. How could the poor student of Auckland come to Dunedin for a term of years, and if he could (argued some) what moral dangers would he not undergo in the dubious streets of that metropolis! A university need not itself indulge in teaching; indeed for it to do so was against the spirit of English institutions. Subordinate bodies should teach. Had not the rival claims, in London, of the godless Jeremy Bentham's foundation and of the Anglican King's College been resolved by the setting up of a university which should act as an examining body to them both, with an open invitation to all who could not get into Oxford or Cambridge to come and be examined also? And was not teaching in Oxford and Cambridge a matter for those colleges whence so many eminent colonists had come? Let culture therefore be diffused. Let institutions all over New Zealand, of respectable standing, where Latin and mathematics and geology could be taught, become ‘affiliated’ to the University, and let their students be examined by the University and be eligible for its scholarships; and let deserving individuals be exempted from attendance at any institution whatsoever and be likewise examined. And, to be certain that examinations were pure and above reproach, let the examiners be not colonists, but men of that formidable learning and passionless probity which went with attachment to the universities of England.

So it was done. The men of Canterbury produced an institution all ready to be affiliated. Overborne Dunedin at last consented to affiliation with the University of New Zealand, on condition of retaining the honourable title of its own University of Otago; and from the more northern parts of the country a variety of secondary schools also applied to become affiliated institutions. Why not? They had teachers, they had hopeful pupils, and the University was prepared to send examination papers far and wide. Of course the system thus inaugurated broke down: broke down so disastrously and completely that a royal commission was appointed as early as 1878 to scrutinize the wreck. One must not, however, deposit too much scorn upon its architects. They had comprehensible ideal. They thought they were shaping a structure which would meet the needs of a particular colony in a new world; they were opposed to education as the perquisite of a class; they were confident that culture could be diffused by a proper mechanism; they were quite sincerely determined to compensate their distance from the centres of civilization by their insistence on a ‘high standard’ for their degrees. They saw no reason, indeed, why New Zealand itself should not, with a university, become a centre of civilization; and to confuse culture, examinations, and degrees with such deadly illogic was perhaps not unnatural in that mechanical age. But it was not inevitable, as the Royal Commission made quite plain. University education, maintained that Commission, could only be carried on in universities or in bodies closely approximating in nature to them; the existing system of affiliation should be abolished and new colleges founded in Wellington and Auckland parallel to those in the South Island, with sites, buildings and endowments provided by the government; the University should be governed mainly by representtatives of the colleges, and examinations should be conducted by those who taught in the colleges. And, added that excellent Reports, ‘Our desire is that each college may acquire a marked individuality, such as to demand recognition in the form of the examinations, and to secure for it a special reputation, which may at some future day be the foundation of its success as a separate and independent University’.

A. to J. 1879, H–1, p. x.

Like the pregnant words of so many other royal commissions, these gave birth to nothing beyond further words. Proposals of this nature involved the expenditure of money, and New Zealand was about to plunge into the greatest slump it had yet experienced. When, therefore, in 1882 a bill was pushed through parliament founding an Auckland University College and providing a statutory grant of £4000 a year the government was clear that it had done enough for the North Island. There was to be no change of system, only its extension—except that in five years more the affiliation of secondary schools was at an end.

By that time a figure of large importance for our study had come into the foreground of the scene, a scene which he was not infrequently to dominate. This was the recently knighted Sir Robert Stout. Stout, the philosophical radical in his early forties, the Shetland pupil-teacher and Otago law-lecturer, the swayer of juries and the intermittent able politician, the infidel and prohibitionist, the acute, kind-hearted and exasperating apostle of reason, had as Attorney-General provided the impulse to set up the Royal Commission of 1878. In the following year he had himself made some trenchant criticisms of the University, and suggested that colleges, as they were founded, should specialize in their functions. In 1884 he joined the Senate, and began that immediate experience of University administration which in twenty years made him so formidable a figure for those who differed from him in policy. In 1886, Premier and Minister of Education, he made a statement of opinion which was important in itself and which had repercussions a generation later. New Zealand, he held, had not the means to establish a ‘comprehensive’ university, even if research were ignored. But four colleges, on the basis of an arts course, might (he recurred to his suggestion of 1879) specialize. Dunedin already had a school of medicine. Canterbury might devote itself to agriculture and, when the Midland Railway opened up ‘the vast mineral deposits of the Middle Island’, a school of mines. Auckland was ‘a place peculiarly suited for maritime pursuits’: there navigation, astronomy and engineering should be taken in hand, and there also research might be pursued into the languages and ethnology of the Pacific islands. These were three existing colleges. And Wellington? ‘I do not think it necessary’ said Stout, ‘that much expense should be incurred in starting a college at Wellington. All that need be aimed at, at first, would be part of the arts course.’ But (though this might seem rather meanly inadequate) he had a larger hope. ‘So far as Wellington is concerned, it is the seat of Parliament and the seat of the Court of Appeal. This city might be prominent for its special attention to jurisprudence, to law, to political science, to history.… Wellington has, also, in the able Director of the Museum and his assistants, scientific men whose services could be utilized for the teaching of the geology and natural history of New Zealand.’

New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 54 (1886), pp. 603–4.

The first part of this programme was a vision that was never entirely lost; the second part, the short cut to science teaching, was a matter on which there was a divergent view—for Dr James Hector, ‘the able Director of the Museum’, was also the Director of the Geological Survey, head of the New Zealand Institute, and Chancellor of the University, and was to be excused when he argued, as in due course he did, that his time was already pretty fully take up.

The pioneer did not stop there. On 6 May 1887, Stout moved the second reading of a Wellington University College Bill, which was debated at length four days later. The pattern of debate became a familiar one.

I do not give detailed references to the debates over the foundation of the college. They will be found, adequately indexed, in N.Z.P.D., Vols. 57 (1887), 84 (1894), and 100 (1897). The text of the acts passed will be found in Statutes of New Zealand for the relevant years. See also the documentation of my University of New Zealand (New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 1937), pp. 145–53.

The college was to serve Wellington, Hawke's Bay and Taranaki. Institutions of higher education, argued Stout, were required for the sake of the poor, not the rich, for the poor man's son could not go to Otago; teachers needed education; evening classes would provide a noble opportunity, ‘You will have men working during the day, clerks in offices perhaps, perhaps mechanics, going to the evening classes, and thereby obtaining a university education.’ To oppose the bestowal of university education, if possible free, was to do a most anti-democratic, illiberal thing, the worst thing for the progress of the colony. True, the colony was hard-up; but it could afford a grant of £1500 a year for seven years, an endowment of 14,000 acres at Nukumaru in Taranaki (set aside under an act of 1874 as a university reserve) and one acre in Museum Street (including the Museum and its moneys); while ‘the able scientific men that we have here shall do teaching work for six months of the year’. He was sure that Dr Hector, who was to become Warden of the college, would be only too glad. If anybody argued that the government was being over-generous with land endowments, there was one adequate replay. ‘As to the value of the land, the land is of such a poor character that we have not been able to let it at all. Nobody would take it and pay the rates on it. In fact, we do not expect that any revenue more than will perhaps pay the rates on the land will be got, the land is of such poor quality.’

This frankly proclaimed parsimony was much praised by Mr Edward Wakefield. ‘I believe we shall get professors in Wellington’, said he, ‘and very good professors too, who can give a good education either as a labour of love or for a very small remuneration indeed; and the best earnest of that is that the Caledonian Society has already established university classes without any public assistance whatever, and that English, mathematics and Latin lectures are at this moment being given, supported solely by the fees of the students, as at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and, I suppose, originally at Oxford and Cambridge. That is why I am anxious to see this bill passed, because I believe it is a direct departure from the lavish expenditure that has been incurred on other occasions.’

The lavish expenditure which the unfortunate country had incurred on behalf of university education was one of the principal sticks with which Stout's opposers beat the bill: the cost of education was becoming so outrageous that Parliament would soon be unable to find the money for the annual vote; the Auckland College was a public injustice perpetrated on the taxpayer; there were plenty of colleges already— ‘abundant facilities’, in fact. Furthermore, primary education was being ignored—there was great deal of reiteration there. But the bill got through the House. It went to the Legislative Council, where the Elder Statesmen gave it short shrift. To the arguments already advanced was added one that put on later a certain ferocity. The proposal for a land endowment, said the Hon. Henry Scotland, was a proposal to rob Taranaki. The Nukumaru reserve had been set aside by legislation for university education within that province and nowhere else. Mr Scotland, indeed, very much doubted the utility of university colleges. They were, it appears, like Stout, doing no good to religion. ‘You get out men from England at £600 a year, and ignorant people think we are getting first-rate scholars. Nothing of the kind. We are getting third-rate men, their heads filled with Darwin and Huxley, Clifford and Tindall[sic], who are only fit to instil infidel principles into the youth of the colony.’ This denunciation of dangerous thoughts, as an argument against the bill, was hardly needed. The Council's feelings were summed up by the Hon. Morgan S. Grace, himself one of the founders of the University. ‘As to the question of expense,’ he said, ‘I do honestly think that we have not got any more money to expend on high-class education in this colony.’ The bill was thrown out.

It was seven years before Stout tried again. For most of that time he had been out of parliament, but in 1893 he came back as a member for Wellington City. By then the Great Slump was over, and the country, solidly based on refrigeration, had begun to experience a prosperity hitherto unknown. Seddon was in the saddle; the Liberal party, in all the effulgence of its youth, was engaged lustily in the reforms that made its name; 1894 was its legislative annus mirabilis. It was not however interested in educational reform; Reeves, the Minister of Education, was also Minister of Labour, and it was to labour legislation that he gave his time and his intellect. One intellectual in parliament was enough for Seddon; Stout the Liberal, who had some claim on grounds of experience to lead the party, came back in opposition—opposition rather to Seddon than to the Liberal programme—and he could not hope for government backing to any bill of his. In the meantime the demand for university education in Wellington had been growing. The population of the ‘Middle District’—the old provinces of Taranaki, Hawke's Bay, Wellington, Nelson, Marlborough and Westland—recovering from the setbacks of war and depression, now exceeded that of Auckland, equalled Canterbury, was approaching Otago; it contributed more candidates to the university entrance examination than any other part of the country; it had as many candidates for university degrees, as extra-mural students, as Auckland had. It had many more teachers, whose need of higher education was apparent. The Wellington Education Board, in 1887, recommended the abolition of its Normal School, and the use of the funds thereby released in the founding of a chair of psychology and education in Stout's Wellington University College. University graduates in Convocation reiterated their earnest conviction of the necessity for a central college, and a Graduates' Association even talked of arranging lectures itself. The University Senate's resolution on the subject became annual. In 1889 it looked for a moment as if the govern- mentgovernment might move, for it consulted the Chancellor over possible alternation of Stout's not very satisfactory bill. Hector did not like the bill, with its Geological Survey-Museum-maid-of-all-work basis, and much preferred the terms of the Auckland University College Act; but nothing was done. The Senate in 1894 prepared a Memorandum Respecting the Establishment of a University College at Wellington, assembling all the formidable figures, and a deputation that was ‘large and representative’ went before the Minister of Education. It was in vain. People ‘wrote to the paper’. More deputations waited upon the government, to receive fair words. The cause became live enough for Stout and his colleague, H. D. Bell, to use it on the hustings. Wellington had got beyond the stage where scientific primers, penny readings, the odd lecture, and the itinerant elocutionist, could satisfy its demand for the meat of the mind: got beyond the stage, too, where the man who wished for a formal university degree could be content, failing the relative wealth necessary to take him to one of the existing colleges, with solitary application to a text-book as an ‘exempted’ student. Canterbury had Wellington names on its books, but that was a mockery of education. Professor Macmillan Brown's notes on English, purchasable at a price, would get anybody through an examination, but that was a mockery of education also. When the able Congregationalist minister, W. A. Evans, came to Wellington in 1893, and began his ‘Forward Movement’—a sort of combination of broadly evangelical religion, philanthropy and adult education—he canalized in its Literary Society some at least of the energies that were impatiently waiting for more formal grapplings with learning; and the discussions which there proceeded on George Eliot and Ruskin and Browning, with Stout and Dr Findlay and A. R. Atkinson and Mrs Evans (that Kate Milligan Edger who was the first woman graduate of the British Empire) whipping up the interest, stimulated intellectual excitement as much as the social conscience in young men and women whose ambitions were all too effectually thwarted. (The Caledonian Society's classes in English, mathematics and Latin seem to have died.) Evans himself was a leader in the demand for something greater. If you want a university nothing else, really, is much use.

Wellington, it appears, did in fact want as well as need a college. There was a awful spectacle of the Gaol, that large red-brick mock castle on ‘Mount Cook’. ‘Goal or no gaol, that is the question,’ said Evans's Citizen, in its first number. ‘For years past, practically without protest, the citizens of Wellington have been watching the gradual growth of this horrible eyesore, and are only now beginning to wake up to the fact that they are likely to have planted right in the middle of their city, not only the ugliest structure that is to be found between the Bluff and the North Cape, but one of the most infamous hotbeds of criminality on this side of the Equator. .… If the site of the Athenian Acropolis was deemed worthy of a temple, it is not less true that the noblest site in this city should be saved from the ignominy of a goal. The movement now on foot for securing the site for the foundation of a university for the higher education of the youth of the Colony should secure the warmest sympathy of every citizen.’

The Citizen, vol. I, No. 1 (October 1895), pp. 82–3.

That Gaol was an insult and a challenge. Nevertheless one looks in vain for any effective independent action—action, that is, which did not have as its immediate end a bill in parliament and a grant from parliament. The city itself as a corporate body was never stirred; those men of means who lived in the city or the province were never visited by the ambition to be Founding Fathers. Neither in 1840, when the earliest settlers landed at Port Nicholson, nor thereafter, did they fancy themselves as leaders in education, or education as a first principle in colonization. The New Zealand Company's first settlement was a strictly utilitarian affair, on the narrowest possible interpretation of that misunderstood adjective. Stout, the passionate believer in the uses of learning, was a utilitarian of a different sort, and he, as a colonist, started life in Otago, Wellington might be the seat of the colonial legislature and of the Court of Appeal. Its soul was not the soul of statesmanship or of law, but of commerce. True, as a settlement it began badly, bedevilled by the Company's inadequacies and deceits. What Fox made of its prospects, as late as 1870, has been already seen. It had to struggle for life, and it might be forgiven, in its young decades, for taking a limited view of the necessities of life. First things first: yes, but who among those merchants and mechanics and country folk was there to put the classics and chemistry among first thing? They built their churches, and found the spirit well enough provided for. They were, many of them, puritans—but not seventeenth century Puritans. They could do without a Harvard. Their province had no gold-fields not easily accessible farm-lands, lying ready to the plough. Port statistics had an obvious fascination that the Muses had not. How then should Wellington's townsmen, left to themselves, found a university? The habit of civic generosity was a habit they failed to acquire. One must not draw a distinction, however, that does not exist. Neither of the two southern colleges arose from individual benevolence; they were provincial foundations, endowed from provincial lands. Auckland was a government foundation, endowed from government lands—though the endowment was an exiguous one. But at least Otago men, Canterbury men, Auckland men had provided the impulse; displayed, some of them, a civilized scale of values. The scale of values in Wellington, if on close examination found to be arranged in no very different order, still did not seem entirely civilized. The Gaol was built —though by the government it is true, not by the citizens. Yet, as the nineties moved on, and the city entered its second half-century, its demands for a university institution of its own became a serious demand—serious enough, as we have seen, to be made use of in an election.

In July 1894 there was a long debate over a new bill introduced by Stout, the Middle District of New Zealand University College Bill. It was passed by both houses. Unfortunately, as a private member's bill, it could not provide for the expenditure of money, and the government, which did not oppose it, when it was passed did hardly more than ignore it. The balance of debate in the House of Representatives was much as it had been in 1887, with Taranaki members embattled in defence of their lands as if they were the Ark of the Convenant. They wanted, asserted the blithe Dr Newman of Wellington Suburbs, to filch an area of 10,000 acres and erect a model cheese-factory on it. Stout, asserted the member for New Plymouth in return, would pawn the colony for high-class education; his colleague for Egmont besought the House to consider the state of our primary education, and the outlying districts, and the folly of making towns attractive at the expense of the country. Endowments should go to model schools, ‘where the sons and daughters of farmers might receive technical instruction in the manufacture of butter and cheese, in housekeeping, et cetera, all of which would add to the general prosperity of New Zealand, and the comfort and happiness of the people.’ The ‘six miles through mud’ which country children had a tramp to get to school became a sort a leit motiv in the discussion; the House had no right to grant one shilling for anything but primary education, concluded one member. There were, however, more useful contributions to debate, such as that of Earnshaw of Dunedin, who thought that the gaol, ‘that disgrace to Wellington’, should be pulled down and a university building erected on the site. Earnshaw wanted an absolutely free secondary and university system: ‘I see no logical stopping-place between a free primary school and a university school of research’. There were other places than Wellington mentioned, as having a superior claim to a university—such as Masterton (the member for Masterton, in his plea for democracy, could not resist a blow at ‘lawyers, clergymen, and others, who prey on the earnings of honest men’); and John McKenzie, the Minister for Lands, who suggested Blenheim or Picton, disposed with contempt both of the bill and of the capital city. The bill he would not oppose—it was just waste paper; but he warned the House that it was also the thin end of the wedge, and that ‘these people’ would be coming along for money. ‘These people’?–these magnates, these wealthy merchants, wealthy solicitors and professional men of every description; ‘they keep their hands tremendously tight in their pockets if they are asked to do anything in the way of education.… In fact, I think, for the interest of the Colony of New Zealand, Wellington should not be represented in this House at all.’ This was a surprising extension to the argument, and as it came from a minister of the Crown, left the bill's supporters in no manner of doubt as to its practical effect. It might be a democratic measure, it might be for the advantage of the ‘poor man’, as Stout argued; but the government's mind did not work that way.

Certain members of the governing body were appointed, but no money was produced; and two years later the University Senate, on Stout's motion, threw away too respectful words and in desperation ‘again reiterated’ its opinion that it was the duty of the government to provide an endowment. In this year 1896 the cause seemed not much further forward than it was a decade earlier.

When, therefore, at the end of the year next following—the precise date was 9 December 1897—John Richard Seddon himself brought forward a motion with the words, ‘I do not think there will be any question as to the necessity for the establishment of a University College here in Wellington,’ Stout, and those who had striven with him, would have deserved pardon for some raising of the eyebrows. But they were used to Seddon. There was more surprise when McKenzie seconded this motion; which was for the second reading of ‘An Act to promote Higher Education by the Establishment of a College at Wellington in Commemoration of the Sixtieth year of the Reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’.

What had caused this unpredictable interest in higher education on the part of the Premier? In the absence of intimate records, the lack of which is so often exasperating to the historian in our country, one is driven to guesswork. It could hardly have been a belated attention to the recommendations of the Royal Commission of 1879; it could hardly have been heed of the complaints of the University Senate; it was hardly attention to Stout, on the Senate or in the House, for Stout in the House was a thorn in the Seddonian flesh, before long to be plucked out and placed on the Supreme Court bench as Chief Justice. The explanation, it seems, must be sought, at least partly, in Seddon's own academic career. The earlier months of 1897 he had spent, like other colonial premiers, assisting at the Diamond Jubilee of his Queen. It had been an expansive time, and the older universities had done their part. Upon Seddon himself the University of Cambridge had conferred the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa. It is likely that a tinge of academic romance descended upon the imperial romantic; for the returned to New Zealand ‘much struck with… the advantages of higher education’, determined to plant a university college in the capital, but a university college of a particular sort—a college uniquely the creation of the Seddonian Liberal state. He had even, it seems, for this purpose made an unwilling convert of his Minister of Lands. McKenzie could not agree that education was of more value to New Zealand than were roads and bridges, than the colonization of the country itself. Also, ‘It requires something more than higher education to brace a man up to go through life successfully in this country’. But he was not, he maintained, opposed to university education.

The new institution was to be—apart from its commemorative intent (‘I think it would be a grand thing in this the Jubilee year if we could establish this Victoria College’, said the Premier)–first of all, a ‘popular’ one, a college for the sons and daughters of poor men. It was to be marked by the creation of what were called Queen's Scholarships, awarded annually on the results of a special examination to primary school children who needed such help. (How ‘need’ was to be determined became a matter of argument.) The Queen's Scholar must not be older than 14; must go to a secondary school and matriculate not later than two years and three months after the scholarship was awarded, and ‘forthwith thereafter … attend[s] the College lectures and diligently prosecute[s] his studies to the satisfaction of the Professorial Board’–exempt from all lecture fees. Two years at the secondary school and three at Victoria College were to produce the educated man. All college fees were to be subject to government approval, lest they be so high as to keep out the poor. There was to be a ‘radical change’ in another direction. Sinister interests were to be debarred from the administration of the college by the composition of its Council, which, apart from three government appointees, was to be elected by a bewildering variety of constituencies—by members of the legislature resident in or representing the university district, by the college graduates (when their number reached thirty, and till then by graduates of any British or colonial university resident in the district), by school committees, by school teachers; even the Professorial Board was to have one repre- sentativerepresentative (though on no account was a professor or lecturer to be deemed eligible). Was not this democracy? The Professorial Board, of which all professors and lecturers were to be members, was to fix the course of studies (something already done for it effectually by the University Senate), to deal with student discipline, to manage the library, to give instructions to college servants as to the performance of their duties—in all things subject to the control of the Council; but the Board might from time to time offer such suggestions for the consideration of the Council as it thought advisable in the interests of the college. No professor was to be appointed for a longer term than five years. It was quite plain that the professors, on inadequate tenure, fettered administratively by the Council, and academically by the Senate, would find it hard to kick up their heels.

But the Council itself was to be under control. It was to administer an annual grant of £4000. Out of this were to come the Queen's Scholarships—£20 for scholars living at home, £40 for those who had to leave home—which would in five years, at the rate of half a dozen scholarships, thus be consuming probably a quarter of the college income. It was not be allowed to administer at all the land grant of 4000 acres in Taranaki set aside as endowment. That was to be done by the government. McKenzie did not like the way college councils administered their land. He did not like land endowments at all.

The way in which Seddon put through his bill is an excellent study in his parliamentary method. He had a good majority conversing in the lobby, and felt no need to be tender to his bitterly-complaining critics. The bill had been treated with not unjustifiable severity by the Statutes Revision Committee (which included Stout). They had done away with the Queen's Scholarships, and with control of fees by government, and with election to the Council by school com- mitteescommittees, for which they had substituted education boards; they had provided for increased graduate representation. ‘Who ought to direct a university college?’ asked Stout. ‘It ought to be men who know something about university education.’ But in vain, all night, the waves beat against that Rock. The Premier moved straight from second reading to committee, calling in his majority to vote whenever needed (‘Stick to the bill!’), put everything except school committees back that the Statutes Revision Committee had taken out, and took out what they had put in; proceeded to a third reading of mutual recrimination; and then pushed another bill through committee, amid further indignation, before he let the weary House adjourn. He professed to be shocked at the attitude of his opponents. ‘Look at the ingratitude of Sir Robert Stout and the honourable member for Wellington Suburbs [Mr Charles Wilson]. Here we have had honourable members stopping in this Chamber till four o'clock to put a Bill through for Wellington, and the thanks they get is to be confronted with the statement that they do not know what they are doing, and what has transpired is simply disgusting.’

There had, naturally enough, been some discussion of the finance of the college. Seddon himself, in monumental ignorance of the subject, had proposed ten scholarships a year (in the end the number was made six); but to his critics he had replied that ‘if we find the college is popular’, there would be further moneys granted. And there was that reserve of 4000 acres: the government was going to look after it, road it and make it pay a good rent. This meant expenditure of a large sum of money—‘all to help them’—and he referred again to the ingratitude of Sir Robert Stout and the honourable member for Wellington Suburbs. One must concede that the reserve, in its pristine state, was not very highly thought of by anybody. ‘If there was a block of land of the most broken character’, said Mr Buchanan from the Waira- rapaWairarapa, dealing with John McKenzie, ‘without roads, and of the poorest possible description, covered with bush, it was straightway made an education reserve.’ Anyhow, it was argued, professors were much cheaper than they used to be, and that would save money; and as for a building to house the college, there was the Gaol—the Premier and his colleagues were seriously considering whether that could not be put to a better purpose. ‘I … hope, Sir,’ McKenzie had roundly declared, ‘that for the next twenty years we shall hear no more about universities.’ The bill went to the Legislative Council.

Ten years ago the Elder Statesmen had thrown out Stout's first bill. They did not feel happy about this one, but it was not a bill that could be thrown out. They listened to the able and scholarly Bowen on the need for independence from political influence, they listened to the Hon. William Campbell Walker, the not very able Minister of Education, on the cheapness of professors (… ‘at the present time you can get just as good men for about half what the older colleges paid in the first instance’); and they decided to make one or two amendments. They threw the Queen's Scholarships open to competition from the whole country, rather then from the local university district, and they provided that the Council of the college, and not the Inspector-General of Schools, should prescribe the manner of examination. Seddon was angry. This was no way for a Legislative Council to behave. The matter was one of privilege—the bill was not far removed from a money bill—and rather than compromise the rights of the House he would slay the bill at once. Innocent slaughter, however, was prevented. There were those who pointed out, not very kindly, that the Premier was prone to define privilege to suit himself; but he was persuaded to appoint managers. The managers let the Council have its way over the examination; and as for eligibility for the scholarships, it was agreed that geography should be no bar, as long as the scholars conducted their studies ‘at a secondary school or its equivalent, within the said provincial district’; and that, agree Seddon, was as good as putting the clause back as it was before.

The bill became an act. It repealed the still-born act of 1894. The Sixtieth Year of the Reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria was Commemorated. Such commemoration was no doubt better than the extraordinary crop of statues that were at that moment appearing all over the British Empire, in the most improbable places. And what then? On this short-titled Victoria College Act, 1897, what body corporate would grow, to what height and in what direction, with what peculiarities of nature and what variety of experience, what original impulse and what fashion of maturity? In 1897 not Stout, not Seddon, not politician nor university senator could say. Lesser men had registered their contradictory opinions. The bill, said Buchanan, was a scandalous pretence, an abortion of a bill. With more mounting eloquence, the stoutly Seddonian Mr Hogg, member for Masterton, had expounded his vision of the future: ‘All I say is this: that it will be the most popular college in the colony, and, if it is lower in status, it should stand higher in public opinion than the other colleges. As regards the financial difficulties that are apprehended, I have not the slightest doubt they will vanish before the prosperity that will follow a popular institution.’ At that moment Mr Hogg and Mr Buchanan might just as well have tossed for it.

II The Missioners

A very respectable newspaper of the capital, Mr Blundell's Evening Post, had commented rather sadly on the Premier's idea of a university. ‘Fortunately for the colony’, it added, ‘we cannot imagine that the present Ministers, who know little about the requirements of education, will long remain in office.’ Unfortunately for prophecy, Mr Seddon was to remain in office for eight and a half years longer, and his henchmen for six years after that; so that the nascent college had just to make do with these unsatisfactory politicians as best it could. There were those indeed who came to regard the Premier as not at all an unsatisfactory person. He had the gift of gesture. The Victoria College Act, 1897, at any rate, was to be taken seriously.

In the succeeding months the necessary elections took place and appointments were made, and on the afternoon of 23 May 1898 the college Council held its inaugural meeting. There came the Bishop of Wellington, the Right Rev. Frederick Wallis; the Very Rev. Dr Felix Joseph Watters, the organizer and headmaster of St Patrick's College and the leading Catholic figure in secondary education; the Rev. W. A. Evans; Sir Robert Stout; Dr W. A. Chapple, a Wellington physician of some fame, born and educated in Otago; Dr D. P. James, a Fellow of a Royal College of Surgeons; Mr John Graham, M.H.R., a member of the Nelson Education Board and a supporter of Seddon in the House; Mr Alexander Wilson Hogg, M.H.R., the enthusiast from Masterton; Mr Charles Wilson, M.H.R., the honourable but ungrateful member for Wellington Suburbs, a newspaperman and later Parliamentary Librarian; Mr John Rutherfurd Blair, a serious Scots bookseller who had become chairman of the Wellington Education Board and the Wellington College Board of Governors, and was at that moment mayor of the city; Mr R. G. Bauchope, from the Taranaki Education Board; Mr A. P. Seymour, a Marlborough sheep-farmer and Education Board member; Mr J. P. Firth, the tall headmaster of Wellington College; Mr T. R. Fleming, a school inspector of some note; Mr Clement Watson, the headmaster of Te Aro School; and there came an apology from Mr P. J. O'Regan, M.H.R., a young man in politics who might be described as on the left wing of the Liberal Party.

Of these, Graham, Hogg and O'Regan were appointed by the Government; Chapple, Watters and Wilson were elected by members of the Legislature; Stout, the Bishop and Firth were elected by graduates; Evans, Fleming and Watson elected by teachers; Blair, Seymour and Bauchope elected by Education Boards; and James appointed to represent the Professorial Board.

Thus, with a nice sense of ecclesiastical and secular gradation, the Council's minute book lists these founders of our corporate being. Sir Edward Osborne-Gibbes, the secretary to the Education Department, presided; he read a letter from his Minister calling the meeting and appointing him to conduct the election of a chairman. He duly conducted the election—Stout proposed and the Bishop seconded the name of Blair; Mr Blair was duly elected and given also the duty of treasurer; Sir Edward retired; and the Council started its business.

It followed time-honoured precedent and appointed a committee—a committee to frame bylaws, to advertise for a secretary (at not more than £80 per annum), to consider if any amendments were required in the Act (some technical errors were suspected already), and ‘to report on the most practical way of beginning the work of the College’. Information was wanted about the Taranaki land endowment; money was wanted; and was the college to be in or near Wellington? Still uncertain about so many things, the Council, led by Stout, made at least one firm decision: the college was to be in Wellington. By its next meeting it had £2095 17s 9d in the Bank (something out of the £4000) and could regard itself as solvent.

There were four main immediate problems—to collect professors, to find a habitation, to arrange the bestowal of the Queen's Scholarships, and somehow to compass the financing of these things. It was agreed to start with four chairs: classics, English language and literature, mathematics and mathematical physics, and chemistry ‘and some one branch of physical science’; engagements were to be for five years, as the act had specified, at £700 per annum. The financial problem was at once apparent: Mr O'Regan urged £500 for the first year and £700 thereafter. Mr Fleming wanted a chair of natural science: there was not enough money, said Sir Robert Stout, lecturers would do for other subjects. The chairs were to be advertised in New Zealand, Sydney, Melbourne, England, Ireland and Scotland. That was settled by June, by which time also the committee had found that the act needed eleven amendments, and an absent Mr Bauchope had telegraphed strongly objecting to the idea of dividing the exiguous income from the land endowment, which should be kept ‘for the children of bona fide residents of the Taranaki provincial district’. It took longer, till August, to settle on a syllabus for the Queen's Scholarship examination: Composi- tionComposition, Grammar (‘as in the 6th Standard’), Arithmetic, Geography (‘as in the 5th and 6th Standards’), Drawing, History, Science (‘based on the 4th, 5th and 6th Standards’—a large choice of Botany, Chemistry, Physiology, Domestic Economy, Physics, Agricultural Science); of which English, Arithmetic and Geography were to be compulsory. Mr John Gammell, B.A., consented to examine the products of the primary school system in these wide departments of polite knowledge. As for the habitation, the Council's mind turned at once, automatically, to the Gaol—to what was sometimes, more euphemistically, referred to as the Mount Cook site.

But here was check and disappointment. Blair had first proposed to the Minister of Education, as a short cut, that the Council should take over the Girl's High School at Thorndon at £900 per annum and that the girls should be put elsewhere; the Minister had not given him a reply. Then members of the Council went round various sites with the Premier; by September the Premier had said nothing. The Mount Cook site was the best, it had over thirteen acres, and the Council agreed to ask the government for it— ‘such portion of the Reserve as is not required for the college to be maintained as a Public Park accessible to the public under regulations’. Then Graham reported having seen the Premier: he had a letter to the effect that the government would consider granting a site—he thought Seddon was thinking of part of Mount Cook. The citizens of Wellington held a public meeting in its favour, the Council sent a deputation to Mr Seddon. The government announced that it had been decided ‘to ask the approval of the legislature to a proposal of a site’. In the meantime the Council could have the use of the so-called Ministerial Residence in Tinakori Road, then in use as a boarding-house, which would be available at the end of April 1899. This information was received in September 1898; in January 1899 the professors were appointed; by the next meeting of the Council the only further development was that the end of April, so far as the boarding-house was concerned, had become the end of May. The Council was getting desperate; the professors were due to arrive at the end of March. The best that could be done was to collect rooms: there was the ‘large Hall’ at the Museum that could be used for chemistry—though that was also open to members of the New Zealand Institute; there were, too, some rooms at the Girl's High School which could be used before 9 a.m. and after 4 p.m., there were three upstairs rooms in the Technical School building in Victoria Street and another ‘large Hall’ in the Education Board building next door. With the Girls' High School and the Technical School rooms the Council resolved to face the immediate future.

On 1 April 1899, one of Wellington's best autumnal afternoons, the steamship Kaikoura appeared in the harbour and deposited on the wharf the new Professors Brown, Mackenzie, Easterfield, their wives, and half a dozen children—the harvest of that wide advertisement in New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland and Scotland. Scotland had done well. Indeed, one councillor had voted for Easterfield (as he told that high-spirited young man on his arrival) only because there was no Scot on the short list. Professor Maclaurin, a bachelor, had made early enquiries, and finding that so much of the academic-domestic was being embarked en bloc had come out by a different route. The voyage, it appears, had not been without incident, from the time the Mackenzies, on the way to Tilbury, arrived at Fenchurch Street to find the station in flames. It could hardly be conceived otherwise than as a Missionary Journey. ‘After a week or two's experi- enceexperience of my fellow-missioners’, wrote Mackenzie later on,

In an account printed in 1924 and distributed in 1934, when the portraits of the Foundation Professors were presented to the College.

‘I concluded that Professor Brown could with propriety be represented as the St Paul and the head of the mission; Professor Easterfield as the St Peter; while I myself might, with some diffidence, aspire to the humbler role of a Barnabas.’ It took a steady course of Pauline exhortation to maintain the high seriousness of the other brethren; they could not afford, Paul argued, to arrive compromised on the scene of their labours. They were not, in any case, unimpressed with the seriousness of their destiny; they were even perhaps a little anxious, coming from a teaching experience exclusively male, as to how they would get on with ‘mixed classes’. They had held many meetings to discuss the future; and already some variety of thought had been revealed. Paul and Barnabas, it appears, ‘made it clear that they regarded their subjects as on a far higher plane educationally than mathematics and science, I [it is Peter who now writes] considered that culture could be derived from almost any subject if sufficiently well taught’. Peter wished to get down to first principles straight away, to lay out ideals for the new college, to give it a definite and independent spirit: the other apostles, whom no one was ever to call rash, preferred to wait, and to copy the colleges already established. Well, after the discussions of a seven weeks' voyage, here they all were. If one that First of April, when the Council met them, they had felt a little foolish they might have been forgiven. Somehow, before they left England, they had been given to understand that their college was not only adequately endowed, but actually physically in existence—that their task as founders was, as it were, to walk in and begin lecturing. Reality was different. The general scene was different from anything to which they were accus- tomedaccustomed—except for the Aucklander Maclaurin; colonial, raw, and to eyes from St Andrews and Oxford and Würzburg a crude and unhappy jumble.

The Wellington of that day has gone. It has vanished, for us, as completely as the English towns and villages of our forefathers; it is as remote, almost, psychologically, as the first Reform Bill or Captain Cook or Abel Tasman. The Wellington of macadamized roads, where stable manure and straw mixed thickly with the clouds of dust that advanced on every wind, Wellington of the horse-tram, cabs and drags, business Wellington of wood, where on Lambton Quay an occasional building soared three stories skyward, and at the corners the German Band tossed its inspired strains to the enraptured air (within a few months they would be the strains of ‘Good- byeGoodbye, my Bluebird’ and ‘The Soldiers of the Queen’); Wellington of scattered rural railway stations and the blusterous Thorndon Esplanade, and the fantastic tracery of Government House, looking down on the one structure of grace and fine proportion in the town, the unfinished Government Building, with its huge slabs and planks of kauri and totara; Wellington where shrewd investors were taking shares in a company to run a cable tramway up to the farms of Kelburn, ripe for subdivision, and where a roving eye rested on the bare hills of Wadestown and Brooklyn; where, from the far borough of Karori, substantial citizens rode their horses or drove their traps down to business in the morning (a professor was soon to join them); where in the Theatre Royal, off Lambton Quay, Mr Bland Holt and his company proclaimed the drama, against backdrops that ravished all sensibilities; and in the Opera House in Manners Street, where meetings had declared for and against Home Rule for Ireland, Mr Robert Parker conducted the Musical Union in Elijah; Wellington, whence you went ‘over to the Bay’, to the sandhills and the toe-toe of a region not yet ‘Eastbourne’, where a few holiday cottages nestled against the hill; Wellington, where the Church Anniversary and the Sunday School Concert or picnic were still for thousands of citizens the principal festivals of the year; where Maori women still passed from door to door selling ferns, in little tins painted shiny black and gold; where George Winder, of Winder's Corner, was the Cheapest Ironmonger, and J. Godber, of Cuba Street, provided the most celebrated cream-puffs and horns: it was to this Wellington with its 48,000 inhabitants, where a house could be rented for 25s a week, a Wellington provincial and gawky and unsophisticated, but on the whole very much pleased with itself after its almost sixty years of existence, that our four professors came. It was this environment within which they, much more than parliament or a premier or a Council, were faced with the task of founding a university. Fortunately they all had qualities—comparative youth, and a vast good humour, or a faculty for genial contempt, or an undemonstrative endurance which gave them a high survival value; and at least two of them, as one said many years later, had lived through years of the Scottish Sabbath.

Here, then, were Brown and Mackenzie and Easterfield and Maclaurin. All four had something to give the new college which it could ill do without; all four became somehow incorporated in its legend; all had the mark of individuality. Now all were in the first rank of scholarship, but all had minds that were alive, all had the mark of some intellectual or moral conviction; all had the capacity, without which scholarship in itself is of little avail, to draw a mingled admiration and affection from their students, and themselves to feel for those students both admiration and affection. They were a somewhat oddly assorted quartet—Brown with his suppressed emotions, his shyness, his Scots mingling of caution and am- bitionambition; Mackenzie the other Scot, with no repressions at all, the anecdotal, the laughter-loving; Easterfield the Englishman, the German-trained researcher, incisive, athletic, a high-spirited practical joker; the brilliant Maclaurin, virtually a New Zealander, with his astonishing diversity of gifts, detached, tolerantly critical, amused, the conscience-driven sojourner, the one, among those four, destined to a sort of greatness and too early death.

The first was John Rankine Brown. What made Brown come to New Zealand? He was not an academically adventurous man. Perhaps the truth is that he wanted to be a professor, and somehow in Scotland he had missed: the chairs were all too securely held. He was born near St Andrews in 1861, the son of the University tailor; the traditional sound classical and mathematical curriculum at the Madras College sent him on to University; at the age of twenty, with a distinguished M.A. and the Guthrie scholarship in classics and English to his account, he left St Andrews for Oxford, where he had been elected to an open scholarship at Worcester College. Then with a first in classical moderations and a second in Literae Humaniores he returned to St Andrews as an assistant; then in 1886 he went to Glasgow as senior assistant to the professor of Humanity, to become in 1896, after agitation for better conditions by assistants—in which he himself had taken a large part—senior university lecturer in Latin. There, as he neared forty, he seemed stuck. He was able, he had a good record, professionally he was well-known and he was unusually close to students. He was a first-rate teacher, and the undisciplined Glasgow men sat without riot at his feet. The printed brochure (a portentously thorough document) with which he applied for the Wellington chair seems to contain testimonials from every classical professor in Scotland—but also, more significantly, from a large group of his students. This was indeed to pass the acid test.

In his first words from the chair which he was to occupy for forty-six years he struck no dangerous note, nor thereafter was he to do so. Brown the agitator had done his dash. The New Zealand Brown was very much the classical scholar, the Latinist, the man of gravitas. From deep down within him, perhaps, he gazed with a little envy at the freer, the more high-spirited, heel-kicking Greek; but his published work was in school editions of Caesar and not among the emotion-exciting poetry or philosophy of Hellas. Was not De Bello Gallico, Book VI, at one time almost a standard work in New Zealand, and the editor regarded with awe—someone in Wellington, who could be seen in the flesh, who had actually edited a Latin book? The great thing about the classical languages, argued Brown, was that they were dead. They —‘fourteen distinct intellectual operations for the proper comprehension of two words’ there was balance and refinement and purity of style and pensive pathos, ‘firm adherence to great principles’, there in fact was Culture. He was not immune to the charms of French, but it was a deplorably uninflected language. So Brown continued his good teaching, in the tradition. He was moderate, he was conscientious, laborious, kind; and he broadened. He saw the limitations of his students. Late in life he made his own unconscious comment on his inaugural lecture: ‘I do not think I have endeavoured to teach Latin in my classes; in fact, for the majority of students, it was really impossible to teach them Latin. But I have endeavoured to show that Latin is very much more interesting than the subject taught under that name in the schools and that it has a far-reaching influence through life, and that, if its teaching were abandoned, it would be a serious loss to civilization.’ In this belief, too, for the sister language he planned the later course in Greek history, art and literature, which must surely have seemed arrant sciolism to the Glasgow assistant of 1886. Like his colleagues he had his humour, but it was a pawky, a cautious humour, as so much of him was caution; not for Brown the earthy guffaw of large-framed Mackenzie, nor the unbuttoned gibe of Easterfield; his smile came with a certain hesitance, ‘I do not, of course, believe in picking questions,’ he would say at the end of the session in the old days of external examination, controlling his muscles with severity as he gazed at the hopeless class before him, ‘but So-and-so is the examiner this year, and he generally asks for the quotation of some passage of Latin verse; the … er … most celebrated passage in the Aeneid Book IX is that on the friendship of Nisus and Euryalus lines x to y’; and with the grateful acknowledging laughter from in front he would suffocate a smile, and you knew you had one question in the bag.

It was again Brown's pawky humour, not snobbery, that made him say to a much younger professorial colleague, with his peculiarly judicial manner, and a twinkle in the eye, about some other colleague whose behaviour had been in dubious taste, ‘You know, I have an old-fashioned prejudice that a professor should be a gentleman’.

He never outgrew that first (perhaps also last) infirmity of the classical mind, the love for bloomers in examination renderings; very late in life he would take the morning's crop over the road to Mackenzie's house for appreciative gustation at afternoon tea. He did not, one thinks, outgrow a certain innocuous streak of vanity, John Brawn, who started from scratch, had a taste for social distinction that was ungratified in the Wellington of 1899, where professors and professors' wives meant, in the hierarchy of wealth, nothing; but things improved a little—he valued the invitations to the garden parties at Government House, his membership of committees, he really enjoyed being Vice-Chancellor; he thought that late knighthood was not undeserved. There were things one had to guess at, or be told, if one did not know him. The students of his first ten or fifteen years knew him best; his shyness, his repression, in his last years grew on him to the point of a gruff inarticulateness. His repression—never, in the course of twenty years' golf, said Mackenzie, had he heard Brown, though often inwardly very much perturbed, give utterance to worse than ‘Per deos immortales!’ And Brown took his golf seriously, as one of the chief duties of man. It was not a thing one joked about. There were moments, nevertheless, in those last years when one was led to doubt the final hold of classical proportion and balance, of pensive pathos, on the mind that had upheld them so conscientiously; in the Staff Common Room one afternoon he suddenly staggered a very junior colleague, always embarrassed by what seemed John Brown's own muttering embarrassment, by opening his lips and recommending a novel he had just read—he would lend it—an American novel, a work written in a most excellent English style,… It was James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. Meanwhile, at the end of the old century, in an intellectual climate as alien from that hard-boiled masterpiece as the climate of St Andrews was from the tropics, stood Brown, the apostle of Virgil and of culture, the upholder of the humanist tradition, eager to help, patient, with a sense of the dignity of learning but anxious not to offend.

Hugh Mackenzie, a Highlander, one of those farm-bred Scotsmen with a natural gift for heresy, was born in the same year as Brown; notwithstanding which contemporaniety, he was pleased to relate, Brown had been his post-graduate tutor in Greek. He was a member of a huge family of Mackenzies which already extended to New Zealand, eighty or ninety of them—among whom was his generation-older half-brother Jock, the Minister of Lands who hoped no more would be heard of universities (and who, it is said, had had some determining hand in the appointment of Hugh). He was the child of the second marriage of a father born in 1795, whose services in populating this country he regarded, with glee, as of infinitely greater worth than those of the land-reformer or of the professor. Solidly grounded in the Greek and Latin of the Old Aberdeen Grammar School, he went to St Andrews for the eight years' course in arts and theology which would produce a minister of the Presbyterian Church, Range widely over literature and philosophy Mackenzie did, but he became no more than a ‘stickit minister’. Like other students, he was strongly affected by the battle raging over the theology of the great Robertson Smith, the Free Church professor of Hebrew whom Aberdeen dismissed; that famous heresty hunt decided Hugh that the Presbyterian ministry was not for him, and he settled down as a private tutor at St Andrews. This was the life, no doubt agreeable enough, not without expectations, but not very enriching to the philoprogenitive, which he exchanged for a colonial professorship.

Who can measure the range of that expansive geniality? For expansiveness, geniality, were the qualities in Mackenzie that made him loved. He knew his Latin and Greek and Gaelic, but in the technical nineteenth century sense of the term he was no scholar, he brooded over emendations to no text, he would never have edited Caesar. Wide, rather than deep, was his reading; wide, uncertainly rolling, studded with parentheses and quotations the little academic writing in which he indulged. Herbert Spencer, Taine, Sainte-Beuve, Mathew Arnold, Carlyle, Wordsworth, Shelley, Materialism, Utilitarianism, Communism, the social regimen, the French Academy, Mr Frederic Harrison, Chaucer, Tennyson, ‘the light that never was on sea or land’—all find a place in his inaugural lecture, all were liable to be drawn on in the course of the next thirty-five years. (There was less variety in the history of the English language—there it was all Sweet and Skeat, the measured repetition of the tabulated.) The professor was no rash critic, he made no giddy flights into mod- ernitymodernity. Nor did he shine, exactly, as a publicist for literature; he would never have made an extension lecturer. He was a publicist; but it was in the cause of free, secular and compulsory education that that massive blade was so often unsheathed, it was against the Bible-in-Schools League that it whirled, that the letters went to the paper,

With all his heresy, Mackenzie had a Scots love for authority. If, said Brown (Spike, 1940) you came on a pseudonymous letter in the newspaper containing the words ‘credible’ and ‘approved authority’, you could fairly safely guess it was his.

that the pamphlets were printed; it was Mackenzie the rationalist who smote and thundered in this sacred cause, or who sometimes, in milder vein, ascended the pulpit of the Unitarian Church to denounce the obscurantists or expound a non-theological metaphysic. How true to form he always was, with that welcoming benevolent smile, that afternoon-tea large hospitality (everyone went to Mackenzie's for afternoon tea), the love of gossip, the twitting of Brown, that ponderous heave of the mind and the voice as, at the outset of some long journey through reminiscence, the engine turned over. How true to form the fragmentary memories he wrote—a tumble of words, of inverted commas, of exclamation marks! The young, the intolerant among students were liable, in his last years, to feel impatience with that large smiling bulk, rather out of touch certainly with the most recent products of the English Muse, but his was a tolerance that never lost its kindliness; righteous indignation at the spectacle of Canon Garland and his League could hardy fail to be mingled, long after the battle, with almost affectionate laughter. One sees him yet, on the dais in room B2, the expounding of old notes, Matthew Arnold and poetry as a criticism of life, Hebraism and Hellenism; but somehow memory switches to the light that never was on sea or land; somehow that light shines—and there is the old man, he was recurred to the love-letters he wrote in his teens for Scotch lassies without the learning of the pen; Shelley's poetry (how did he ever read Shelley?) or Shelley's Harriet and the loves of Byron are moving up for consideration, the measured pace quickens, the gold pince-nez come down in the well-known gesture, that high tenor voice goes up higher—‘aye … aye …’—Hughie Mac is away.

A very different personality was Thomas Hill Easterfield, five years younger than his Scottish colleagues. Easterfield had the normal persistence of the Yorkshireman, but he had a lightness, a swiftness of mind and body (he had been a great miler in his undergraduate days), an habitual cheerfulness and buoyancy that were all his own. He got his university training at Leeds,

The Yorkshire College, Leeds, was itself a sort of training for Wellington; for this college, which was to become Leeds University, had its being in a bankrupt music hall known as the Colosseum, the auditorium of which served for chemistry lecture theatre.

Cambridge, Zürich and Würzburg, lectured for the University Extension movement, and at Cambridge (on the chemistry of sanitary science), and taught at Perse School. He had developed as a result of this experience an admirable lecture style, clear and orderly and simple; he was liable to break down into a mild slang, not always closely observing the proprieties of the fading Victorian age. Of all the first four, he most seems the man with a definite purpose. The impression he received in 1899, he later remarked, was that there was a general tendency in New Zealand to place a higher value on the possession of a degree than upon a sound intellectual training. This tendency, ‘in opposition to the advice of some colleagues’, he accordingly set out deliberately to assail; with vigour, without discursiveness he goes in his first lecture straight to the point. One thrust on the way disposed of the ‘craze for examination’; admirable lecturer, excellent teacher though he was, he showed his scepticism of too much ‘teaching’; the flower of Würzburg and of Cambridge laid before his hearers (some of them no doubt rather puzzled) the gospel of experiment, of ‘research as the prime factor in a scientific education’, Look at Liebig, look at Berzelius, at Bunsen and Pasteur and Victor Meyer!—back to the memoirs of the masters! There was original work to do in New Zealand; ‘I appeal to the citizens of Wellington, to the Council of the College, and to my students, whether regular candidates for a degree, or pharmacists, or those who work at chemistry from pure love of a fascinating science, to assist in establishing in this city a research school whose fame shall be the pride of our University’. This was strong meat. It was meat that failed to excite the taste of the citizens of Wellington

The statement in the text is not quite true. The Post had a leader. Two days after the address the Council of the Pharmaceutical Association came to ask for Easterfield's help in giving a better education to young pharmacists. ‘This was followed by a visit from a man who asked me to assist him in a research on making gold from sawdust, in which he claimed to have been already partially successful,’ Easterfield, ‘The Early Years of Victoria College’, Spike, Golden Jubilee Number.

–even when Easterfield adverted to ‘the application of chemical, physical and biological research to the trade and manufacturing problems of the day’. Nevertheless he remained fast in his faith; no Wellingtonian proceeded, as it was so strongly suggested he should, to immortalize his name in the city's annals by building and endowing a chemical laboratory, but at least the students experimented, and when twenty years later Easterfield went to the further organization of research as first director of the Cawthron Institute it was no accident that his successor in the chair of chemistry was his own most brilliant student.

The researcher never became the fanatic. The early photographs show a face of a humorous cast. Over those orderly lectures flickered the spirit of jest, of a cheerful irrelevance even; and it amused, as well as pleased Easterfield, in his first session, to instruct a class of lawyers in scientific thought. He could, too, be more positive in his humour. There was, the memory of one of his colleagues records, in Easterfield's laboratory an attendant who had spent some time in a British gunboat on the coast of East Africa, and learnt the naval language. Easterfield took him up to Seifert's flaxmill near Levin to work on the utilization of waste. While they were there a fire broke out in a neighbouring mill and all hands rushed over to help put it out. Presently Easterfield was standing with a hose in his hand when he caught sight of his assistant on the roof of the burning shed. He could not resist the temptation, he pointed the hose. He gazed and listened with satisfaction and took an early train home. A week later Seifert's foreman came to town, obviously with a greatly heightened appreciation of the academic mind. ‘When you and that young chap went down to the fire that night’, he said to the professor, ‘we thought it was a mistake’. We didn't think you'd be much good; but we changed our minds, Sir, I tell you we changed our minds. You know, when you turned the hose on that young chap, why the men in the other mill couldn't come near him—we were proud of him, Sir, we were proud of him! ‘Obviously, the man who could stimulate this sort of reaction, as well as students whose experiments were recorded in the Transactions of the Chemical Society, was a man a new college might well take to its bosom’.

Last came Maclaurin, garbed in honours, not yet thirty. Richard Cockburn Maclaurin, born in Scotland in 1870, had been brought at the age of four to New Zealand. At Auckland, like any other brilliant student, he took his first in mathematics. What followed however, was highly unusual: the young man, elected to a foundation scholarship at St John's, Cambridge, was bracketed with the Senior Wrangler in 1896, carried off the Smith Prize in mathematics, and became a fellow of his college. Taking up law, he entered Lincoln's Inn with a studentship, in 1898 won the Yorke Prize for a disser- tationdissertation on title to realty, and then went to Strasburg to study philosophy. It was this much-admired person, astonishingly brilliant, versatile, charming, already a figure on the English university scene, with either of two great careers stretching before him, who (as one of his friends said) ‘accepted an insignificant post in New Zealand, at an institution scarcely of university rank, just struggling doubtfully into existence’. There was, it seems, in Maclaurin, among the large number of virtues with which he was endowed, a vein of moderate, rather deliberately controlled quixotry, which led him to bury all those gifts and accomplishments in the obscure spot at the end of the world. He felt, in some deep way, a New Zealander—New Zealand, at any rate, had given him his first chances, in the peculiar workings of her educational system; and to New Zealand he would give something back; he would start off by repaying the debt. Perhaps also the chance to lay foundations, to build, was not unattractive to him. But he was quixotic with a line of retreat: completely modest, he was yet conscious of his own powers, and he had no intention of undergoing indefinitely the remote provincial existence. The idealist was wordly-wise: a professor, he would earnestly advise a colleague, must go Home frequently if he did not wish to be forgotten; and Maclaurin went Home. A professor might sometimes not without advantage bow his neck in the house of Rimmon; Maclaurin was the only one of the band who was a member of the Wellington Club, and his Masonic lodge was most select. Meanwhile, life could be amusing, fools could be treated according to their folly, there were funny stories to tell. He was a highly accomplished raconteur. One could bring all one's tact and wisdom and practical shrewdness to bear on the problems of academic life in Wellington, with its now-and-again absurd administrative and social complications. And there were students, there was teaching, the reasons why he had come out, Mac- laurinMaclaurin, with his light touch, was a good teacher, he could lay his mind alongside of the undergraduate's; he could do the surprising, the illuminating thing, as later on, when he changed his chair, he illustrated Maine's Ancient Law from from Maning's Old New Zealand. He could manage a masterly popular lecture, like his inaugural, in which he astonished his audience with the declaration that Euclid's doctrine of parallel straight lines was only approximately true, went on to put Marconi firmly in his place in the history of wireless telegraphy, and concluded with an examination of the possibilities of mathematical statement in biology, taking the population of Wellington as data. It was Maclaurin who was first chairman of the Professorial Board, Maclaurin who presided when the Students' Society was formed (or was this because the bachelor-‘Mac the debonair, the lone-handed’; ‘Our Dick, the gayest of the boys’—was a more available man than his married colleagues, who had to get home; or merely because he was chairman of the Board?); it was Maclaurin who would lean against the mantelpiece and argue the point, a Euclidean point or any other; it was Maclaurin whose wit and elasticity and savior faire were as dependable as anything in those early days. When he took his Cambridge LL.D. there was a pleased excitement in what one might almost call the whole family. He could do it all without being extended; the mastery was easy, was apparent—Maclaurin, who never patronized, who never overbore, with his air of effortless and amused calm, could even seem at times a trifle negligent of labour. Why not?—was there any obvious labour to be done? Yet the cast of his mind, when fully examined in retrospect, seems to have been administrative. He could handle men as well as ideas. For a professor there was little direct administration to carry on, and no one could foresee the enormous task that lay ahead of him, the physically rather slight man, as university president in Massachusetts.

It was the age of moustaches, All four professors had them. Maclaurin's was, comparatively, rather larger than the others.

On 12 April the professors were given a heart-warming reception in the Education Board building, surrounded with dignitaries religious, civil and political. Easterfield had been told on his arrival that if they came out strongly for the Seddon government, they would get all they wanted for their new college. Returning thanks at this meeting, he said that they wanted sympathy, students who valued knowledge for its own sake, a first-class reference library, and laboratories; but alas! he did not come out for the Seddon government. On 17 April they met their intending students, and during the week they gave their inaugural lectures.

To keep the record quite straight, it should be added that two inaugural lectures were given on the evening of 17 April, the third on the 18th at 5 p.m., the fourth on the 19th at the same hour. The first ‘regular’ lectures to students were on Tuesday, 18 April 1899, which date may be said to mark the beginning of the college as a working institution.

They drew up a timetable, they had their first official meeting as a Board and made their first report to the Council. The time-table is worth analysis, as a contrast to be complicated document of fifty years later. Except for Saturdays, most lectures were to be after 5 p.m.—this, it must always be remembered, was to be a college for part-time students, working during the day in fields far from academic—though one or two managed to begin as early as 3, and Jurisprudence and Constitutional History were at 8.45 in the morning. On Saturdays there was something going from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. There were lectures in English (five periods a week) and Advanced English, Junior Latin, Senior Latin, Advanced Latin, French, Mental Science, Jurisprudence and Constitutional History, Physics, Mechanics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Advanced Mathematics. But there were only four professors? ‘Courage, mon ami!’ they might have said to one another; for Brown had agreed to lecture in French in addition to Latin, Mackenzie took Mental Science, Maclaurin added Law to Mathematics, and Easterfield had his Physics and Mechanics as well as Chemistry. On Saturdays Mackenzie did English from 9 to 10, Mental Science from 10 to 11, and Advanced English from 11 to 12. There was a proposal to add to the staff a lecturer (at £100 per annum) on Political Economy; applications being called, they are evidently not very satisfactory, and Professor Mackenzie was interviewed to ‘see if he can undertake to lecture on Political Economy’. Professor Mackenzie considered that there were limits even to a Highlander's endurance, and he declined. Then thee was that first professorial report, of which the Council approved. It defined the academic year as two terms, the first from the first Tuesday in April to the end of June, the second beginning three clear weeks from July 1 and ending in the last week of October.

There were two terms in the year till 1920, when the present three-term division was begun.

Students were to be deemed to have kept terms who had attended three-quarters of the lecturers in at least two subjects and passed the annual college examination in them; and the subjects for terms were to include not merely those on the time-table but General History and Political Economy. Perhaps in that last particular the Board had gone too fast, even though the Council, before it tried to saddle Mackenzie with Political Economy, had jettisoned General History. But after all, the professors were enthusiastic. They were not organizing the ephemeral.

If professors were enthusiastic, evangelical in their zeal, what is one to say of the students, these hundred undergraduates, men and women, ‘mixed classes’, who in that first year made for the Technical School and the Girls' High School?

In the first month there were 98 students: English 38, Latin 49, Mathematics 37, French 15, Jurisprudence 17, Chemistry 30, Mechanics 15, Physics 11. By the end of the year there were 115, with 9 exempted.

They came as the starved to a banquet, as the huntsman to the hunt, as the settler to his farm, as the lover to the beloved. Brown and Mackenzie and Easterfield and Maclaurin were more than professors, they were the Means of Grace. At last Wellington had a college, it had lectures, the arts and sciences, intellectual excitement, a fellowship of learning. Not in scarlet gowns, but not in utter nakedness, did the devotees rush through the streets from the rented rooms in Victoria Street to the rented rooms in Thorndon, from chemistry to philology, to the Age of Johnson and Caesar's Gallic War—they were clothed in a high purpose and in romance. Almost before they knew it they were a universitas, a body corporate. They hung around talking. They stayed up late at night with grammars and with argument. They began to jot down phrases about Pallas and Minerva. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

III Advance on All Fronts

Mediaeval universities, said the Frenchman, were built of men—bâtie en hommes; and that is one way in which the modern university, different in so many ways from its ancestor, has not changed. Men and women make it with themselves. So, whatever the physical difficulties of 1899, we may say that our infant college had the essentials—it had the teachers and the students, and both were willing to learn. Nevertheless, an infant flourishes best that has a home. In April the Council tried to bring things to a head by agreeing to Stout's motion, that it was absolutely necessary for the success of the college that permanent buildings should be provided, if possible centrally situated in the City of Wellington; and directed its chairman to communicate with the government over ‘the property of at once vesting the Mount Cook Prison Site in the College’. The chairman said he would do his best. But what was anyone's best with Seddon? Mr Blair could report only a long interview in which the Premier ‘had said that he was determined to put the Victoria College Building on a satisfactory basis and would take an opportunity shortly of announcing his intentions’. There was the Ministerial Residence. It ceased to be a boarding-house, though when inspected it did not promise very well as an academic building. Easterfield, getting in early, made it clear that his science departments would at once require the whole of the ground floor: this would have put the other classes into the bedrooms, and the bedrooms were not very adaptable, even for temporary use. The students held a meeting and opposed the scheme. Could the property, then, be vested in the college for the revenue it would bring? No, was the answer. A committee was thereupon set up again to ponder the question of a suitable site.

Meanwhile deputations of the citizens of Wellington had waited upon the government in the matter, and had at least got an undertaking that Mount Cook would not be used as a gaol. The weeks passed. In July the Council petitioned parliament for the site, and conferred hopefully with members representing the university district. Mr Graham and Mr Hogg came back from a meeting with the Premier, who had this time said ‘very decidedly’ that the government would not give it; Mount Cook was colonial property and if it was given away other land would have to be bought with colonial moneys; but they had inaugurated the Institution, ‘and it would be their pleasure and duty to find funds and a site’. This was cold comfort to a body as used to the Premier as the Council now was. But even the Council underwent a startled horror when, a few weeks later, Seddon attacked it in the House, accusing it of gross neglect of duty, and of having done absolutely nothing except to bring out professors under false pretences. He reiterated his refusal of Mount Cook, concluding that if the Council would not accept what was offered (but what was offered—presumably the Ministerial Residence?), he would have to appoint a royal commission ‘to enquire whether Palmerston North, Nelson or Blenheim, or some other place could be utilized for the purpose’. Noisy bluff this might very well be; nevertheless it left the Council where the imperial statesman had already placed it, in hopeless bewilderment.

The arts professors were not so badly off for the time being in their Girls' High School rooms at £50 a year. As long as the caretaker was squared and the young ladies of the school and their mistresses were not unduly inconvenienced (they paid due attention in their magazine to the coarse male irruption), and as long as undergraduate enthusiasm remained high enough to keep the bicycles going at the rush hours between the different parts of the town, life was not intolerable. Mackenzie could ride his horse down from Karori and hitch it to a paling in plenty of time; apart from lecturing there was not a great deal to be done; the professors, being non-peripatetic, had an easier time than their students. But Easterfield could not just stand up and expound his subject—there was more to a research school than that. Experiment, experiment! So the upstair rooms in Victoria Street were adapted to some purpose. Twenty-five years later he told some of his own story.

The Development of Science at Victoria College’, in The Spike, Silver Jubilee Number, Easter 1924, pp. 44–7.

‘The physical laboratory was also the lecture room, but each student as he left the room removed his chair and collapsable table, to the no small annoyance of those who made use of the rooms below. As the arrangement with the Technical School authorities was only just completed when the term began there was no time to install laboratory benches and fittings. The chemical laboratory was therefore equipped with tables made of boards on trestles. The water was brought in large jugs from the kitchen, one or two buckets received all the waste liquids and all heating was effected by means of spirit lamps. A chemical balance, still in use in the physical laboratory, stood on a packing case in the corner and server a small but enthusiastic class in the practice of quantitative analysis. There was no laboratory attendant and the students fetched the water and emptied the slop buckets as required. On one occasion they forgot this emptying and the corrosive liquid ate through the bucket, ran through the ceiling and made an unwelcome mess in the director's office.

‘The class in practical physics had to put up with at least as great inconvenience as the class in practical chemistry, but it is questionable whether the students really suffered. Most of the apparatus was home-made, treacle tins made excellent calorimeters and long stretched wires served for quantitative experiments on linear expansion. There was no spectrometer, but with a small photographic replica of a Rowland's getting, a telescope at the far end of the laboratory, and a carefully measured base line, the students obtained fair values for the wave length of sodium light. After all, the equipment was probably as good as that with which Isaac Newton made some of his fundamental discoveries.’

‘It was at once apparent that this makeshift arrangement could only be of a temporary nature, and would break down with any considerable increase in the size of the classes’. It was therefore suggested to the Council that they should apply to the Government for a grant of £3000 for equipment of science laboratories.

‘Blair was so certain that the government would refuse that Easterfield went and saw the Minister of Education himself.

Cabinet granted the request, and when the students returned in April 1900, they were surprised to find the rooms fitted up in a manner which must have seemed palatial in comparison. The fund was most carefully husbanded so that after a good working equipment had been secured and maintained, there was still a small balance available for the permanent laboratories in 1905.’

Science gave aid to Art. The young women to whom Mr Nairn taught painting in the Technical School were always peeping in at the laboratory with its odd goings on, and Nairn finally gave them the task of putting it down on paper. Most of them, records Easterfield, were quite unsuccessful, but one produced a delightful water-colour picture with a fascinating colour scheme which is amongssst my most treasured possessions.

The Four wrought mightily; but four professors were not enough. In May 1899 the Council appointed not merely a Registrar, the bearded C. P. Powles, who did the business of so much of the education establishment of the city, but also— after its preliminary hesitation—a lecturer in Political Economy. This was David Ritchie, another Scotsman, all, somewhat dour-looking, able and well-read, a Writer to the Signet and a graduate of Oxford and Edinburgh. There was nothing dour, really, about Mr Ritchie. He was a wholly different type from his colleagues—a man of means who had come to New Zealand for his health, a good horseman and shot, a gentleman who ‘didn't care two straws’, but who was willing to turn his hand to anything agreeable while waiting for the right farm to turn up. Somehow, not unnaturally in that day of double-banking, and in spite of the Council's earlier resolve. Mr Ritchie seems also to have been saddled with General History—a predicament from which he escaped through the simple process of not teaching it. Then the University registrar, J. W. Joynt, a rather guff but most warm-hearted little man (Irish luckily—the Scots were having it too much their own way) with an almost terrifyingly brilliant record at Trinity College, Dublin, cut short by ill-health, volunteered to help the department of modern languages by teaching German. He would do it simply for the students' fees. A grateful Council insisted that he should accept twenty guineas.

It was in May 1899 also that Stout, coming to the rescue of Maclaurin, gave notice to move that law should be taught, and that a lecturer should be appointed for the following ses- sionsession at £ 100 per annum. Losing his motion, he improved on it later, and in December it was agreed to advertise for a lecturer in the second and third year subjects for LL. B., at a salary not to exceed £150. The Council can hardly be accused of extravagance, but then, as Stout had said at the beginning, ‘lecturers would do for the other subjects’; and it was an era when, on an even lower rung than lecturers, a laboratory assistant could be obtained for 7s 6d a week. At the beginning of 1900 Maurice Richmond was appointed—at the maximum amount. He climbed: in 1902 he was asked to give a more elaborate course, at £250; and the following year the Council, building steadily, agreed ‘That with a view to making the Law School in Wellington the most complete in the Colony a professorship of Law be established as soon as the Finances of the College permit, and in the meantime Mr Richmond be asked to make the teaching of Jurisprudence and Constitutional History part of the law lectureship for one year at a salary of £300 a year.’ He was to go even higher, to a chair of English and New Zealand law, before, in rather unhappy circumstances, his resignation was forced. Richmond was one on the most interesting of the early members of the teaching staff. The son of James Crowe Richmond, the Unitarian railway engineer who played so important a part in our politics in the sixties, the had been largely educated in Europe and had taken an honours B.Sc. in experimental physics at University College, London. Back in New Zealand, he studied law and was in practice for the seven years before his appointment to the college, though he did not take a law degree till 1904. Sensitive, serious, refined in face, of a philosophical, even metaphysical cast of mind, with all his family's slavery to the demands of a painful and urgent conscience, he had hardly the personality, or technical skill as a lecturer, to satisfy the other quite different demands of the law students of his day. For what the law students of his day wanted was a degree as swiftly as possible, with no nonsense of philosophy about it, and the man who gazed at his feet as he groped for the exact, the honest, the elusively truth-laden word was not precisely the man for them. The one gazed at his feet, the others dragged their feet wearily across the floor.

In the middle of 1899, too that full year, the Council received a letter from the Education Department, observing that while the government had approved of the table of college fees, no provision had yet been made for lectures in German, biology or geology. Students therefore could not take a science degree, for which more was needed than chemistry and physics. Mr Blair had replied (he might have been forgiven for some asperity) that the Council was doing its best, but could be greatly helped by the government's placing more funds at its disposal. Nevertheless the question had to be faced. Joint provided the German. The Bishop suggested lectureships in both biology and geology at (it was inevitable) £150 a year. The Professorial Board resolved in favour of some natural science, preferably biology. Stout harked back to his perennial idea, and had a committee set up to see if some scientist in government service could not be got ‘to conduct classes in Biology and Geology’. It is an idea which makes one ask how deep the great educator's understanding of education really was. But the committee went to work: it thought of Mr H. B. Kirk of the Education Department as one who could ‘take up Biology’, and Hogben the Inspector-General agreed that the Department would not put any difficulties in the way. But Mr Kirk had too much to do, in Wellington and out of it (he was an inspector of native schools), and the committee went to the Minister of education, who said—uncomforting words—he would consult cabinet. What did Sir James Hector—the next enquiry—think of making use of government officers? Sir James was not encouraging. Teaching would have to be thorough. English examiners were ‘men well up in the latest developments’, a larage outlay for a laboratory would be necessary: biology, for which Wellington and its surroundings offered a good field, would be better than geology, ‘the surroundings of Wellington offering very little opportunity for its study in the field’;

The reader will note that G. A. Cotton, of Victoria University College, had not yet written his Geomorphology of New Zealand.

but his opinion was that the college had better not undertake science teaching at present. So, in November, the Council, torn between the demands of the government and the advice of the government's chief scientist, was reduced to writing to the Minister beseeching that they should be relieved of the Queen's Scholarships, a burden which in the near future bids fair to wreck the college by absorbing so much of the statutory grant that an insufficient sum will be left for providing a teaching staff'. The government, taking pity for once, granted the £3000 for buildings and laboratory fittings that Easterfield found so useful—nothing of which was to be expended except for material which could be utilized when permanent buildings should be erected.

Then Stout moved again, in February 1900. He had found a government scientist. In the Survey Office was Mr C. E. Adams, trained at Canterbury in engineering. He could give lectures in geology (£100 per annum); Stout and Blair could interview the Minister of Lands and arrange it. The Minister of lands was amenable, Mr Adams was appointed. Mr Adams was an amiable man (he was later a benevolent Government Astronomer) and the Council settled down to granting not infrequent requests for apparatus with surprising complaisance—minerals £15, blowpipe, two microscopes and slides £20, cutting and grinding appliances £40; science certainly was a financial drain. Then Adams suggested a course of lectures in surveying, and another committee, in 1901, reported that ‘at small expense’ teaching could be pro- videdprovided of the subjects necessary for the civil engineering degree and for authorized surveyors, if the Technical School could be utilized for the drawing practice required. With somewhat more realism (for Canterbury was jealous of her privilege as seat of an engineering school) it suggested, in view of the proposed extension of the college's teaching, a Finance Committee. Fifteen months later Adams offered to become a full-time teacher of either geology or civil engineering, and another committee recommended engineering; but it was too late. In August 1902 the Council, after a great deal of discussion, had decided to get a professor of biology (at £700), to begin work in 1903. There was still before the end of the year, a scheme to save money by having the new professor made assistant to Hector in the Museum, with the right of succession, so that the government could pay half his salary; but it was dropped, and in February 1903 the man was appointed. It was the gentle and courteous Kirk.

Kirk, born in England but a New Zealander since his early childhood, was the son of a man most distinguished in the exploration of the New Zealand flora, and a brilliant and precocious boy. He grew into a very able man; but it was suspected by some that he might be the wrong sort of person for a professor, and there was even some distress at his appointment. Had his years among native schools, those years of travel in remote places, familiarized him so much with the lower levels of education that he would have difficulty in sustaining life in a more rarefied atmosphere? Never was suspicion more belied, Kirk had learning enough, and he had enough experience of men, enough of charitable humour, to carry him safely him safely through any atmosphere. His colonial background, his knowledge of settler and drover and coach-driver, of bush and river and Maori pa, of the natural history of man in shirt-sleeves, as it were, was as valuable as the more urban, the more surface-polished backgrounds of his colleagues. And what stories he had to tell, what a master-hand he was at the causerie! What tolerance was there in this bright-eyed ‘professor of Bohemian appearance’, with the large straying moustaches, so different from the clipped propriety of the others in the college collection. Always a late worker, his light would be seen burning on Saturday or Sunday nights by passing young men; up would go a handful of pebbles, and Kirk would let them in and they would take counsel with him on the problems of life—extravaganzas or the politics of annual general meetings—or would listen to some masterly reminiscence of the Far North, Or, a generation later, the sons of his early students would listen, in the haze of tobacco smoke—Kirk was considerably, though inconspicuously, diverted by the preachments of a lecturer who deplored the evils of nicotine—to stories of the pioneering past, when the heroes that he had known, Hector and Hutton, Dendy and Parker, would come alive to the aspiring youth. Extraordinary in his modesty, he was both a first-rate worker over wide expanses of his field, and a first-rate teacher, abreast somehow of each new advance in the modern biological sciences, always with fresh material.

There is a short, but charming, article on Kirk by Dr H. B. Fell in the New Zealand Science Review, Vol. 6, No, 2 (August 1984), pp. 43–4. Dr Fell remarks, Amid the changing panorama of new methods and new theories which had to be adopted over so long a teaching span, curious archaic survivals would remain. Thus who can forget the delight he took in an extraordinary system of rocking aquaria, whose mysterious waters were kept in constant and erratic agitation by a series of pulleys, siphons, taps and rubber tubes that he alone understood. It was the bane of all lab-boys Ever so often during dissection the class would be startled by a cacophony of gurgles, clanking glassware and shuddering cords that marked the relentless operation of that infernal machine. The corridor to the new building now cuts right through the place where this engine stood, but its lurking ghost still has possession.'

He would be remembered more as an original worker, had he not been accustomed to put greater importance on his students' work than on his own; he would have been less successful as a teacher had he been more dogmatic. But Kirk had that great capacity of the born teacher, the capacity to ask questions, or lead his students to ask questions, and make them find out the answers. Not that that argued any defect in benevolence; Harry Borrer Kirk, a humanist, honour's very soul, chivalry's exemplar, upholder of all that was good and true, teacher at Victoria College for forty-two years, might have stood as model for a seventeenth century ‘character’ of the Kind-hearted Man. For nothing will he be remembered by man or woman, student or colleague, more than for that quality in him which made his teaching a communication of friendship, and his friendship a teaching in wisdom. The Biology Department was installed in a room in Miss Baber's Kindergarten (it was Pipitea Street this time), hired for 5s a week.

Or was it 10s? The records differ.

The members of the first class were of course known as Kirk's Lambs. They talked about their subject ‘as though it were Football or some other exciting pastime’. It is hardly surprising that the Council, having now got biology, should decide to dispense with geology after the current session—for the number of students was small; and hardly more surprising that having dispensed with geology, they should suggest that Kirk might teach it. Kirk declined.

But the scientific story has outrun chronology. Kirk's was the sixth chair to be established; it was preceded by a year by Modern Languages. In March 1901 Brown wrote to the Council about the inroads the teaching of French was making on the time of a professor of Greek and Latin, and a committee reported in favour of a lecturer in modern languages. Again there was struggle with the inelastic statutory grant. Perhaps £350 would do; the lecturer's services could probably be made use of by others, whereby his salary could be supplemented; but at the same time he must be under the control of the Council. In June, after careful calculation, it was decided to go up to £500 and forbid outside work except with the consent of the Council and on such terms as It should lay down; then Joynt resigned to free the Council To appoint a professor; and in December George William von Zedlitz, aged 31, M. A. Oxon and a Scholar of Trinity College, with seven years teaching in French, German and the classics, currently a master in the Loretto School, Musselburgh, was appointed to the chair. It was a significant step, though how significant the council could hardly guess. Von Zedlitz brought the college something it badly needed. The child of a German father and an English mother, with paternal roots going deep down in the history of Europe, by birth he had inherited two cultures, and his training in French had given him another; say rather that he had inherited, to an extraordinary degree, the civilized mind of Europe. From England he had received formal education and a home. At Oxford, an ornament of the Union, he had battled with Belloc and sharpened his gift for intellectual mockery; and in New Zealand he found enough that could be mocked at, if humanity had not restrained his talents. For complex as his character was, sensitive, various in its gifts, it had, as such characters sometimes have, a fundamental simplicity, the simplicity of the sympathetic imagination—which is, perhaps, another name for a wise tenderness in dealing with human beings. He could be direct enough, if need be, as men found in days of university controversy that were coming. He disliked sham, but like his friend and coeval Maclaurin, he could tolerate with amusement where redemption was impossible—if the evil were not too arrant. There he may have been difficult; for a province like New Zealand will find rage more intelligible than satire, thunder and tempest from a Carlyle easier to bear than the light Voltairean phrase. In lightness of touch, indeed, in a sort of perverse logic of wit, von Zedlitz, the half-German-half-Englishman, could somehow be unexpectedly and surprisingly French. But he had, also, the free and uninhibited mind of one sort of educated Englishman; on a tram he would toss Brown for the fares; he would attack the University and all its works in the person of the Chancellor at the most inappropriate of times. He would— one fears—being young, take a certain pleasure in the urbane embarrassment of staid and worthy persons. He would, also, make students, the callow and unsophisticated, delightfully his equals. He was a godsend to college clubs. His mind ranged widely; you never knew where you would be taken by a lecture from Von, though it might start with grammar, or a page from a set book. Indeed it might never (such are the ramifications of literature and life in our extraordinary cosmic environment) reach its staring point. But how adventurous, how amusing, how exciting is this journey through the intelligence of mankind! No one more gained the devotion of his students, from the day of his arrival when, on adventitious grounds, he snatched half Maclaurin's admirers—was not he, too, a bachelor, and a man of superlative charm?

It all amused him. The square, strongly-marked face is not a solemn one. He was probably amused by himself. Like Maclaurin, of whom he afterwards wrote, he, who might have chosen otherwise, had accepted an insignificant post in New Zealand, at an institution scarcely of university rank, just struggling doubtfully into existence. It was something he could see very clearly, with detachment and—oddly enough —understanding. Yet is it odd? The teacher of men was also a student of men. To consider it odd, really, would be to misunderstand his own whole character. What some people possibly found hard to understand was that the Comic Spirit —in the civilized sense—had come to Victoria College. There had also come something it had not yet had experience of, replete with virtues as its foundation professors were—the good European. His relations with his colleagues are instruct- tiveinstructtive: Mackenzie his mind could appreciate but hardly impinge upon; Easterfield was as remote, in a different way, too plainly English, as Mackenzie was too unsubtly Scotch; Maclaurin he admired and took advice from; Brown he made uneasy. It is perhaps not without symbolic meaning that of all the painted portraits which hang in the college library, his is the only one which is a work of art.

The New Zealand Educational Institute wanted a Chair of Pedagogy, and for a while the Council was hospitable to the idea; then, luckily, the Education Department not being financially co-operative, it was dropped. Stout wanted extension lectures in the larger towns of the Middle District, from New Plymouth and Napier all the way down to Greymouth and Hokitika, but this time it was the professorial Board which was not co-operative, even in suggesting courses— though it was sure such lectures should be of a ‘really Educational nature’. Then Stout, chasing after a fresh hare, and generally stimulated by reports of what was done in American universities, wanted correspondence classes; here even the council was untouched by enthusiasm. The Board did, in its second year, agree to give a series of public lectures, leading off with Easterfield on the Romance of Coal Tar; but the public does not seem to have been very receptive to English literature in relation to the philosophical influences of the century or the Importance of the study of Economics, and the experiment was not repeated. The Board met conscientiously in Mr Powles's back room to do its exiguous business, considering terms, and rules for the conduct of the library that had been begun, and spinning out talk till it could decently adjourn to the Blue Platter, a little tea-room at the north end of Lambton Quay, At the beginning of the second session it had to make regulations for the Discipline of Students, to be posted on the High School notice-board: there had been too much noise, there had been smoking in the precincts, inscriptions had been carved on desks. It was hoped that the good sense of students would render complaints impossible in the future; if not—our men were prepared to strike an ominous note. ‘The professorial Board will deal with any violation of a student, and in the event of repeated misconduct will visit the offence by rustication, which involves the loss of one or more sessions, or by expulsion from the College. By order of the Professorial Board’.

In that first year 46 student, out of the 115, kept terms. There were other milestones. It was in 1900 that a student took the first B.A., H. P. Richmond, to be followed by a larger crop in 1901; in 1902 James Bee and Mary Blair graduated B.Sc., and in 1903 the first LL.B. appeared, H. P. Richmond again. The first senior scholarship went in 1901 to Marion K. Wilson, in chemistry, the second to P. W. Robertson in 1903, in the same subject. Easterfield the experimenter was having his reward. In 1900 the government founded the first scholarship the college ever had of its own—that know by the name of Sir George Grey, a scholarship in science. In 1900 the first Calendar appeared, a thin pamphlet of 38 pages, bound in a not unpleasant dark red cloth (it went into blue, and ornamental lettering, in 1902). It set a permanent pattern with its calendar proper at the beginning; then came a two-page of Historical Notice couched in severely neutral tones, a page of Council in capital letters and half a page of staff in small letters; two pages on regulations and fees (‘For any course of Lectures to which five hours a week or more are given, three guineas a year; for any course of Lectures to which less than five hours a week age given, one guinea and a half a year’—English was three guineas, laboratory fees three guineas, everything else a guinea and a half); a time- tabletimetable and the necessary notices on classes and text-books (here Easterfield goes down as professor and Director of the Laboratories); results of college examinations, list of students who kept terms in 1899, and a final two pages on the Queen's Scholarships. It is all very simple, though before very long the complications begin to set in. In 1902 there was a short series of benevolent suggestions to intending students. They were recommended to take during their first two years subjects they had already studied at school—English, French, Latin, Mathematics—' and to reserve for the second part of their course the more scientific and philosophical subjects'. The professorial board wished to discourage the idea that any student was likely to pass his Degree Examination in any subject on one year's work, unless he had had some previous acquaintance with the subject in question. The Chairman of the Professorial Board or any professor would be glad to advise students with regard to their work. It is obvious that experience of the colonial mind was making its impact on the professors; obvious also that that mind had its usual optimism.

Certain other important matters occupied the attention of the captains of higher education. The college must have a Seal, it must have a Motto. In 1901 the question, like so much else, was referred by the Council to a committee, which at the end of three months recommended a crown and a laurel wreath and the motto (suggested by Richmond) Sapiemtia auro magis desideranda. Adopted, these three things appear in unhappy juxtaposition on the title page of the 1902 Calendar and the cover of the college magazine, After some months of ineffectual assimilation, the revolted Professorial Board asked for a conference, and in June 1902 the more agreeable suggestion was adopted of a seal ‘lozenge-shaped with a representation of the late Queen, standing, crowned and sceptred; round the seal the legend to be “Seal of the Victoria College Wellington New Zealand 1897”’. And the motto? Richmond's suggestion re-ordered, as Sapientia magis auro desideranda, or Victrix fortuna sapientia? wisdom as the conqueror of fortune somehow seemed less attractive than the other, with its high moral tone. But then what was the status of wisdom? A desperate argument broke out over the precise meaning of those words. Was wisdom more to be desired than gold, or was lack of wisdom preferable to lack of gold? Students assailed, Brown officially defended, the Latinity of desideranda so used. Anyhow desire of wisdom was there—even if, as Easterfield flippantly suggested, it was to be desired for the sake of more gold. The motto endured.

And there was the Badge. Surely heraldry should be called on for tribute? The students were understood to be interested; but what sort of badge should it be; what sort of arms should the college bear? There was talk of the five-pointed heraldic star, or mullet of silver, with a centre of red; but was it not possible to invent something better than that? A committee produced alternative arrangements of crowns and stars, surmounted by that lion, or dubious spaniel, ‘the crest of the Duke of wellington’; and the familiar scutcheon was adopted.

In 1903. ‘The Arms are vert on a fesse engrailed between three crowns or, a canton azure charged with four estoilles argent (in the from of the Southern Cross).’ They seem never to have been the subject of a formal grant by the College of Heralds. The amateurish version which lasted for forty year was redrawn for various purposes by Sam Williams (1941 and 1943) and E. Mervyn Taylor (1946).

These things were being done; and while they were being done, a student body had leapt into activity. A student body —for among those mature and high-collared men and women who were storming the forts of learning by bight with such athletic enthusiasm there was from the beginning a most astonishing corporate feeling. Perhaps it was not astonishing —perhaps it was no more than natural; for they had been starved of what, in the twinkling of an eye, came to seem to them an indispensable element in their existence. Fellowship was life, and lack of fellowship was, if not exactly death, something extremely unpleasant. They had read all about universities in their books; before they had met hall-a-dozen times their college was met and drink and romance and high endeavour to them. Here at last, so they seem to have felt, was a mistress that could be loved with a pure heart, with a Galahad-like intensity; they would write her songs; they would exalt her, they would wear her colours and do battle for her; they would meet as frequently as possible and talk as much as possible and dance together as much as possible, and argue and laugh uproariously and compose high-falutin' exhortations to one another, and it should all be in her honour, the homeless and peerless one. They were abetted by their professors. Brown, with von Zedlitzs consultant, invoked the Latin muse, and in 1902 the strains of his Song of Victoria College were first raised to the air that has heard them (rather imperfectly, to be sure) so often since.

Aedem colimus Minervae Acti Desiderio Artes nosse liberals Hoc in hemispherio. Aedem colimus Musarum—

with loving care he ground the lapidary phrase. Let us cherish the abode of the muses, though under a southern star; let the youths and maidens court wisdom; here in this brotherhood, this newest of all colleges, should their professors lead them under a favouring Heaven through the laborious ways of learning in its every branch (French and Mental Science as well Classics and English?). Nor let the exercise of the body be absent; let us hasten to drive with cudgels the ball through the goal; and hark, the Ciceronian flood that orators pour forth, and their eloquent sisters, to the confounding of the very chairs!

O Victoria, sempiterna, Sit tibi felicitas; Alma mater, peramata, Per aetates maneas.

O Victoria, everlasting one, bountiful mother, beloved, through the generation perdurable, happiness be thine.… It was nothing if not hopeful. Yet it was possible to gaze at the goddess, in her borrowed and sundered habitations, with the eye of faith; she was there, for the believer; the altar did not smoke for a presence altogether unknown.

Indeed there was fact as well as optimism. The learned professors were dragging their disciples along laborious ways, certainly. Oratores, oratrices?—the thunder of the Debating Society had been sounding almost as long as that other, professorial eloquence. Fuste pilam trudere?—the Hockey Club had been driving balls with cudgels, rather uncertainly, for a whole winter's season. When Brown wrote, there was a Students' Society, a Debating Society, a Hockey Club, a Tennis Club, a Christian Union; a football match had been played, the first of the Glee Clubs had even had time to be born and to die; in that very year 1902 The spike sprang into existence. The first Easter Tournament had been held.

The activities of 1899! On Saturday, 6 May, a meeting at the Girls' High School (Professor Maclaurin in the chair) decided to from a Students' Society.

The name was altered to Students' Association in 1903.

A committee was appointed to draft rules and report to another meeting on 16 May, and on that evening the Society was constituted and the first Executive elected: ‘president, Mr. J. Prendeville; Vice-Presidents, Miss M. A. Blair, S. W. Fitzherbert; Secretary, Mr. J. E. Patrick; Treasurers, Miss M. Fleming, Mr. K. Kirkealdie; Committee, Misses Ross, Greenfield, Reid, Messrs. Hutchinson, Stout, Logan and Charters’. There is a dignity, a respectability, a measured formality about this list that go with the high seriousness nd the high collars of the early photographs; ‘Mr’ and ‘Miss’ are prefixes that come naturally to the lips and the pen. Society is still a stable thing, it has its ceremonious imperatives. But that did not stop a life abounding. Pausing but to decide that the patron of the Society each year should be the chairman of the Professorial Board, the meeting went on to instruct the Committee to frame rules for a Debating Society; before the month was out the Society entertained the students at a concert and dance, ‘which was such a success that a ball was held in the Sydney Street Schoolroom on the 18th July’.

Precious, draughty, unadorned, Spartan Sydney Street Schoolroom; gone, like so much else of that departed era! Scene of how many balls and concerts, euchre parties and amateur dramatics! Centre, for how long, of whatever branch of culture in Wellington that needed a platform; and home of the alma mater for half a decade as much as the Girls' High School or the laboratories of Victoria Street; a Hazlitt, a Lamb should describe thee, no lesser pen. A Hazlitt, a Lamb—or Spike. And here is Spike, for June 1902, and mirth and culture are linked, are unrestrained. ‘Socials’ is the heading, Horace at Athens is the sub-heading.

‘It was to raise money for the Easter Tournament that a concert and play was held in the long vacation. The Students' Association Committee met at the tennis courts, appointed a Sub-committee, and instructed it to arrange for a concert and face. In a few days it was decided to produce “Horace at the University of Athens”. Mr. H. E. Nicholls, the prominent amateur, was asked to take charge of the acting, and he very kindly consented. On the 19th March the Sydney street Schoolroom was well filled. The concert programme opened with a piano solo by Mr. W. F. Furby. Mr. J. W. Hill sang in artistic style Bohm's “Still as the Night” Miss Julia Moran was heard to great advantage in a violin solo, “Reverie”, by Frunne. “For the Sake of the Past” (Mattee) was tastefully sung by Mrs. F.P. Wilson. Miss R. Richardson recited “How the La Rue Stakes were Lost”, and Mr. Douglas Jackson sang “A May morning”. Nearly all the items were encored, and Mr. A. Newton's song, descriptive of Hooligan's Fancy Dress Ball, was so much appreciated that he was brought back to relate the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet in modernized form.’

What items were not encored among that galaxy of talent, one yearns to know, and what did Mr Furby play on the piano? Horace at Athens, with gags adapted to local requirements, but even then leaving its audience in a certain bewilderment, took a page and a half of small type to describe. ‘After the play the Romans foregathered in the supper room, and asked Mr. Nicholls to accept a walking stick as a memento of the good times past—hurried rehearsals enlivened by his racy wit and good fellowship. Professor Maclaurin made the presentation.’

The next year it was in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that our students graced the boards, moulded again by the admirable Mr Nicholls; while the concert this time began with a piano duet, tastefully played by the Misses Parker and Page. And there was Mr A. Newton again, achieving signal success in his song ‘A Girton Girl’–‘describing the troubles of a young man who thought Tolstoi was a racehourse and who had to take a “new woman” to dinner. As an encore he explained why “Mother laid the carpet on the stairs”’. At this period, indeed, the college and the leaders of the local stage (a strongly comic stage) were very close together; college thanks were due, Spike would say, ‘to some of Wellington's leading musicians and reciters for the readiness with which they give their help on occasions of this kind’. But pianoforte and drama were not the extent of social entertainment, nor even recitations and violin solos. There were euchre parties and dances (Brown was a great hand at euchre) to welcome new students, or for their own sake; there was the ball the professors tendered to students; not alone in the Sydney Street Schoolroom but also in the Hall of the Girl's High School the fun waxed fast and furious.

And then the Debating Society. A debating society was a ‘necessary adjunct’ to every university, it was felt; a committee of the Students' Society had rules and standing orders ready for the inaugural meeting of 3 June 1899; Mackenzie was elected President and Maclaurin Vice-President and Chairman; Maclaurin took the chir, and Mr Fitzherbert moved ‘That any system of control of the drink traffic is inimical to the highest development of civilization’. The motion was opposed by Mr Thomson: it was lost. Debates followed in great quantity; the committee was pleased to note that they were interesting and of a spirited nature, and that the attendance was large. The Lady Principal of the Dunedin Girls' High school read a paper o Jane Austen; the next year Brown lectured on mediaeval universities and there was a mock election; then a Literary Prize and a Rhetorical Competition were instituted; the Wesleyan Literary and Debating Society was engaged in battle (Was the Anglo-Japanese Alliance detrimental to the best interests of the Empire?) and the Wesleyans won. By 1902 the Society could begin to look back; it could reflect that the services rendered by Professor Maclaurin could not be over-estimated; it could note with pleasure that the ladies were taking a far more prominent part in the debates than they had done hitherto. The only thing over which it was prepared to grieve was the fact that so few ‘outsiders’ had become members of the Society, though the rules admitted members of the University Senate and the college Council, as well as professors, lecturers and graduates of the University of New Zealand. But it seems that the citizenry were coming to debates, as audience and judges—the students were being brought ‘into closer relationship with the leading celebrities of this city and Colony’. And on went the process of argument: Was Commerce antagonistic to Art? Had any event in the history of the Colony had a more injurious effect than the dispatching of Contingents to South Africa? Would Collectivism do away with the present dispute between Capital and Labour? Was the promiscuous reading of magazines having a baneful influence on the literary taste of the day? Was the advance of the Empire due rather to the Individual or to the Nation? Should Cremation be supported or opposed? Sometimes there was a parliamentary evening, sometimes a presidential address; the Society joined the Wellington Literary and Debating Societies' Union and earned the plaudits of Sir Robert Stout; one way and another, oratory did not cease to flow.

The Christian Union, it may be claimed, was not so controversial a body, but no less fervent, It got in early. It was formed, in fact, among intending students even before the inauguration of the college, through the efforts of a Travelling Secretary. But alas! That brilliant start and those first Friday evening Bible studies did not survive the loss of the energetic first president; and it was not till the college's second session that a small number took up the task again, deciding that ‘aggressive work’ was out of the question, and that it would be better to study the life of St Paul. From then on the Christian Union continued to exist, strong in intent and in prayer, studying St Paul; calling on professors not notably Christian, except in their long-suffering, for addresses on Religious Indifference and Martin Luther; contributing to Summer Schools; and stimulated from time to time by traveling secretaries and general secretaries. The great John R. Mott had his effect; he it was who urged the Union to be broad: to be broad enough to include as associate members all right- mindedrightminded students whatever their creed or beliefs, and to cultivate energetically the society of non-members; he it was who addressed the men of the College on ‘Temptations of Students in all Lands’, called on a Missionary Conference to consider the problem of Evangelization, and gave an address which would always live in the memory of those who heard it, on Why an Increasing Proportion of Students throughout the World are Becoming Christians. The Missionary Problem got more and more attention; by 1903 a volunteer band of six had been formed and had made the declaration, ‘It is my purpose, if God permit, to become a foreign missionary’. In time indeed the missionaries departed; and Victoria College arrived in China.

Corpus sanum no sit absens, sang Brown, Nor was it; September 1899 saw the Student's Society active again, appointing another committee, this time to wait on Mr Hogg, M.H.R., ‘and to obtain through him an introduction to the Government, to obtain permission to use the Parliamentary Tennis Courts’, Mr Hogg was waited upon, the Speakers of the General Assembly were interviewed, and the use of the parliamentary tennis courts was granted. The committee of the Students' Society then set up a tennis committee, and fixed the subscription of the Tennis Club at 5s per annum. The college, in borrowed corridor and open street, burst into its first wild fit of constitutional controversy. Was the Tennis Club, this first-born among the college's athletic children, to be autonomous, or was it the mere creature of a totalitarian parent, the Students' Society? Who had the power of taxation, who was to fix the subscription? The tennis committee had its own first meeting, and ‘a spirit of revolt… was at once manifest’. The committee itself drew up rules and fixed the subscription at 5s, and referred the constitution to a general meeting at the beginning of the following session. By that time the spirit of accommodation was more manifest; the Students' Society at its annual general meeting resolved that the Tennis Club should be constituted a separate body; the club agreed once more on its annual subscription and its constitution; and everybody was at last satisfied that the Tennis Club had indeed taken over those rights and privileges which had been granted by the Speakers of the General Assembly. Not quite ‘at last; the argument flared up once again, and someone lost the constitution’; but after all, the important thing was to play tennis. College clubs were to be ‘affiliated’ to the Students' Society, and to make their own arrangements. The days of a vast financial organization and a centrally held purse were not yet. There was enthusiasm; ‘the players existed through the week that they might live on Saturday’–even if Saturday was wet; they played matches with all the other clubs and won a great many of them; at the first Easter Tournament ‘the lady members particularly distinguished themselves’ (the gentlemen members were rather handicapped by having to play Mr Anthony Wilding, the champion of Canterbury).

In the first few years of the college it was hockey, probably, that was the major winter sport; at any rate it bulked larger in life than it has done since. An exclusive spotlight was not yet trained on football, basketball had not begun its almost all-conquering advance among women, and hockey was a game that might be played with bruises but satisfaction by either sex. Fuste pilam trudere, sang Brown (or von Zedlitz?). not really faced with the problem of reducing to classic brevity of statement the activities of those other muddied oafs at the goal. The origins of the Hockey Club are so nicely traced in the first number of Spike, the brief paragraphs are so perfectly of their time, that the historian has no alternative to quoting them as a whole.

‘Early last year [i.e., 1901] G. F. Dixon called a meeting of those interested in the formation of a Hockey Club, at which two or three students put in a casual appearance. After about a fortnight's hard work the promoters managed to gather 10 players together, and so challenged the Karori Hockey Club, trusting to luck, or to Hermes, the father of hockey, for an eleventh player to turn up on the ground. The challenge was accepted, and, on 18th May, those pioneers of the now flourishing Hockey Club wended their way over the hills to Karori, some walking some cycling, while others, less energetic, took the coach.’

‘Before the match a meeting was held to elect officers, which resulted as follows; Patron, His Excellency the Governor; President, Hon. Sir R. Stout, K.C.M.G.; Vice-Presidents, Professors Brown, Easterfield, Maclaurin and Mackenzie, Messrs, J. P. Firth, F. J. McDonald and D. Sladden; Capt., R. St. J. Beere; vice-Capt., H.P. Richmond; Hon, Sec. and Treas., George F. Dixon, F. A. de la Mare took the chair at this meeting, or rather sat on a hockey stick; he was the looked-for eleventh player.’

‘After this game about five of the players said they would have to give it up, as their knees, or their hearts, were not strong enough, but after two or three days' rest they recovered sufficiently to be commandeered for the next performance.’

Starting in this casual way the club, even with its officers elected so much in the grand style, started off by losing a good many matches. But it won some, it practiced on moonlight nights or frosty mornings in vacant sections or on the old Thorndon reclamation (putting the ball one night through a police inspector's window), it went on to field a junior as well as a senior team, it added other teams to these; it provided, in due course, coaches for the Ladies' Hockey Club. The Ladies'

‘Ladies’ or Women's? They were generally referred to as Ladies, though one stern early editor of spike insisted that they were Women. The controversial point is elsewhere referred to.

Hockey Club was founded in 1904, and never was there a more popular institution. The Ladies (to use their own words) demanded not only wealth of intellect, but wealth of spirit, and where could better education of the spirit come than from hockey? The Tennis Club could be respected, one could feel proud of its achievements—but after all, a tennis club, where aggregate of individualists. Not so a hockey club, where each served all, where ‘the practice of self-control and self-effacement. The generous unjealous service of another's fortune, becomes a growing part of every soul that entertains them, and strengthens with the years’. Did not their brethren, who refereed and coached, exhibit such virtue to a marked degree, while the ladies ploughed through mud and rules alike, with mutual interposition of sticks and shins? The Ladies kept on, in their large hats, large blouses, large ties, and large skirts—an animated, a devoted sisterhood with the beating of the Kiwi Club the distant goal that beckoned them on.

The clubs were catholic in their enjoyments. The students' Society might run euchre parties, but it was the Hockey Club that arranged the first ping-pong tournament (the students beat the professors), and anybody might arrange a dance, or combine in the arrangements. The captain of the Hockey Club was a notable M.C. Any function might turn into a dance, whether in the Sydney Street Schoolroom or in the Hall at the Girls' High School. Dancing was dancing, it was exercise, it was waltz and polka and schottische and lancers; beneath the lycopodium and streamers it moved with tune and vigour and high endurance. There were generally professors present. In the reciest of reminiscence the most genial of hockey-players (who never, it is true, took a degree) indicates certain amiable and not unsatisfactory irregularities; ‘You may wonder’ he writes, ‘that I say little of the dear old Profs.–I knew most of them by sight, of course, but our ways seemed to lie apart, doubtless to their lasting regret. We col- laboratedcollaborated occasionally none the less. One of them once asked me to fix all the lights so that none could be turned out during the progress of the winter balls. I cannot say why—those were quiet, old-fashioned times when all the Bolsheviks were still in Russia and there were on debates as to the wisdom of creating the Universe.’

A, H. Bogle, ‘Some Memoirs’, in The Spike, Silver Jubilee Number, (1924), PP. 40–1.

Easter 1902 saw the first Inter-University College Tournament. Our men and women were not going to be parochial in their outlook. The infant college would strive with its elders; more, it would egg them on. In 1900 the Tennis Club played a match with Canterbury College. H. P. Richmond of Victoria had the idea and passed it on to his hosts. The Canterbury students were interested, and formally proposed a tournament in athletics, tennis, and debating, to be held at Christchurch at Easter 1901. But there was no immediate enthusiasm among students anywhere, and nothing happened. Then came G. F. Dixon, of Victoria, in whom the idea blossomed with the force of revelation. Dixon was Vice-President of the Students' Society, and on the way to being President; he was a man undoubtedly to whom fellowship was life, and as he brooded a tournament came to seem for him life abounding. Yet he and his friends were tactful: they sent an unofficial and persuasive note to Canterbury, the Canterbury Athletic Club took fire again, and in August 1901 invited Victoria and Otago to Christchurch for 1902 Auckland seemed too far away—but not for Victoria; Victoria brought in Auckland, and Victoria settled down with a Training Committee during the long vacation to see what could be made of her chances, Dixon became a trainer, and made his men race him up Makara hill on Sundays, hell and toe; Dixon became Manager, Dixon became Tournament Delegate. It was apparent that Dixon, his friends noted, had found his role in life—after that first experience the Tournament became almost his, ‘Clad in a new Norfolk suit each year, with increasing badges and presentation walking-sticks and a tremendous air of here-comes-my-team-don't-shoe-any-of-'em-a-bun-till-Tuesday, the man was an institution in four cities.’

Bogle again, ibid., p, 40.

But this was only the outset. Easterfield, the Cambridge miler, took a hand with the training, paced the team round the Basin Reserve, and coached them on the Wellington College playing field. Easterfield's influence kept the desire for gold medals in leash– if a crown of bay or wild olive was good enough for Greece, bronze would suffice for New Zealand. When the team at last went to Christchurch, three professors and two lecturers went with it, to astonish the students of the south—here was a staff who showed an interest in college life!

The leaders of the other colleges worked hard, and the tournament was a great success. The weather was good, Victoria had managed to provide competitors in every event, it ran Otago close for second Place in athletics (a contest won by the hosts); its women put it second for the tennis championship; it tied with Auckland in its part of the debating contest, though Otago carried off the verdict of the judges. Vicroria's A.S. Henderson had to put up a record for the half-mile, 2 mins. 3⅕ secs., which was to stand for nineteen years. There was a ball–‘the magnificent hall at Canterbury College’ (ah! the Sydney Street Schoolroom, those borrowed walls!) ‘was filled with youth and beauty, and the fleeting hours were all too quickly gone.’ The organizers were highly satisfied. They decided to buy a shield for athletics, a cup for tennis, and a ‘scroll shield’ for debating (here the University registrar stepped in and the Joynt Scroll began its peregrinations over New Zealand); and to go to Auckland in 1903. They were idealists. They had brought the colleges together; they had struck a blow against provincialism, they had struck a blow against professionalism in sport. In Wellington, those were delighted who saw in their fellows a too obsequious regard for examinations. There had been a quickening influence' on college life. ‘There was more real activity displayed by the students on this than on any previous occasion… in every way our students began to know one another better… Throughout the University of New Zealand,’ spike went no to say, gazing with youthful enthusiasm into the future, ‘there is now a bond of friendship and respect, which will tighten as years go by, and which will stand as long as the Tournament lasts, a safeguard against a system of mere University cram.’ One would not have thought, from the extant records, that Victoria College was in serious bondage to the system of ‘mere cram’. But its students continued to assail that erroneous ideal. Among them was the poet who crowned the tournament with numbers:

My Lord, I did attend the Olympic games– Maid Modesty forfend I tell my deeds– But such a goodly show of fellowship, Such turn for speed, such thews, such sleight of hand, Such honeyed tongues for golden oratory– I trust I may bear witness to again.

And The spike was born, the Muses' darling, whence to quote is so tempting, so fatally easy. There was an idiom, circa 1902, ‘to have the spike’; that man who had the spike was dissatisfied with life of his fellows to the point of disgust. But The Spike was not like this. The name was taken because it was short, it was currently on many lips and would stick in the mind, and it carried an agreeable suggestion of having a point—the point perhaps of satire, a point which might prick pretensions, or goad sinful men into well-doing; for this magazine was to be run ‘as a free lance, dealing out to each and all their just meed of blame or praise without fear, prejudice, or favour’. Houstile critics said the name was unworthy of a university. Certainly the sub-title, the Victoria College review, was less intimidating.

The first number, for June 1902 (it was to be published twice in the session) was, it appears, financed largely on the proceeds of advertising space sold one afternoon to a variety of benevolent firms, from booksellers to haberdasher, by H. H. Ostler, the editor, and F.A. de la Mare. His sub. What a period piece is that first spike, in typography, advertisements and art; in its prose an verse, in its humour and its good intentions! Does it seem naive to a later generation, nurtured on the literature of so different a world? But if it was sentimental, it was honest, it made no bones about its good intentions.

‘We be wayfarers together, O Students,’ were its opening words, ‘treading the same thorny path of Studentdom, laughing at the same professorial jokes, grieving in common over the same unpalatable “swot”, playing the same games, reading the same indigestible books.… Our aims are threefold. Firstly, to make The spike and official record of the doings of the College, and of all clubs and institutions in connection with it. Secondly, to bring out the dormant talent, perhaps even genius, in both art and literature, that cannot help but exist, and too often lie hidden, amongst two hundred University students. In so doing, it is out ambition to as high a standard of literary excellence as possible. Thirdly, and perhaps our chiefest ideal, to strengthen the bonds of union and goodfellowship amongst us, to help us to take more interest in the social life of the college and our fellow-students, to foster that brotherly comradeship which, to out mind, is the chief charm of studentdom. In doing this we humbly advance the suggestion that the presence of The Spike will. in some measure, compensate for the absence of a home of our own.’

That ingratiating self-introduction was accompanied by the warning that there would be pricks. Let them not, however, penetrate beneath the skin. The magazine intended to good-humoured, and implored its potential victims to be good-humoured too. It had need to make the fervent prayer; for, by the time the second number appeared, the editors had been told a good deal about ‘journalistic etiquette’ and the law of libel. Indeed The spike was very frank—so frank that its first number had to be reprinted. Its idea of brotherly comradeship was very much a family one, it dealt faithfully with the erring—with committee members, with hockey-players who did come out to play or who played for the wrong club, with those the talked greatly in a cause but served not, with the foibles and shortcomings of professors, with the devotees of ‘mere cram’, with the New Zealand Times, and with the chairman of the college Council. More than one chairman of the college Council, as time went on, might well have taken thought before uttering words which brought upon him not so much a pinprick as a bludgeon. To be wayfarers together was a serious enterprise. Dormant talent began to awake, to be sure, mainly in terms of the humour that is so compelling for contemporaries and so impenetrable for later generations–‘Students we Have Met’, annotations on Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, ‘In Lighter Vein’, fictitious ‘Answers to Correspondents’–and the poetry was, in the main only moderately comic; but a flowering was not far off, and Spike, while upholding the categorical imperatives of duty to the college and brotherly comradeship, was to provide the setting for some verse, at least, that was of serious value, as well as for another sort whose lasting quailties have been, on the whole, better—the verse of wit.

The advertisers, on whose generous trust so much depend- eddepended, display in their intimations an almost Arcadian simplicity, a tone as of some never-to-be-repeated golden age. S. & W. Mackay (praeclarum et venerabile nomen) Booksellers, offer set books for 1903 in September 1902, and a variety of standard academic literature rising in price from 3s 6d to nothing higher than 14s (theirs was the famous typographical error, ‘Comic Sections, by George Salmon’) ‘The Kash’, Willis Street, in an announcement Important to Gentlemen, proclaim The Newest in Ties, The Best Makes of Underclothing. The Very Latest in Collars, The Most Reliable Things in Gleves; Messrs Warnock & Adkins will sell suits to order (Guaranteed fit, Guaranteed Work)for £2 17s 6d and £3 3s, and costumes to order (Best Materials, Best Work) at from 50s to 65s. A student could be well-dressed. The photographs in Spike depict well-dressed students. The collars are superb.

Hockey-playing, dancing, engaging in tournament, merely mixing with ordinary unfortunate non-collegiate citizens, for purposes of identification and decoration students needed Colours. Jerseys must be coloured; ties must be coloured; Hats—the ‘straw boaters’ so dashingly worn by either sex– had hat-bands and they must be coloured. The committee of the Students Society in its first year chose a combination referred to variously as chocolate and gold, and brown and mustard-colour. But the hat-band had a large V.C. woven into the front, and the daring ones who wore it were mocked by small boys in the streets. When the Hockey Club began to sally out therefore the matter was reconsidered, and in 1901 a general meeting accepted maroon and light blue. The hockey-players were satisfied; but could a dark maroon and light blue hat-band be tolerated with the generality of female complexions? Could lady hockey-players possibly wear that insulting combination? The gallant George Prouse, who proudly wore it himself in the senior Eleven, and belonged to a musical family, consulted one of that family's friends. It was the celebrated diva Antonia Dolores. Madame agreed with the ladies. More, she swept her hand towards the gorse-clad Tinakori hills: ‘One cannot improve on Nature,’ she said Prouse went to annual general meeting of 1903 with enthusiasm, there was vast excitement, Nature and Madame triumphed.

Oh, have you heard the very latest colours of our choice? How Johnstone tried to stem the tide and Prouse raised up his voice? How the ladies and the Murphys in solid rank were seen? How they waved aloft their banner of gold and olive green?

11Capping song, 1902, Quot anni tot colores.A. H. Johnstone, a fervent hockey-player, denounced ‘the Irish compromise’, the combination of green and orange.

Then, somehow to obtain the stamp of permanence, the decision was referred to the Professorial Board for its agreement, the Board referred it back for proof of irrevocable desire, the 1904 general meeting re-affirmed, colour-specimens were sent to the council, and the Council, ratifying, pasted them down in its minute-book. Olive green and old gold, however unsuccessful the attempts to render them in current fabrics may be, had survival value: there were no further attempts at change.

But the College as yet had no habitation of its own, and granted that a university is built of men, need somewhere to live if they are to live corporately. The Council had that painful problem continuously before it. In July 1899 a Mr Travers, taking a line of his of his own, favoured it with a copy of a petition he had sent to parliament, stating that as Wellington College had ceased to be affiliated to the University, its lands (which, so the argument ran, had in time past been reserved for ‘higher’ education) should be handed over to Victoria College—which petition was followed up by a bill to transfer ten of the controversial acres. The Wellington College Governors were scandalized, and the Council could raise no enthusiasm. In July 1900, while this abortive bill was pending, it received a deputation of citizen, led by the mayor, pleading on behalf of the Mount Cook site—true, the surrounding were objected to by many, but they would soon improve; the site was central, and the mayor would do all in his power. What was a mayor against Seddon? Enterprising agents began to come forward with pieces of land, at Vogeltown, Evans Bay, on Adelaide Road—none of them, obviously, of much use. And then there was a letter, a letter of such importance that it may be given in full.

Longwood Featherston.February, 27th, 1901.The Secretary, Victoria College governors,

Wellington

Sir,

I am surprised to find on paying a short visit to New Zealand from Lond, that the site for the College is still unsettled. My conviction has always been that the one position for it is on the Kelburne Park Reserve, or possibly if that should not be available on some of the land higher up. I have hesitated to express this opinion in any public way, because I knew it would be said that I was influenced by my large interest in the Kelburne Karori tramway, I have however too long been subjected to absurd misconstructions of my motives to care what may be side now that I am in a position to make a definite proposal which I hope will be considered in the spirit in which it is made, viz: If the site I have indicated is decided on, but not otherwise, I shall be happy to give a donation of (£ 1000) one thousand pounds to the College funds, to be used either for building or for an Educational endowment, as the Governors think best. The money to be paid when the College building is erected and ready for occupation. I will sign any undertaking thought desirable to this effect, so as to make the promise binding on my executors in case of my death. As events have happened which make it probable that I may spend a great part of my time in future out of New Zealand though I have no intention of becoming an absentee, I wish to show in this way some recognition of my attachment to the City of Wellington as the spot with which most of my recollections are associated.

Yours faithfully, C. Pharazyn.

That £ 1000 did it. Mr Pharazyn was a shrewd, well-known and wealthy Wairarapa sheep-farmer, with good investments, whose interest in learning had so far been manifested mainly in membership of the Wellington Education Board. His letter was not the sort of letter that could be ignored by a council weighed down by Queen's Scholarships, holding those 4000 acres in the Nukumaru Survey District the paid nothing, and anxiously calculating lecturers at a hundred and fifty pounds apiece. A committee went to look at the territory indicated by Mr Pharazyn—fairly determined, no doubt, to do justice as between wisdom and gold. It was all part of the Town Belt, both the waste land of the Kelburn park reserve and the precipitous hillside adjoining. The City Council might be expected to look at the park with a jealous eye; what of the alternative? There was a report.

The committee having carefully gone over and inspected the land is satisfied that it is convenient, accessible and suitable and under existing conditions the best available, it has good road access from North and South and is by direct road within ten minutes walk of the centre of the City. The land in question is high is a bout six acres in extent and can at a very moderate cost be made into an admirable site.' And it commanded a magnificent view. But the Town Belt was bound up in legality. An act would be necessary to facilitate the transfer of the land, the City Council would have to be compensated from land in the Willington College reserve (also hillside) which would not harm that college.

‘With respect to the position of the city with reference to this question your committee are of opinion that the proper housing and establishment of a University College in the City is an important City interest and should as much as possible have the City Council's support so long as no injury to the citizens as a whole is done thereby. Your Committee urge that not only will no injury be done gut a great benefit to the City will result in converting an unused and unsightly piece of land to this useful purpose and improving it with a suitable building to bring University education within the reach of the youth of the City.’

Them began the negotiations, and further reports. The Professorial Board, stimulated by Easterfield, wanted Kelburn park. Hogben, the head of the Education Department, said flatly that kelburn Park would do. Government, said particular interest. When the Duke and Duchess of York came to Wellington the students, clad in cap and gown, halted them with a banner inscribed ‘We have eyes but no site’–which loyal greeting caused the visitors some mystification. The City Council was prepared to give the ‘Salamanca Road’ site, upwards of six acres, in exchange for land of equal value, conditional on building being started within five years; or two and a half acres at the north of the park reserve, on condition that the college reclaimed for it an equivalent from the deep gully at the other end. But what use were two and a half acres? There was a small piece of land next to the Salamanca Road site owned by the Hospital Trustees, which could possibly be obtained, to make six and a half acres in all. The college Council plumped for this site. The Hospital Trustees were at first not very amenable. The Council received a letter from the Nelson college Board of Governors, who had resolved that' Nelson being and inherent part of the Victoria college University District, as well as pre-eminently fitted to become the Seat of the University', they should offer a site of six acres free of cost, ‘the situation offered being second to none in the Colony for the purpose required’. But Nelson was not in the centre Wellington, and the Council could but tender its thanks.

An act was passed by parliament in November 1901 to facilitate the negotiations which were in progress.

12The Victoria College site and Girls High School and Wellington Hospital Trustees Empowering Act, 1901.

The Hospital Trustees came round to accept a government section adjoining the hospital as fair exchange; deadlock between the City Council and the Wellington College Governors was solved by acceptance of a ten foot frontage on Willis Street owned by the Governors, instead of ten acres on a bare hillside; and in February 1902 the thing was done. The College had its site, or at least the ‘six vertical acres’ from which a site could, in the Wellington manner, be hacked and hewn; and the Council braced itself to its next task, that of getting money from the government for a building.

IV A Home of its Own

Was the council right in doing as it did? It is an unprofitable question, but it insists on being asked. John Henry Newmann, in his University Sketches, describes a conversation he once had with an ‘academical luminary’ casually met on a stage-coach. ‘One point which he was strong upon, and was evidently fond of, was the material pomp and circumstance which should environ a great seat of learning. He considered it was worth the consideration of the Government, whether Oxford should not stand in a domain of its own. An ample range, say four miles in diameter, should be turned into wood and meadow, and the university should be approached on all sides by a magnificent park, with fine trees in groups and groves and avenues, and with glimpses and views of the fair city, as the traveler drew near it. There is nothing surely absurd in the idea, though it would cost a round sum to realize it. What has a better claim to the purest and fairest possessions of nature, than the seat of wisdom? So thought my coach companion; and he did but express the tradition of ages and the instinct of mankind.’ The tradition of the ages perhaps, thus interpreted in terms of the eighteenth century aristocratic English landscape gardener, designing his splendid country seat; but not the instinct of that segment of mankind that came down from its perch on the Wellington hills to do business on the reclaimed land of the former, the colonial tradesman or attorney. It was New Zealand, a colony and a democracy; it needed education—that is, the necessary qualifications for teachers and practicing lawyers—and it needed something cheap. It had no particular truck with Wisdom. How many members of the Council, that body democratically chosen for the direction of a democratic college, had the beginnings of an understanding of university education? What did stout, with his ceaseless pertinacity in running up blind alleys after the latest ideas from America, really know about it all? Alternately ignored and bullied by Seddon, whose cocksure ignorance had done so much to determine the shape of things, to raise gratuitous obstacles to the rational solution of any problem, what could the Council do?

It might, as some people suggested it should, turning its eyes away from Pharazyn's glittering temptation, brave the charges of incompetence and simply wait. There might be a magnificent view from the hill on Salamanca Road (generations of students indeed, gazing down on that vies, have experienced loveliness and nobility and poetry and a lifting of the heart), but more was necessary. The college was in being, even if in rented rooms; it could continue to exist and expand, yet awhile, in rented rooms. It would outlast Seddon. There stood the Mount Cook site, crowned at one end by the vast red-brick extravagance of the pseudo-gaol, like a vision of Stupidity: the finest site in the city, ample, superb. In twenty years the gaol would have gone, and another building be rising in its place—but not the home of a college. But would waiting have got Mount Cook, even after Seddon? It is impossible to say. It not, there was land in plenty in the suburbs, hundreds of acres at Karori, at Miramar; the whole Hutt valley stretched out in farmlands, and a farm or two would have given something that even Cardinal Newman and his academical luminary would not have despised. But there was that unhappy dogma, the college must be in Wellington, it must be ‘central’; there was that unhappy fact, it was founded for evening classes, for the part-time student; it was not, the chorus reiterated, for the ‘rich’. When, a little later, before the vested interest in Kelburn had become impregnable, the suggestion was made that it should be moved out to Karori, the immediate retort was ‘But how will the law students get sown to their offices on time?’ Always the short view triumphed; and from short view to short view the Council proceeded, from excavation to excavation and then to retaining wall, biting deeper and deeper into the clay and crumbling rock, while the thin unlovely line of buildings advanced higher and higher up the hill, and only the bulldozer and the mechanical shovel saved it from being lost, in the end, in a wild abysm of expense. Yet what, in 1901, would any other ordinary person have done? And has any ordinary community the right to blame its own past for not producing extraordinary persons? The town of Wellington itself was plumped down with no great regard to the amenities of living. We are still fighting the nineteenth century. In 1901 the college had 144 students. The Council aimed at accommodating a good many more than that. It might even persuade itself that it was taking not a short, but a long, view. It had a few scraggy pines on its estate, in a group; it could do without groves and avenues. It set out to level 1½ acres, ‘in order to gain ample space’; and the Minister of Education cut the first sod.

Competitive designs were to be called for. By July 1902 a Building Committee could report having interviewed the Minister of Education and Sir Joseph Ward, the acting-Premier (Seddon was off instructing the Empire how to man- agemanage South Africa), to ask for £40,000 for the building. The Professorial Board, its advise requested by the Council, had suggested, besides laboratories and class-rooms, a science museum, a large lecture and examination hall, a library hall, two common rooms for students and a luncheon of dining-room—a building which would be ‘cheaper in the long run than the erection of a college adequate merely for present needs’. But Sir Joseph Ward thought those requirements could be met for £25,000 and asked for a more detailed plan and estimate. So the Council agreed to try for £30,000 and a sketch plan free by the Government Architect; and spike composed its castigation of Blair for thinking that any less sum would do. Controversy, which had accompanied the college the short length of its days, did not now stop; professors were still articulate to some purpose. ‘To expect to educate men to great and noble ideas in mean and ignoble surroundings’ wrote Maclaurin to the Evening Post, ‘is to neglect one of the deepest lessons of modern science.’ But that did not influence the government, which, having seen sketch plans and an estimate produced by the local architect Mr J. Charlesworth (the Government Architect being too busy), agreed to grant £15,000 spread over three years. At that the Council, taking the bit momentarily between its teeth, decided to erect a £30,000 building, call for competitive designs, and have an assessor appointed in Melbourne to give judgment on them. Easterfield impartially gave all the contestants who wanted advice a lay-out for the science part of the building. There was to be no more washing of test-tubes in a bucket in the back-yard. At the Council meeting in June 1903 it was announced that the firm of F. Penty and E. M. Blake had won the competition, with Charlesworth second. The unsuccessful architects complained, but to no purpose. The plans went to the Premier, who was home again; he looked at the elevation and said firmly, It wants another storey'. To record this as an aesthetic judgment would have been gratifying, for it was undoubtedly true; but it seems to have been based merely on Seddon's conviction that to build a two-storey building was to waste the site and to waste money. The also was true, and the Government Architect, John Campbell, made the criticism on both grounds, while pointing out, furthermore, that no provision had been made for the extensions that would be inevitably necessary. So Messrs Penty and Blake added a storey. On the last day of March 1904 the council met. ‘At 7.30 Mr. Graham came in and informed the council that Mr. Seddon would receive Mr. Evans and himself presently. [Mr Evans was now the Chairman.] Mr. Evans and Mr. Graham went up to the Premier's house and on their return the Chairman reported that the Premier approved of the acceptance of the Tender and that the Government would give £25,000 towards the cost of the Building.’ The tender was that of Mr. A. Maguire, £25,371 for the science block and the middle protion of the arts building. The ornamental wings to this middle portion, designed as college hall and museum, were excluded, and the Seddonian to storey was to be for the immediate future merely an unlined shell. But there Mr Blake's picture was, with a hansom cab driving briskly towards the two little top-hatted gentlemen in front, and the noble pile reaching skywards, all patent ventilators and finals and crenellations, with spire and oriel windows complete. ‘The building’ reported the Evening Post, no doubt on expert advice, ‘has the chief characteristics of the late perpendicular period of Gothic, which style lends itself admirably for the purposes of a university building’. Inside, as appeared in due course, the style changed to a sort of bastard Early English, breaking down in the science building, as the architects gave up the unequal struggle, into plain utility.

Now every month, as Mr Maguire pushed on, in those happy days of crowding bricklayers and carpenters, there was something to report. The Governor, Lord Plunket, consented to lay the foundation stone, on Saturday, 27 August, 1904. There was the usual overweight of speeches. A new chairman of the council, Dr. C. Prendergast Knight, took the occasion to thank Seddon ‘for saving them from that hideous clay hillock surmounted by that ugly forbidding brick building once destined for a gaol’, but was happier in his references to the enthusiastic and much-tried students. The Attorney-General gave Governmental explanations. The mayor hoped the University would follow Education along modern lines, ‘for on this depended the future of our commerce and manufacture, and on these the nation would rise and fall’. Easterfield, for the Professorial Board, trod diplomatically among congratulations and reassurances, Stout carried off the oratorical honours with a history of the college, a demand for generous administration of the great principles of free, compulsory and secular education, and an appeal to the example of America. ‘He hoped our wealthy people would feel as the wealthy American did—that to give money for education was the greatest act of patriotism a man could perform.’ Lord Plunket added to the appeal for private munificence.

The Governor, with his silver trowel, had an appreciation of his roe that must have seemed to some, at least, of his hearers eminently fitting. ‘The ceremony in which I have just taken part is the most important function which has fallen to my lot since my arrival in New Zealand’–though certainly he had not been hare long. There were students whose sense of the high seriousness of the occasion would not be satisfied with anything less than an Ode, and one of them, Seaforth Mackenzie, provided verses that have not ceased to be, for that generation, one of the New Zealand classics.

Here in the common clay, Here in our strait demesne, Lay we the stone in trust, Waiting the fuller day:

There was suitable acknowledgment to the Duke of Wellington for winning the battle of Salamanca: and now here was a Citadel to be guarded inviolate. Farewell to the Girls' High School farewell to Victoria Street–

No more our step will be a trespasser Beneath the portals of an overlord: But there will be the greeting and the stir Of fellowship within our rightful Hall.

This was to be the Citadel of pure Wisdom.

Clear face of Pallas, will thine eyes be kind Towards thy fane for ever?

It is again very naive, very band of brothers, very mens sana in corpore sano, very sentimental! It was also, for those men and women, very true, it was something they lived by.

And if they could be sentimental, they were apt at a sterner note. It now looked as if a completed building would cost £50,000. The council must appeal to the public. A special meeting to consider the matter lapsed for want of a quorum. The council was prepared to set up a committee and send round a circular but did not quite like the work ‘canvass’. The chairman thought that canvassing for funds would be undignified. The issue of Spike that contained the Ode rent Dr C. Prendergast knight, rent the New Zealand Times for its lack of Sympathy, praised the Evening post for its sympathy, and went on to examine the attendance of councillors at their meeting. it is a close, a very frank examination; it does not hesitate in its conclusion that a number of them might very well depart. Did these lax gentlemen read Spike? At any rate a circular went out, signed not only by knight, but by Easterfield and Maclaurin for the Board and by Dixon and A. H. Johnstone for the Students' Association. The Dixon and A. H. Johnstone scribed £210 among themselves—there were then 195 of them. In November the middle District members of parliament went as a deputation to Seddon, With Evans and a colleague: the premier received them kindly but had given no definite answer, he said all would come right in the long run'. The long run is a thing that it is difficult to define. By 1905 the government had provided £31,000. The building originally designed was never finished. The Pharazyn £1000 paid over. There is no record. of The citizens of Wellington providing anything at this stage. The council being unwilling to canvass, Easterfield and J. W. G. Aitken, the mayor, went round the town. ‘The general attitude’ it is recorded, ‘was that it was the duty of the Government to pay up,’

Mr William Weir the timber-merchant said he hoped to do something later. Mr Jacob Joseph said he would put money into scholarship but not into bricks and mortar. Mrs. Sarah Anne Rhodes gave Easterfield £25 for his own department and expressed her ‘intention of doing something later’, –Letter from Easterfield to Sir Thomas Hunter, 9 July 1948.

When in 1909 the government agreed to give a subsidy of £2000 for the building of a science wing at the rear of the original block, if £1000 could be raised independently, the Council decided to ‘make a special to the public spirit of the College District … for the completion of this urgent work’. Public Spirit was screwed up to the extent of £825.

The building was opened by the Governor, amid flags and greenery which inadequately hid the nakedness of unfinished third storey walls, on Friday, 30 March 1906. on the Saturday night following the students held a bazaar. Kirk and Easterfield provided demonstrations in their new laboratories.

It was not be thought of that students would be satisfied with merely a building, Many months before the opening wider thoughts had been active. A committee had been set up' to watch the college site, the college Council, and things in general in the interests of the Tennis Club', day from the college excavation had been deposited and leveled in a suitable place, but something more was needed, for which there was no fund. The students decided to excavate tennis courts themselves; and somehow—so great is the compulsion of disinterested labour in the crises of human history—the Tennis Club was able to drw not merely on its own efforts, but on those of students in general, of the professors, of Dr Knight, that chairman of the council who so often incurred the wrath of spike, and even of the Premier. At half past two on the afternoon of Saturday, 9 September 1905, Mr Seddon rode up, wielded pick, shovel and barrow with the finish of an old West coaster, and made an appropriate speech. He could tell them as an expert they wouldn't find much gold there, but physical exercise was a valuable thing. The government would help those who helped themselves, and he would anticipate the Public Works Statement to the extent of the £6000 the University was then asking for—of which a quarter would come to Victoria. He got on his horse and rode away. It was magnificent. Who now could nourish hard thoughts of the dictator? The ladies dispensed afternoon tea amid general rejoicing. And them Saturday after Saturday Beere the organizer drove on his band—a band that dwindled, it must e confessed. Two courts, three courts were dug out; in 1906 two men, Dixon and Gillanders (neither of them played tennis) were still digging; in 1907 Dixon (who else could it be?), horny-handed, completed the fourth court by himself. There was, it seems, at least one giant in those days. And with all that clay, under, around, and looming over the red brick Gothic (‘late perpendicular period’) of the college building, who could differ from the sentimental gentleman who now instituted the fashion of referring to the beloved as ‘The Old Clay Patch’?

Excavation was not quite enough. Some money had to be expended. The Council made a grant, the students'Association a lesser one, members of the Tennis Club took up debentures. But the amount was small compared to that needed for the second building on the Old clay Patch, not red brick this time but wood, the Gymnasium. For no sooner was the original building in use (and the students. outrunning estimates as they always did, were by then almost 400 in number) than men began to talk of the next steps, Why not a ‘residential department’? Why not hostels for men and for women? And if These could not be compassed why not at least a gymnasium? A gymnasium was urgently necessary; for nor merely were debates being held in the bare dubiously-furnished top storey of the college building—the council had presented fifty chairs which broke whim sat on—but dances; and then the Football Club began to practise there, and the plaster fell off the ceiling below in Easterfield's laboratory. The architects sent in a cheque for £20 which the council as gallantly returned. Obviously football practice could not go on. But if it could not go on how could the Football Club be expected to win matches? The Football club had been founded in 1903 In that year its first Fifteen played nine games and lost nine; in the next year it got a notable recruit in T. A. Hunter, newly appointed to the staff, who believed that football was a game of brains, and won one match by default; and then it went on to greater things, brain and brawn combined, Hunter with it (he was captain of the first senior team of 1095.) until the impact of his head on the knee of the great Freddy Roberts of Oriental, twin halves of one august event, finished his flashing half-back career. The Football club at any rate wanted a gymnasium, and steered its way with diplomacy towards the consummation of its desires, past of round the opposition of those other students who also ‘wanted’ (in metaphysical terms) a gymnasium, though they knew it not. Subscriptions were called for; an anonymous donor, later identified as sir Francis Bell, provided £250; Lieutenant Shackleton, back from the Antarctic, lectured for the cause and gave £250, the Governor, the ever open-handed Lord Plunket, £ 10, and gradually the rest of the money was raised from students and others and a government subsidy, until a gigantic Bazaar, with professors' wives in charge of the stalls, wiped out the indebtedness left over. It was in fact a Gymnasium and Social Hall that was opened on another notable Saturday afternoon, 30 July 1909, with the usual flags, photographers and afternoon tea. It was' a building such as the college has long needed'–two-storied, with a ‘large room’ on top for gymnasium and dancing; on the ground floor ‘a large assembly hall with a stage’; there were dressing rooms, a caretaker's room, a committee room, even a kitchen. The Gymnasium won the envy of an eminent visitor fullness of time, foundations began to go and joists began to creak, how many college generations had it seen, and heard? ‘–how many, uncounted, hundreds of dances under the sedate eves of the patient row of chaperones how many chaperoneless hundreds; how many football and hockey practices, with appropriate thudding of balls bodies, and sticks; how much dramatic ranting on the stage of the assembly hall; by how many remorseless waves of oratory had it been engulfed, enough not only to confound the chairs, but to wash away walls joists, floors, foundations and all? How many suppers were cut and mixed in those downstairs rooms? What poundage of sandwiches, what cubic content of fruit salad, what astronomical reckoning of meringues were there consumed? The college, truly, could not have done without the gymnasium.

Meanwhile, the surrounding clay began to look less intolerably graceless. Paths were laid down; shrubs were hopefully planted; the taupata hedge was planted outside the tennis courts; the city fathers did something to make the Mount street approach look less like the bed of a mountain torrent and provided lights; in the winter of 1909 the unemployed of the city removed gorse and carted away more clay, fitted up class-rooms on the top storey of the college buildings, and improved the gymnasium. In return the Students’ Associations organized a concert and raised £35 for the Mayor's Relief Fund. It was the day of small things.

It was the day of small things also in the attempts that were made to enable students to enable students to live together, in the providing of ‘the residential department’. Teachers and students may be the essentials of a university, but community in the mechanics of living can add greatly to the corporate life, Professors; wives dispensed limitless sympathy, a limitless hospitality—who ever could forget among them, the delightful Mrs Mackenzie?–and more than one mother of students made a Wellington home a sort of social annexe to the college. Yet such gifts of pure goodness were the graces, not the mechanics, of living. Students whose own homes were not in Wellington were hard put to it to live together. There were one or two boarding-house keepers who almost maintained unofficial hostells—there was Miss Ewart's in Brougham street for instance where the inmates lived the full university life with great damage to the windows, for they insisted on playing football all over the house—but this was inadequate. The Council could do nothing. In 1906, however, Mrs Wallis, the bishop's wife, and a number of other philanthropic ladies, put forward a plan for a women's hostel, with which the Council decided that neither it, nor any member of the professorial Board, could have official connection as it promised to be a religious establishment, Undeterred, the good Mrs Wallis kept on, a section was bought and a house was built in ‘Woolcombe Street’, and thus the Victoria House of today came into existence. It was opened in 1908 its afternoon teas, though not elaborate, were highly esteemed by the male friends of the young women in residence. There was, they reported, jam on the biscuits. In the same year, out of funds held by the Anglican church, and designed as a memorial to Bishop Hadfield, was built the hostel for men known as Hadfield House, not far from the college in Kelburn—primarily for theological students, but as these were few in numbers, for others also. It maintained a precarious though lively existence for some years. Its wardens were not met born for the task; but more important, having accommodation only for sixteen, economically it could not make ends meet and had to be sold. The Society of Friends also managed a hostel, for women, but its population was mainly one of Training College students.

The academic staff was increasing in number. As new men came they brought complications. Esterfield's demands for the teaching of science had been an eye-opener for the Council, but it had done what it could to satisfy him, and he had got a building designed to his taste. Now Kirk hardly appointed, wanted to get the island at Island Bay for a marine Laboratory and Biological Observing Station, and wanted a fund started for the purpose so that he could collect money in proper form. The Council, never very good at collecting money itself, gave professor Kirk permission to go ahead, but the public of Wellington was no more inclined to support a Marine Laboratory than it was other good academic causes, and Kirk's ideal remained unrealized. And then the college had hardly been in its new building a year when Mr Hunter was beckoning it on to a strange region of ‘experimental psychology’. Mr Hunter was an acquisition of 1904.

By the beginning of 1903 Professor Mackenzie had decided that he should lay down his load of mental science. There was talk of doing away with the part-time lectureships of Richmond and Ritchie, and it was decided to end their engagements from the close of that year. Mr Ritchie said it was a mistake to suppose he wished to retire, and that he was willing to ‘take up’ mental science. But it was otherwise decreed: for one session Mackenzie would take logic, Dr Chapple, of the Council, would lecture ‘on the physiological side’, and Evans on ethics; and then at the end of the year it was decided to advertise for a lecturer in Mental Science and Political Economy—at £300, or two separate lecturers at £150 each. The choice form sixteen candidates was Thomas Alexander Hunter, a black-haired little fellow with a cock-sparrow face and a brain that never stopped working. He came from Otago, where he had achieved first-class honours both in the formal subject of mental science and in its other branch, football, and though he was only twenty-eight he had already, so he told the council, ‘nearly ten years' experience as a teacher’. He had also, in his nuggety way, done some useful exploring in Southland and had climbed a number of mountains. He was a very capable young man indeed. The Council, as when it appointed von Zedlitz, had not the faintest glimmer of what it was doing; but it acted cautiously, and for a start appointed Mr Hunter only for one year. Nor were the students, when they composed their capping-songs for 1904, much wiser. A suitable verse was fitted to the tune of ‘Tit-Willow’.

A newcomer here that we know little of Is Hunter—Tommy, young Hunter! The Chancellor surely should make him a Prof.- Hunter! Hunter! Tom Hunter! For he's such an enthusiast in his own skill That his students can't follow him, and never will, While he shows such impatience—it's pard-nable—still Won't do, Hunter! Young Hunter!

They were to know a good deal of him before long. He grew in patience. He rapidly gained ‘the respect of the hard-working, and the confidence of the muscular element’, reported Spike, with its finger on the pulse of opinion. He gained also, it seems, the confidence of the Council, who reappointed him (with History added to his load—on paper: he never taught it) and agreed to spend £50 on ‘apparatus’; who were then in 1906 prepared to appoint him for five years (History had gone and Political Economy had become Economics) at £400; and by the second half of 1907, with a Hunter returned from a trip to America, all Cornell and Titchener, were agreeable to the setting up of a psychological laboratory. It was a queer idea, but Mr Hunter had given them a demonstration one afternoon in his room. Mr Hunter showed an extraordinary capacity for producing first-class honours men among his students (there were three in 1906); and at the end of 1907 Mr Hunter to his surprise was informed that he was to be a professor at £500 a year. Other professors got more, but this one was working up. Inexhaustible in energy, with his eye on all sorts of things and an opinion on most, with a sceptically appraising judgment on his fellowmen and a rigid standard by which to weigh footballers, with William James for his philosopher and Marshall and Hobson for his economists, he continued to work up. Certainly there were limits to his versatility; he could hardly, one guesses, have lectured, like Mackenzie whose mental science he supplanted, on the loves of Shelley; but then could Mackenzie have played half-back in senior Rugby, or gone exploring in Southland? He was never a master of polite letters: it may be doubted if he ever found solace in Virgil, and the psychology of William James's brother Henry would with difficulty have held his attention. He studied German, seeking aid therein from von Zedlitz, not so much for the culture of his soul, as to see what the untranslated psychologists were getting at; and though von Zedlitz might be more intimately acquainted with the European poets, would he have known what to do with all the apparatus in that new, that recondite laboratory? At least, ‘young Hunter’ might have argued, if to gaze on the cosmos unblinkingly, with some faith in the ability of the human mind ultimately to disentangle it, was to share in part of the civilized tradition, he was to that extent a civilized man, unabashed colonial as he was. For Hunter, though London-born, and with a French grandmother, was bred a New Zealander. Perhaps there was something French in the instinctiveness and candour of his commonsense, that logic that was so often brought to a halt by the unlimited relish of mankind for confusion—as there is a shade of France in that cheerful face of the football photograph of 1905. (In France certainly he would have been a captain among the anti-clericals.) But to such an ancestral strain he added the capacity for fresh questioning which comes sometimes to the mind born and educated in a province, the unsophisticated and native inability to take tradition on trust, to venerate established facts merely because they are established. Perhaps he should have played as a child with Mark Twain on the banks of the Mississippi rather than with the little Presbyterians in the scrub on the Dunedin hillsides. Perhaps he would have got into trouble anywhere. Certainly he owed something to those intellectual characteristics like his own in his older, much-admired brother, the brilliant uncompromising Irwin, the surgeon, from whom could be derived aid and comfort in the war against sham; for Otago was strewn with the splinters of the idols which that terrible wit had assailed. Thomas, with his native gift for doubting, was to smash one or two idols himself in his time, not without a righteous joy. A righteous joy: though Hunter, one is persuaded, did a good many things because they were jobs that someone ought to get on with, and so, with or without allies, he got on with them himself; in the end, if one stands back and examines him carefully, with all scientific detachment, placing him in a due historic perspective, one sees something else. One sees the dissenting conscience hard at work, not merely logic; one sees a sort of moral passion; one thinks irresistibly of a great Victorian, also no philosopher in the technical sense, the Thomas Henry Huxley whose ideal university was founded on ‘the fanaticism of veracity’. Hunter too, who had Huxley's inability to keep out of a fight, believed in the distinction between right and wrong; he shared as his own the conviction that ‘veracity is the heart of morality’. Such men are dangerous.

When the Council first discussed the new lectureship in mental science, other decisions were made. Civil engineering was regretfully dismissed. In 1902 Maclaurin had suggested an addition to his salary for the law work he was doing. He got no more than hearty thanks. Then it was resolved that, ‘with a view to making the Law School at Wellington the most complete in the Colony a Professorship of Law be established’, Richmond to teach jurisprudence and constitutional history for a year with the additional salary Maclaurin had been denied; then, as we have seen, it was decided to give Richmond and Ritchie notice. The former survived. In 1904 parliament voted to each of the four colleges an annual grant of £1500 for what was vaguely called ‘special teaching’. When this money came in the Council, considering the nature of special teaching, naturally enough turned to law, and in 1905 decided to advertise a chair. Then it took thought. Why not be more ambitious? Dr Knight and Mr Bell went to call on the Premier; without further money, they said, ‘specialization’ was impossible, but with £500 more they could specialize in both law and science, at £1000 each. The Premier was gracious, he granted the money, and now the Council decided on two chairs of law; one, the senior, (£700) of ‘Law’, i.e., jurisprudence, Roman law, international law, conflict, and constitutional law and history; the second, of English and New Zealand Law (£600), to be advertised in New Zealand only, and taking in all other branches. The pro- fessorsprofessors should be forbidden private practice. While the committee was still deliberating Stout reported having heard that the great Salmond, author of the Treatise on Jurisprudence, and then occupying the chair of law at Adelaide, had expressed a wish to come to New Zealand. Stout had cabled enquiring whether he would accept an engagement at Wellington were it offered, Salmond was willing, and in December 1905 he was appointed to begin in the next session. The second chair was given to Richmond.

Here, in John William Salmond, was a catch indeed. Born in Scotland, but with degrees from Otago in arts and London in law, he had gone from a small country practice at Temuka to Adelaide; his Jurisprudence (1902) had almost immediately become classic, and in 1906 not merely was its second edition in the press, but also the equally classic Torts. The author was admired by the celebrated Sir Frederick Pollock; the celebrated F. W. Maitland had suggested him for Oxford. He came to Wellington. He was an extremely able teacher. He was as passionately interested as Richmond in first principles, but had more success in finding them; he lectured as lucidly as he wrote, with all-embracing grasp, with economy, with the sort of latent humour that can colour, without disturbing, the texture of a man's utterance. (There was in Salmond a potential Samuel Butler, Butler of the Notebooks. He loved the unbuttoned epigram.) He was a first-rate tutor also, his room and his home at his students' disposal, the tobacco and the tea ready, the mind working always; and he was a first-rate talker. Yet he had the profound, the undeliberate humbleness of the really great scholar; Salmond, it was said later, would consider at length a point put by the office-boy. He might have made Victoria College illustrious; and he left almost as soon as he came. For this man, who admired not organizers and administrators but the research student, who had never as a practitioner achieved the prosperity even of a small-town lawyer, who had never spoken to a jury and hardly knew how a court of law worked, deep down nourished a desire to be practical, to get his hands on law in its immediate dealings with men. Alas! there were public men who knew his capacities, and in January 1907 his letter of resignation came to the college. He had accepted the office of Counsel to the Department of Parliamentary Drafting; he was prepared to carry on the work of the chair gratuitously, till June, when the session began, and perhaps even longer till a successor was appointed. He was a miraculous law-draftsman, the government never had an abler adviser, the books went into edition after edition, Harvard sent him the Ames medal, in due course he became a judge, he was knighted, he figured to some purpose at the Washington Conference: it was a disinterested pride alone that the college could take in all this. Here, it might say, he once was.

What could the disappointed Council do now? It thought of Maclaurin. Able as he was, few mathematicians of good calibre had presented themselves to him: in seven years he had had only three honours students. He had been publishing papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, preparatory to his Treatise on the Theory of Light of 1908, but perhaps he would change over to law. Another committee sat and recommended special inducements. The head of the law school should have a distinctive title—say Dean of the Faculty of Law—and a distinctive salary—say £800—and be allowed to receive fees for opinions on cases submitted to him by solicitors. As long as lawyers were unwilling to abandon the advantages of private practice there would be greater difficulty in getting competent professors of law than of other subjects—but the ‘risk is obviously less in the case of a man who has devoted himself for years to the career of a University Professor’. Maclaurin was unwilling to relinquish all connection with mathematics, and made the condition that an honorary chair should be established for him. The Council was agreeable, he became Professor of Law, Dean of the Faculty of Law, and Honorary Professor of Astronomy, and consented to manage the higher mathematics for the second term as well (though not in an honorary capacity). All seemed well, in April 1907; and in September Maclaurin announced that he had been offered, and had accepted, the chair of Mathematical Physics at Columbia. The Council, in extremis, held a special meeting; they advertised; and in January 1908 they appointed James Adamson. Nobody but a Scot, argued Stout, could teach Roman law.

To lose Maclaurin was sad, but it was inevitable. It was the penalty the province pays to the metropolis, the perimeter to the centre of things. He would have adorned any university in the world and he had already stayed in Wellington two years longer than he had originally planned. The bird of paradise had alighted, and was gone. It cannot be said that our citizens knew either what they had harboured or what they had lost; for ordinary men with difficulty understand the transcendent. That swift and debonair intelligence went to New York only for a year; then, taking within his hands a moribund institution at Boston, within a decade he virtually created the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and there, beneath the roof that he had raised, in the winter of 1920, with the snow falling outside, dead, he lay in state. Destiny, for Maclaurin, was more dramatic than for his colleagues—or for his successor. There was indeed little of the dramatic about Adamson, large-framed, dour, shy behind his rather heavy features—in so many ways different from the high-spirited man he followed. Adamson was no raconteur, no amused spectator of life. He was solid, with a solid Scots accent, and solid success in arts and law at the University of Edinburgh, and with solid and unimaginative persistence for the next thirty years he drove his men through the requirements of the New Zealand LL.B; a disappointed man, one guesses, that the Wellington School of Law had seemed so much more promising on paper, in Edinburgh than it ever was in reality,

When Adamson came to New Zealand he worked out a plan for a Law School which would take ten bursars from each province, and to which would be appointed specialist teachers.

but persisting till the end when, in 1939, desperate sickness drove him from his task. Of all the Scotsmen who came to out college, he most retained his native cast and tone; irredeemably aboriginal, as it were; always, and only he, ‘Scotchy’.

The Council perhaps, as crisis faded, thought it had been too generous with law. Before the end of Adamson's first five years, though it was pleased with the increase of law students, it resolved to abolish the title of Dean of the Faculty and offer the chair to Adamson at the normal professorial salary. Thus in danger, the Dean attended a meeting in person and ‘made a statement’—a statement persuasive enough to secure the continuance of his privileges. Richmond, in the other chair, was not so lucky. Though one of his colleagues has said that there were students who regarded his lectures as the best given in the college, his idiosyncrasies were defeating him. Law was a fascinating mistress; she was no mere creature of statute, clause and amendment; he could never interrupt her service casually at the end of the hour; so, at the end of the hour, regularly, for ten or fifteen minutes, the creaking of Austrian chairs rose in crescendo, till the voice of the lecturer was obliterated, and then the lecture came to an end. The non-philosophical complained that their success at examinations was not being materially forwarded; in 1910 the Council set up a committee to consider the matter, some of the members of which were singularly blundering in their approach on delicate ground; and Richmond himself provided the solution by not seeking re-appointment at the end of his five years. The Council did its best to be monetarily generous, and he retired to practice in Christchurch as a consultant on knotty points, and to compose a metaphysical work, never published, of some complexity. It was the college's misfortune that it had no place for Richmond, even as it had to lose Maclaurin; but the ascetic sensitive philosopher was no doubt, in that raw commercial community, a luxury which it could not afford. The chair was offered to James Garrow, a Dunedin man (born in Scotland) who had been school-teacher, secretary of the Dunedin Employers' Association, registrar of the University of Otago, and law lecturer there. He had the degree of LL.B and some legal practice. As an examination coach he shone; his duplicated notes were readily saleable. ‘We hope’, remarked Spike, ‘that the college Council will not let him slip through their fingers, as they already have some of our most distinguished professors.’ But Garrow did not slip through their fingers; he remained till 1929. He was an unexciting kindly man; he would play his gramophone to students who shared his taste for music, and his annotated editions of various local acts of parliament were useful to the profession.

But his lectures too apparently had their longueurs: ‘Garrow I knew, and Law of divers sortsI studied once, and I have played at OrtsAnd Crosses, and by many subtle shiftsHave whiled away the lagging hour of Torts’ —Spike, 1912.

The vicissitudes of law have taken us beyond a strict college chronology. We may regard the foundation professors, with Kirk, Von, Richmond and Hunter, as the first ‘generation’ of our teachers; by the time of Maclaurin's departure they, and their students, had built up a sort of life, a community, something essentially of the nature of universitas, which was noticed clearly by the perceptive among the later-comers. The first of this ‘second generation’ to arrive, himself at an impressionable age, not yet thirty, was Picken, appointed at the end of 1907 to succeed Maclaurin in mathematics. David Kennedy Picken had gone from his native Glasgow with a brilliant degree to Cambridge, where he was elected a foundation scholar of Jesus; and from equal distinction there he had returned as chief assistant to the professor of mathematics at Glasgow. He was vice-president of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, he had edited its Proceedings; he no doubt, with all this distinction, deemed it not un-honourable to seek the chair where Maclaurin had sat. He was triumphant over other good applicants—including both his own successor, Sommerville, and Gifford of Wellington, who had been filling the gap, and whose name was bound for high eminence in the mathematics of astronomy. Picken, with his wide and candid forehead, his curly hair, his general air as of a rather startled cherub, his earnestness of the Christian doing with his whole might whatever he found to do, was no light-hearted jester even in the cause of Goodness. What had startled him was the inadequate preparation of New Zealand youth for the higher mathematical studies—but, even more than that, what may be referred to briefly as the System, something that will receive more attention hereafter.

He was followed to New Zealand in 1909 by one who became the friend of his bosom, T. H. Laby. The Council, it will be recollected, had got £500 extra from the government and had determined on ‘specialization’ in science as well as law. In science, after due consideration, this resolved itself into appointment of a professor of physics (at £600, not the full rate) and of an assistant for Kirk, one who could lecture on geology. Thomas Howell Laby took the chair in physics. This very remarkable man was an Australian, born in 1880 in a Victorian bush township, who without formal schooling, beyond the elements, had forced himself upward by sheer intellectual power. He never passed a matriculation examination or became an ordinary graduate, but, managing to get a junior demonstratorship in the Chemistry School of the Uni- versityUniversity of Sydney, he there put in four years of intense study and original research, largely pioneer work on the radioactive materials to be found in Australia. He attracted the attention of Lord Rayleigh, then president of the Royal Society, through whose good offices he was granted an 1851 research scholarship; and the years he spent at the Cavendish Laboratory, from 1905 to 1908, earned him the respect both of Sir J. J. Thomson, its director, and of Rutherford, as well as of a great number of other English scientists. Tall, thin, square-profiled, with a slightly diffident manner that was easily submerged in an indignant eloquence, he knew more about the System than Picken did, but by no means the whole truth. Indeed he had left England only to be nearer his mother, whose devotion to him he matched with an answering devotion of his own. Within a year he was considering resignation—he ‘appeared dissatisfied with the position here’, it was reported to the Council, ‘and complained of being out of touch with scientific developments’. Nevertheless he determined to stay; though a poor lecturer he was a magnificent organizer of research and trainer of researches; he had good students, of the calibre of Burbidge and Hercus; and in his paasion for original work was prepared to found and keep going a research scholarship himself—the £ 50 from the ‘anonymous donor’ carrying a government subsidy. Naturally he opened his physics laboratory in October 1910 with a public ‘demonstration’; for not only did he share to the full Easterfield's faith in the experimental method of teaching, but he also had a sound idea of the publicity value of showing the ordinary man technical things at work. In the meanwhile, unable to get on with any important continuation of his English research, he gave himself of the completion of his share in the preparation of that famous volume ‘Kaye and Laby’–the Tables of Physical and Chemical Constants the first edition of which came out in 1911. He was an excellent trainer of laboratory assistants: to the small but useful workshop he set up he brought from Australia the incomparable physics mechanic H. E. Strawbridge, who was to remain permanently at the college, and permanently Laby's admirer. Good at the expounding off difficulties, persuasive in controversy, he shared, the interest in imperial and international affairs that was then becoming fashionable, through with Laby the interest had grown rather from his impassioned reading, in his bush school-days, of Seeley's Expansion of England, than from fashion. He duly addressed the Debating Society, not on science, but on the ‘German danger’ and ‘preparedness’, and he was always willing to talk to a cabinet minister on the same subject.

‘once in Melbourne’, wrote kirk, ‘he invited me to accompany him to try to impress on the Federal Minister of Defence the necessity for Australin having her own navy. He put the case exceedingly well.’

When Lionel Curtis, the great apostle of a new-shaped British Commonwealth, arrived in New Zealand in 1910, Laby was one of the first to meet him, and then began his association with the ‘Round Table’ groups which ever after was one of the chief interests of his life. Meanwhile the college: Sympathetic and generous to young people of promise, rather touchy and obviously resentful of obstructive fools, he proceeded to make his mark. In 1913 the Council was able to raise both Laby's and Hunter's salaries to the normal figure. Certainly the young men were giving satisfaction as teachers, even if they caused a good deal of trouble otherwise.

The lecturer in geology that had been decided on was found in another young man, C. A. Cotton. Lecturers were treated more cavalierly than professors: ‘Mr Cotton to take up his duties within a fortnight’ ran the minute (it was April 1909) ‘and that he be required to make up for time lost at the beginning of the Session by lecturing during the vacation.’ Mr Cotton, thus abruptly pitchforked into action, was to make a name for himself. He was a New Zealander. A New Zealander also was F. P. Wilson, appointed the same year to lecture on history, economic, physical and commercial geography, economic history, currency and banking. Mr Wilson, one of those students of the college who had come to it hot with excitement in 1899, tall handsome and smiling, musical, tennis-playing, beneath this burden retained his optimism. He had need to. The principal of the Teachers' Training College had, almost ex officio, acted as lecturer in education, at first gratuitously; from 1905, this was William Gray, succeeded in 1912 by J. S. Tennant. It was in 1912, too, that more specific teaching for the commerce degree began, with J. S. Barton lecturing on accountancy and W. F. Ward on commercial law. Ward was a sort of valuable general Practitioner at the college; for some years he gave assistance to Brown with Latin.

One is forced to note, at this stage, the number of Scots who had come to the teaching staff at Victoria College, quite apart from those of Scots descent—and the stream had by no means dried up. The noblest prospect which a Scotsman ever saw, remarked Dr Johnson in classic words, in the eighteenth century, was the high road that led him to England. The noblest prospect from 1898 onwards, one may be forgiven for thinking, was that of the sea voyage to New Zealand.

It is obvious that every step in the development of the college was taken, not as part of the logical fulfilling of a well thought-out plan, to give a particular community the particular sort of university it needed in a particular age of history, but simply as an expedient dictated by the balance, for the time being, at the bank—plus what promises could be wrung out by an occasional deputation to the government. The fact represents the community—represents the colonial mind, slovenly, lazy, makeshift, satisfied with a passing enthusiasm, pretentious in the width of its Idly-held ambition, willing always to retire into complacency over a half-done job or an achievement not its own; pushed and shoved along a succession of lines of least resistance by the vigorous and determined individual, but moving as little and as meanly as possible. The governing body of Victoria College could not help reflecting this society, from which it was chosen. No one of its members had any consistent ‘idea’ of a New Zealand, or Wellington, university institution; and if he had had it, what could he have done for its realization? In 1886, Stout had had the fragment of a vision, but on the Council Stout, with his sudden starts in every wind of educational doctrine, was the politician rather than the statesman of a university. What really was specialization in law, political science, history, in the natural history of New Zealand? Where was Krik's marine laboratory? An Easterfield or a Laby might go out on his own for what he desperately needed, or put his individual entice, as it were, his elders into the provision of new toy; but these were piecemeal advances. When Laby discussed resignation it was really very difficult for councilors to understand what he was complaining about. It was easy to see why law students complained about Richmond: he was too engrossed in his subject, he kept on talking too long, he didn't stick to the syllabus. That was a practical problem, with a practical remedy. But the other problems, the problem of a real school of law, in which law might be the basis for the education of the whole man; the problem of science and the arts as the two wings of a great movement of advancing knowledge; the problem of the application of wisdom to the relations of men in the society at hand—these were hardly practical. What did the community care for a college to the extent? And if the community did not care for the college to be extent of supporting it, what could the council do? It had no gift imagination, no touch of fire; but even with imagination, with fire, what them? it needed money; the city, certainly with imagination untouched, clutched its money close: the government, if sufficiently pressed, would give money, but in dribs and drabs, With a lively consciousness that any gift to one college would be followed by noisy outcries from three others. This was the penalty education paid to democracy, and democracy to the geographical conformation of New Zealand. So the history of the college is a study in ‘ifs’;–if it could raise a few more pounds it could teach surveying, or geology, or currency and banking, or commercial, law, it could meet this demand or that demand, without venturing to examine what demand should be deemed legitimate. Nowhere in the Council's minutes is there reference to any decision made on educational principle. The note is instructive, in March 1907, on a letter from Otago enquiring whether it had adopted any principle in giving the title of professor as distinguished from that of lecturer; for it answered that the title simply depended on the salary.

The college continued to fight hard against the drain on its resources caused by the Queen's Scholarships, and in the end with success. Experience proved that Seddon's democratic experiment was an ill-judged one. From the beginning the examination was popular in the primary schools; Mr Gammell, the first examiner, was ‘both surprised and gladdened’ by the quality of the answer sent in to him; and among the names of candidates are some which in days to come carried an aura of brilliance, or at least the impress of a solid accomplishment. But they were all extremely young, all necessarily under the age of fourteen—so much so that when the time came for them to enter the college, after their absurdly exiguous two years of secondary education, they could not meet the age-requirement of matriculation, and administrative juggling had to make workable the confusion of law. In 1900 the Council resolved that it should be relieved of all responsi- bilityresponsibility, not only because of the expense, but because its control of scholarships held at secondary schools was absurd. If scholarships had to be maintained, then at least let them be divided into two series, the first tenable at secondary schools for your years, localized in the Middle District, paid for by the government and administered by the Education Department; the second fewer in number, competed for by winners of the first, on the University Junior Scholarship examination, tenable for three years, and supported by an additional grant to the college. The government reply to this was an amending bill which increased the maximum college liability from £ 1200 to £ 1800 per annum! Then the examiner reported a low standard; then the Professorial Board, after some experience of the work of scholars (it was now the end of 1902) wrote, almost needlessly, on the impossibility of getting good university work out of those who came to college much too young and with much too little secondary training. The government, at last taking notice, in twelve months more passed another act,

The Queen's Scholarships Act, 1903.

adopting the Council's suggestion of 1900; an act which repealed the fatal Section 36 of the Victoria College Act, and provided immediately for six junior, and, from 1906, four senior scholarships, the latter awarded after any examination the Council might think fit—subject to government approval. There was one significant difference, however, from the Council's scheme: the Council was still to pay for the scholarships. On the other hand, it was to have £ 200 added to its grant—as a makeweight against the £ 1500 to the pay ment of which the act made in liable. But the absurd system was falling: there were already scholarships to take children from primary to secondary schools and from secondary schools to the university colleges. They could be multiplied without burdening any particular college.

Government had need to show some mercy. The Council in 1905 made out a table of its regular income. Statutory grants £4200, ‘specialization’ grant £1500, rent from endowments £32 12s 6d—such was the simple tale; and from this it immediately lost £1100 in scholarship payments. It produced a comparative table: the other colleges all had larger incomes; Auckland paid nothing in scholarships, Canterbury £135, Otago nothing. There were fees—an estimate of £930—but fees were uncertain things, generally on the rise with the number of students, but never able to catch up on expenses, and always liable to fluctuate with a fall in that number, such as came in 1913. The inequity was all too glaring. The revised system of 1903, incorporated in a consolidated Victoria College Act of 1905, was itself virtually abolished by the Queen's Scholarships Act, 1906, which provided for payment of the scholarships by the government, simultaneously withdrawing the extra grant of £200; and finally wiped away by an amendment to the Education Act passed in 1907. Seddon was dead, and democracy, it was clear, could be better served in other ways. The unhappy experiment was over. Among the hopeful infants who had headed the examination lists were a future chief justice, a minister of education, one of the ablest of New Zealand civil servants, a leader in advocacy, and a number of distinguished school-teachers; but of the total fewer than half seem ever to have got a degree, and there is nothing to show that those eminent ones would not have attained eminence otherwise.

Student numbers rose from 254 in 1905, the year before the building was opened, to 350 in that great year, and to 547 by 1912. By then the famous specialization grant had been quite swallowed, not only in new chairs, but by the assistance which every professor needed. It has been seen at what rates the newer professors were started—£500 seems to have been the dividing line beneath which the worthiest of men must be classed as a lecturer. In 1911 income from the en- downmentendownment

The 4000 acres, ‘more or less’, in fact worked out at less—a bare 3965. There was another endowment, of upwards of 10,000 acres, reserved for higher education in Taranaki—the acres which had been the subject of argument in the debates over Stout's bills. In equity this endowment should have gone to the college set up to serve Taranaki, as part of the Middle District: in fact it was held back, and under the Taranaki Scholarships Act, 1905, the income was devoted exclusively to scholarships for Taranaki youth, tenable at any university college in New Zealand. See Appendix I.

reached £74 7s. Private beneficence still lagged. In 1903 the merchant Jacob Joseph had bequeathed £3000 to found two scholarships, which were wisely devoted to post-graduate work; in that year too, the Wellington Literary and Debating Societies Union, also dying, made the college its residuary legatee, and its £100 was the foundation of the Debating Society's Union prize. Subscriptions to the building fund had been pushed up to £1825; £255 had been provided for scientific apparatus; £417 17s 6d for the Library (including a bequest of £300 in 1907 from Mr Donald Manson); for Kirk's Biological Observing Station, £9. With college finance in this position, it is not surprising that when in 1908 (a year when professors were asking for teaching help) a newspaper agitation arose for extension lectures in the vacations in secondary schools, the Council accepted the very strong advice of the Professiorial Board against the proposal— not that the arguments from educational principle were not in themselves overwhelming. Nor is it surprising that the demand arose for increased fees—and in 1912, at last with government permission, the guinea and a half became three guineas, and a general college fee was added of 10s 6d, half of which was to go to the Library.

The Library was a part of the college for which everyone had a tenderness. Everyone indeed knew Carlyle's remark about the ‘true university’, and a collection of good books was much more readily appreciable than the experimental apparatus of Professor Easterfield and Mr Hunter, which might be regarded as esoteric. Mr Charles Wilson, the General Assembly librarian, remained a member of the Council, and though Mr Wilson tended to get at loggerheads, not very forgivingly, with the Professorial Board, he was quite willing to give his advice in this department. Mr Wilson even had a feeling that, in spite of the statutory powers of the Board, he should run the Library himself. The professors had started off, on their arrival, by suggesting that the Council should ask a number of leading British publishers to present books to the new college—which plan itself suggests that the professors were young as well as Scotch. The publishers did not oblige. It was found necessary to buy books, and gradually they were bought. Some certainly, were given—the remains of the old Provincial Council library, and, through professors and lecturers, runs of one or two scientific periodicals. Stout presented his own overflow. The first infant catalogue and the first library regulations were made in 1900, a year when the Board wrote to the Council, unsuccessfully, asking that funds should be placed at its disposal for book purchases. The Council said it had no funds; but next year Maclaurin and Brown went as a deputation, the Council set up a library committee, and granted £100. In the beginning the Girls' High School cupboards gave accommodation enough, then shelves in a room were necessary; the borrower helped himself and wrote his name in a book, the librarian was the registrar. When the college migrated there was a room ready— that on the first floor over the front door, with the oriel window and the coloured glass; here, in the long vacation, Powles and Kirk and von Zedlitz, with the students Mary Barkas and W. B. Quick, and Mr Thompson from the General Assembly library, arranged and indexed. Indeed the Library was growing: those who ‘saw the quantity of literature to be disposed of’, said Spike, ‘might almost have despaired of the task of evolving order out of such a chaos’. Order was evolved; another student, H. D. Skinner, was appointed ‘assistant custodian of books’; the Council agreed to great £200 a year for new purchases. Then came the Manson bequest. Mr Manson was a Palmerston North man, wealthy and retired. For some reason, perhaps as a fellow Scot, he asked the perfect stranger, Mackenzie, to act as one of his executors. Mackenzie naturally thought of the Library and Manson agreed to provide £300, though it appears as the college's bad luck not to have got a large slice of thirty or forty thousand pounds, the residue of the estate.

The residuary legatees were half a dozen little schools in Scotland, to which Manson left his money for scholarships. But when the residue was calculated, it appeared that scholarships could be provided for all the pupils of all these schools several times over. There was further talk, and a codicil was drawn up, very much to the advantage of Victoria College—and Manson suddenly died, leaving the document unsigned.

Mackenzie took a long while to get over this misfortune; but at least the gift to the Library carried with it a government subsidy, and the Council was able to make the sum up to £1000. This, in the days of cheap books, was something to build on. In July 1910 the Council, with 7000 volumes now on the shelves, decided that the time had come for a librarian other than the registrar or a student, and appointed (temporarily at first) the Rev. B. H. Ward.

Horace Ward was one of those invaluable men whose lives are marred by their gift for making enemies. Humour, it seemed, had been drained out of him. He was not of the modern breed of librarians, technicians trained in a rigorous school of ‘processing’; and he would have recoiled from the fresh-faced young women in coloured overalls, junior assistants of our present day, like a Desert Father confronted with the vision of Aphrodite. He was out of place, he should have been in the eighteenth century. Always old, always unsmiling, with grey moustache and grey hair fringing the famous black skull-cap, garbed clerically in black and heavy with asthma, he had the virtue that he reversed books. He loved them with a jealous love. His Library was a temple in which the light-hearted, the conscienceless, came with fearful risk. Not for him the agreeable camaraderie of the decade that had gone. Did Skinner really ‘eat his dinner’ in the midst of the mighty dead, or was the rhyme merely irresistible? Horace Ward would have gone to the stake rather than suffer that desecration. Rules to him were rules—his mind was logical: then woe afflict the student who broke that holy silence. And suspicion to him was conviction: how many unfortunates, indignantly stifling the protest that was useless, were put to the door on circumstantial evidence; how many eyes looked up in the abstraction of thought, to see those other eyes, hung with the wintry brows, gazing implacably back upon them; how many innocent hearts have quailed to hear that loud and painful breathing coming nearer, behind them! The written rules one knew—one took a fair risk in breaking them; but the unwritten rules were known only to One, and there men trod the precipice's brink. Perched at his raised desk, he surveyed the realm he had made his own: Quietness hung upon the air, and he returned to his Greek Testament. Quips and satire came thick his way. Mutterings of rebellion were never absent. Yet it would be wrong to see in Ward only the ungenial foe of freedom. He made the Library a place that could be worked in, if one were not too nervous. His books were well enough classified, and his card catalogue, written up in the careful round hand, was adequate to its day. He introduced many a student to the elements of order. His gruffness was the sign not of a deliberate hatred but of his disease. Inarticulately— though it is a thing hard to realize—he yearned over students, so difficult to know, so raucous in their scorn, so graceless and callow in their attitude to the values that he held; sometimes, infrequently, as he was saying a farewell or responding to a sign of understanding, a queer, because unexpected, phrase of sentiment would break through. It was the principles that were implacable. He was, in the end, a simple man; his poet was Wordsworth.

The Library spread: law to the room on the right, science to the left—from these secluded caverns came most of the conversation, the muffled laugh; there were bays on each side of the door; somehow the periodicals of the New Zealand Institute were brought in also; on the whole, as time went on, the little rooms came to house a useful working collection, better than any other college library in the country.

The old clay patch became a nest of singing birds. Spike and capping programmes carried the burden of their devotion and their wit. The Lady of the Hill was addressed in tones of a hushed reverence.

Lo! By thy snowy breast I swear, And by thy dawnward gaze, That thou art pure as thou art fair, Nor canst thou suffer bonds to wear…

Some of her appurtenances received less reverential celebration. There were those amazing ventilators, now swept from the roof-line:

We are really quite the latest, most attractive, up-to-datest Thing in modern ventilators. There are many potent factors, why intelligent contractors, And the Council Board have backed us; For we're neat and ornamental, and our style is Oriental, And the noise we make is gentle; But we're really not prepared to, no we certainly don't care to Condescend to let the air through.

These ventilators were one of the less successful inventions of Sir Truby King. They had motors to extract the used air. As the poet infers, they did not work: but they also made so much noise in a wind that it was impossible for anybody in the college to work either.

The Roman Horace was adapted to Antipodean needs:

Come, Chloe, tell me, pray, By all the gods, why you with too fond wooing Young Strephon lead astray To his undoing.… Why is he never seen A footballer at Miramar, together With wearers of the green Chasing the leather?

Warned by the look of the world, and perhaps by Lady, and smiled on by the Defence Department, in 1909 seventy-eight students enlisted in an Officer's Training Corps—‘the latest form assumed by the military epidemic at Victoria College’, sourly commented Spike. But a new Inaugural Ode was obviously necessary:

Rejoice, Imperial Mother! Let the breeze Of hope renewed dispel your dread alarms:.…

Kirk, von Zedlitz and Esterfield, animated by public spirit, joined up and attended the first camp. Kirk, who was carrying out experiments on the restoration of heart-beat after stoppage, and working on dogs,

There is almost a whole saga about Kirk and a dog, possibly fabulous, that was alleged to belong to cotton. It began with a newspaper advertisement for a lost dog, over Cotton's initials, and with that stimulus the wits did easily let go.

was an obvious target.

But soft! From high Olympus Jove descends Deserts the Board of gods and here unbends: His hands still with Cerberean gore, He scents a nobler game—the dogs of war. Beside him strides, with features grimly set, Hung down in front his trusty bayonet, That foreign god, von Zedlitz.… [et cetera]

There was general enthusiasm over the delightfulness of existence as it was at Victoria:

Do you want to know the finest life that's ever to be had? Go to Coll, my lads, go to Coll. Do you want to live the life of a jolly undergrad? Go to Coll, my lads, go to Coll.

There were those noble verses which hymned Mr James Brook, caretaker and janitor (appointed 1906, out of 105 applicants; £100 and cottage, successful applicant to supply own cleaning materials and tools for gardening)—James Brook, lately from Devon, not very big in stature, who was the lord of the entrance hall and served the college with an utter devotion

Beneath thy portals see him stand! Victoria! Victoria! Embodiment of thy command, Victoria! Victoria! His lofty brow by breezes fanned— A clasp of keys is in his hand.… Almighty Brook doth wind, and lo! Thy glorious clocks correctly go, With rhythmic march nor fast, nor slow, Victoria! Victoria!

With all this wealth of words, flippant and more serious (indeed, at times a most desperate seriousness) it was little wonder that in 1910 an anthology could be published, The old Clay Patch, which holds, as it were, the distillation of all the youth, and high spirits, and high ideals of that first formative period. Some imitation-Kipling is inevitable, with a good deal of ‘poetic diction’, but the little book has both mind and music in it, a touch of Spring.

When Picken arrived he was much struck, as an impartial observer, by the corporate life of the college—something the nature and intensity of which he had experienced nowhere else. The enthusiasm of the first years was settling into a habit. Though no more very few, the band of brothers and sisters were on the whole happy. It is arguable indeed that about that time student numbers had reached what is the ideal for a college—as distinct from a university—something round about four hundred. Relations could be lively and vivid; people could know one another, or know about one another, enough to ensure a sort of freemasonry of spirit; a college joke had a discernible flavour, a college quip had an appreciable point. Yet individuals were not thrown too much together; failings could be familiar without being too brutally remarked upon. There was, it may be said, the Greek polis translated into academic terms. The morning freshness had not yet worn off. The college was still one college, and not a number of ‘colleges’. Some of the founders still hung on, with advice that was not, it appears, resented, though it might be laughed at—as when de la Mare objected to raffles at bazaars. That is not to argue that everybody was the perfect students and the perfect companion; Spike, as a regular feature, deplores the person who will not live the full life; it mourns near-lost souls who were interested only in examinations, whose ideal was the degree, or who played—last desperate failing— for outside clubs in one team or another, even sometimes against their own college. If there were those who yearned after an infinity of ‘drawn-out discussions over the dying embers’, there were many who did not; if there were some who had to do everything, there were others content with doing nothing. But the aggregate was enough to impress Picken, straight from Glasgow and Cambridge, and Picken was a young man whose own standards were high.

New clubs were founded, the first an Athletic Club, in 1904, with the expressed purpose of securing ‘the worthy and adequate representation of Victoria College’ at Easter Tournaments (the Tournament in 1905 was to be at Wellington). It held meetings at which light relief was provided by three- leggedthree-legged and thread-the-needle races; from 1909 it arranged inter-faculty sports, which began with the triumph of Arts and Science over Law. The Glee Club was revived (it never died for long) in 1904, and again, with F.P. Wilson to conduct it, in 1907. Yearly it would sally out to give entertainment at the Mission to Seamen and, traveling by drag or motor lorry, at the mental hospital at Porirua. There was even a short-lived Orchestral Society. In 1907 also came the Cricket Club, doubted as an impossibility, and hailed as an extraordinary phenomenon: ‘We sometimes ponder with grave misgivings over the future of our Cricket Club. It differs so radically from the rest of our clubs.… It wins matches.’ Tennis, football, and hockey were all fields of disaster just then—expect for the Ladies. ‘At last’, it was announced in the 1908, ‘the pride for the Victorious Kiwis has been humbled in the dust’—owing largely to the prowess of Miss McIntosh, Miss Johnston, Miss Tavendale, and Miss Reeve-and by 1910 the ladies could announce The winning of the championship for the third time. But in that year the men's Hockey Club also won the championship and held something to talk about, and the first fifteen had won a match or two. ‘Ladies’ was a term that was beginning to be frowned on; it was the Women's Fencing Club that began its brief existence in 1910, the Women's Debating Club that started the cultivation of a separate oratory in 1911.

10‘We carefully called ourselves “women”,And felt proud of our name,But still were referred to as “ladies”,A title we never did claim:For we thought of its misapplications—“Charladies”, drunk ladies, and such.So please will you call us just women?You see, we'd prefer it so much.’ ‘A plea for the V.C.W.D.S.’, Spike, 1911. The unregenerate referred to them as ‘the girls.’

From the Rifle Club of 1908 (Spike again; ‘We have clubs already languishing for support, and our duty is plain; we have the Athletic Shield to retain, and the Football, Hockey, Tennis, and Cricket championships yet to win.’) came the Officers' Training Corps of 1909, under Captain Beere; Swimming and Boxing clubs, in spite of Spike, came in 1910. In 1906 the Graduates' Association entered on the first of its appearances.

The older societies continued to flourish. It was in 1905 that Lord Plunket, a good friend of the college, endowed the Plunket Medal contest fort oratory, to foster an art which had, at the beginning of the twentieth century, already passed its apogee. No matter, the Debating Society was strong for oratory, and the first medal was presented by the donor, on a platform covered with ‘academic personnel and costume’, to E.J. Fitzgibbon, who had celebrated the life of Daniel O'Connell. Pitt, Napoleon, Sir George Grey, Joan of Arc—the ‘historical characters’ began their formidable careers almost as members of Victoria College; the only one who seems out of place, who has never been adopted, is the rather lonely figure of Sir Peter de la Mare, ‘first Speaker of the House of Commons’. For some years the award was made by ballot of the audience; from 1911 judges were called on. The Debating Society, already with its Union prize for the best debater of the year, might consider itself well provided for. It encouraged its ladies, or women, gallantly, on its own platform or on theirs; notwithstanding which it experienced a curious feeling when; in 1913, Marjory Nicholls, the gifted and radiant one, carried off the Plunket Medal.

Fighting doubt (or so it implied) and quoting Tennyson from time to time.

11‘He fought his doubts and gathered strength,He would not make his judgment blind,He faced the specters of the mindAnd laid them.…’

the Christian Union went on its way, with a great support in Picken, with its Bible class studies and its studies on Missions in china, its aid from the scholarly Rev. T. h. Sprott and the magnificent Rev. Dr Gibb, and (some- thingsomething new) its learned discourses on Sunday mornings in the Sydney Street Schoolroom on the Psalms and the Prophets by Miss Maud England, that unwearied bluestocking who was the chief intellect among the women of Wellington. Annual Conferences gave stamina for the year. But the Christian Union was beginning to find a social mission, its books tended to show the impact of the age; and in 1912 it gave birth to a University Christian Social Service League, which went down to Te Aro, the women to run a club for girls in Tory Street, the men to take charge of the educational and religious work at the Boy's Institute. It was a useful experience. The enterprise seems slightly to have wounded the non-religious reformers, who objected to the ‘strict religious test’ imposed on workers (they had to make the declaration, ‘I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ’). But the non—religious found scope for tTheir minds—in the Heretics' Club; and they thoroughly enjoyed themselves. If the Christian Union had Picken, they had von Zedlitz and Hunter and Mackenzie and Laby, they even had sir Robert Stout for patron, and they found Picken quite prepared to put the case for Christianity to them. ‘There is something exhilarating in talking about “-isms”’, rejoiced Spike (it was the eager Miss Nicholls writing); they would found a great tradition of freedom and ‘go gallivanting down the Avenues of Posterity’ (the phrase was Von's). The club was formed ‘to promote free and open discussion on problems of religion, philosophy and art’, -isms had as yet acquired no weary or sinister taint, and the way was clear. It was, so it said, at once a protest and a proclamation. It protested against those who sought to obstruct all research and investigation, it proclaimed a doctrine of freedom of thought and speech for all. Protesting and proclaiming, and certainly exhilarated, it went on to examine the divinity of Christ and theosophy and the Higher Criticism and the university lecture system and the exemption of church lands from taxation. Ethics, held Mac- kenzieMackenzie, was a necessity, religion was a luxury; Hunter upheld compulsory civil marriage, Stout upheld agnosticism and ancient China. And then, to universal astonishment, came the Rev. B. Horace Ward, to uphold Religious Belief in a most Singular manner. ‘Indeed, the lecture was marked by a complete absence of bigotry and intolerance, and was expressive of sentiments so much in accord with the views of the Heretics present, that one remarked, after the lecture, “If this orthodoxy, we shall have to change our name”’. Not often did Ward, in his painful progress, win such approval.

There was the more general, and certainly less intellectual, meeting of mind in the Men's Common Room Club that was inaugurated in 1909—though this too may have had its origin in protest. ‘Perhaps’, we read, ‘it is partly the woimen's fault that such a club has proved necessary; women at college are too apt to demand perfect equality, and at the same time to expect exemption from criticism, expect in that polite form which is nothing more nor less than flattery disguised. Such a state is nothing more nor less than flattery disguished. Such a state of things can hardly continue without doing harm all round.’ So the resentful, the scandalized, male retired into his lair; women, it appears (Rule 25: it was forty years ago) were not admitted into the gym after 5 p.m. The club sang songs and smoked, and one abandoned spirit introduced cards. Rule 9 forbade smoking. The Students' Association requested its alteration; the council discussed the matter and referred it back to the Executive to know if alteration was the wish of the general body of students, Mr Wilson had personal consultations with the President; smoking was allowed. ‘Very few students who smoke come to any good’, said Sir Robert; and he was dealt with in one of the best of capping songs.

Farewell my pipe, for we must part, The Chancellor has said it.… And now I Know why Von and Brown And all those other jokers, Are such disgrace to cap and gown, It's just because they're smokers.

The sexes, undismayed by misogyny, continued to co-op erate. There were Picnics and socials, competitions and concerts and Tournament. The Ladies' Hockey Club had wonderful picnics, proceeding to Tawa Flat or Trentham in a stately line of drags, in beautiful weather, with Easterfield and Joynt as chaperons, and Mr and Mrs Brook on the commissariat wagon (Mrs Brook ran the college tea room) with their binoculars; there was the moonlight drive home, or there was the moonlight return from the harbour excuriosion on the Durchess, when Tournament was held in Wellington, and everybody queued up for the waterchute at Day's Bay. There was the baby show that Kirk almost won with a photograph of himself, aged three, playing with a pet frog. It was said that the professors were becoming rather restive at the strain of social life. Certainly at the end of 1910 they had under serious cogitation ‘the best method of securing from the students a greater amount of serious work during the First Term’—a problem with which those particular professors were not the last to grapple. Not that academic attainment was ignored: paeans arose when P. W. Robertson got the first of the college's Rhodes scholarships in 105, paeans when Allan MacDougall got the second, in 1909. ‘I suppose there are still many’, records one who has been quoted already, ‘who remember the Dougall could interpret and partially understand the English lectures of those days—the Rhodes Scholarship was virtually his from that moment.’ Admiration for such achievements was almost sentimental, Robertson was ‘Robertson of Ours’; but it was the Edwardian age, it was the youth of things, the sense of glory came with a novel and intoxicating delight. Below these heights, there was always work done, and some of it was meritorious.

There were also the glories of Tournament. The Tennis Shield was won in 1907, the Athletic Shield, at last, in 1908 and again in 1912; from 1906, for a number of years, the Joynt Scroll came to Victoria almost with monotony. And there was Capping.

Capping was an institution that began sedately, and rapidly lost all sign of the sedate. Some wag found suitable lines in King John: ‘The yearly course that brings this day about shall never see it but a holiday—a wicked day, and not a holy day’; and his fellows proceeded to make it wicked, according to the standards of the time. In the first decade of the century the University itself, and not the college, managed the graduation ceremony proper, and in 1903 Stout became Chancellor. A strong belief existed among students that this function, as a matter of university tradition, should have a strong injection of foolery: it should be as witty and noisy as possible, and if not witty, at least noisy. It is indeed difficult to listen to an afternoon course of solemn eloquence, particularly on a day of celebration, with high spirits in the air, and high jinks com ing off in the evening. Such was the sentiment in all four colleges, and according speakers were heckled and rattles were swung, and periodically the chorus was raised, ‘How long, O Lord, how long?’ It was not unnatural that a feud should arise between the wicked ones and the Chancellor, and that as early as 1905 the threat should be issued that unless Diploma Day proceedings were more orderly the public conferring of degrees would be discontinued. In 1907, as an experiment, the speeches were received in dead silence, which made oration falter even more: in 1909 there was ‘really bad behaviour’; in 1910 the students registered their protest against the Chancellor's attitude by listening to him for a quarter of an hour and then leaving in a body (unperturbed, he thanked them for their courtesy in giving up their seats to the general public). In 1912, with an internationally distinguished visitor on the platform, Lord Bryce, there was calm; but the following year the quarrel grew immedicable. The Chancellor had had trouble in Auckland and, against the advice of the Council, insisted on a formal conferring of Auckland degrees at Wellington. At 3 p.m. on June 26 the Concert Chamber was packed full, except the gallery where the undergraduates should have sat, which was empty and, on the Chancellor's orders, locked. Stout made his usual speech on University education. The University registrar rose to read the Auckland names, and the gallery began to fill with students, both men and women, who, having politely acquiesced in Stout's wish to be let alone, were now ready to cheer the graduates. They had come silently up the fire-escape and through the window, bearing a great placard, Silence; there was hardly a sound to be heard. Stout. either losing for once his excellent temper, or making what he considered the only possible tactical move, suddenly put an end to the proceedings and marched off the stage. He would, he said, deliver the diplomas in privacy in the Council Room. All but two

12One of them was in a difficult position, being the son of one of Stout's brother-judges; the other was alleged to be ‘not quite right in the head’.

of the graduates refused to receive them. Controversy was excited; the Chancellor remained determined: at the next meeting of Senate the university ceremony was abolished and function thrown over to the colleges. For Victoria, that notable soldier Sir Ian Hamilton spoke (such was irony) on Discipline: and there was a ‘conversazione’ which pleased everybody.

More uniformly satisfactory was what came to be called the ‘Carnival’. When everybody knew everybody, and the number of graduates was small, it was possible to write songs celebrating their foibles, the professors, the college, the Coun- cilCouncil, incidents of college life, all with considerable success. Everybody knew Gilbert and Sullivan by heart, and parodies of sort were easy. There were enough popular tunes, cheerful or lachrymose, to fill any gaps. Starting, therefore, with concerts of miscellaneous songs, hakas, pianoforte-pieces and recitations, with a ‘farce’ in the late Victorian manner for the second half of the evening, the revelers went on to develop the ‘extravanganza’—or rather a number of different sorts of extravaganza; for no attempt to stabilize permanently the pattern of that combination of buffoonery any satire has ever been successful. Time was always short, but the early combinations of tableaux and songs, directed on some central theme,

13e.g, ‘worship’ in The Golden calf (1907); ‘defence’ in The Bended Bow (1910).

and bound together by a ‘run-through chorus’, were very successful. In a small hall, the Sydney Street Schoolroom or later the Concert Chamber, with everyone in the know, the atmosphere of he intimate revue could be captured, for the interested public as well as for students. Kirk and his dogs were perennially amusing; or, when Shackleton was so much in the news, Kirk could be sent to the South Pole with Brook as his faithful servitor. Or there was the famous episode, the Cause célèbre, of Brook's cow. Brook kept a calf, or cow, which was pastured on the hill, behind the college, and the cow dying, it was buried on the hill, with plenty of lime. But this was within the city boundaries, and therefore illegal, and Brook was haled before the Magistrate's Court. The college appeared in force, Richmond took the defence, Kirk paid the fine of 7s and the law-abiding Brook, much cast down by the feeling of disgrace,

14Doyle v. Brook. James Doyle was the Inspector of Nuisances. The legal principle illustrated was Ignorantia juris non excusat. There is another cow story which never quite got into the saga. Professor Mackenzie, while still living at Karori, kept cows, one of which wandered in the road and was impounded—or so it was alleged. Mackenzie was sentenced to a fine of B or forty-eight hours imprisonment. This man of principle, considering the case inadequately heard and himself a victim of justice, steadfastly refused to pay. In due course a police constable came up to the college to collect. ‘But you won't go to goal, Sir, just for six shillings’ pleaded the constable. ‘Of course he will,’ asserted the exuberant Hunter, who had hastened to be in attendance, won't you, Mackenzie?' Mackenzie said he would. ‘But you don't want to be seen walking down town with me!’ Mackenzie was prepared to walk any way he liked, with him, in front of him, or behind him. So off went the professor and the unhappy policeman together, leaving the gleeful Hunter behind. Unfortunately at the back door they met Maurice Richmond. ‘Where on earth are you going, Mackenzie?’‘To goal’, said the college Hampden. Richmond, horrifled, dug in his pocket and fetched out the 6s. Hunter never forgave him. Mackenzie also was annoyed, for he had planned to send from his cell to the magistrate to demand the solace of a bottle of whisky.—Brook's cow was the progeny of the animal involved in this case.

was duly comforted. And then the satanic three, Eichelbaum, de la Mare, and Seaforth Mackenzie, sprang forward, and in The Golden Calf disposed of the cow and butchered Brook anew.

They took her darkly at dead of night; Their lantern dim a-flutter, And they placed her discreetly out of sight In the holy ground (which was scarcely right), And sadly they thought in the pale moonlight Of the vanished milk and butter.

And

All flesh is grass and rank it grows Where Brookie's cow apart reposes.

Somehow by the end the moral was dragged round to the asseveration that whatever a sordid world may say, wisdom is more than gold, and upon the hoarse-throated moralists the curtain fell. This was eminently satisfactory, expect for unhappy Brook. It was not an art-form which could be endlessly utilized, partly because of the natural boredom of humanity at a recipe too often repeated, partly because heaven does not send regularly either so lustrous a theme or the comic poets to profit by it, and partly because the size of the college, as it grew, was to nullify the appositeness of academic wit. The general ‘idea’ of an extravaganza might be no larger, but inevitably its particular applications grew more public and less private, the political succeeded the domestic. The truly ‘college’ extravaganza was a brief flowering, born of a spring that could never be repeated.

In 1910 the first capping procession burst upon a pleased city. The old post Office Square was thronged. This was an aspect of wisdom which the moilers after gold were well-inclined to tolerate. ‘Sweep on, you fat greasy citizens!’ the idealist might cry from the heights; but he went down and mixed with them.

V Revolt of the Professors

The university reform movement was by no means peculiar to Victoria College: there were reformers elsewhere. Yet in a special way it was typical of the college, for there it became organized; there, where discontent with the world has been endemic, it had a native home and fond nurture; there, where the academic consequences of John Richard Seddon were combined with the academic consequences of the University Act of 1874, revolt was natural; there, where the youth of the institution was matched by the youth of so many of its teachers, revolt was bound to be fiery. The young men took counsel together and raged furiously. They also, no doubt, enjoyed themselves hugely. It is a great thing to go forward with battle-cries to assail a System, to appeal to Principle, to assert Independence, to take hold of an Infamous Thing and shake it vigorously, even if it cannot be immediately crushed; and to argue with one's elders is very sweet. The young men of Victoria College got on well together as brothers in arms; they were backed up by their students; they seemed to have failed; and then, when the battle was lost, and the field to some of them was only a memory in a distant land, somehow it was won after all, and the problems were new, and pressing, and confusing, and another generation of young men was gazing with distaste at the University.

Here one may briefly restate the constitution of the University of New Zealand as it was in the first decade of our century; for unless one bears in mind the outlines of the system which seemed to the reformers so stultifying and which seemed to some other good men so satisfactory, it is difficult to understand either the positions of the teacher and student of Victoria College, or the passions that were aroused on both sides of the great controversy. The ‘University’, it has been already pointed out, was almost an abstraction. It was, as concretely as one may define it, an office, the function of which was to arrange the examination of candidates for degrees. This function was superintended by a Senate, which included in its number a small minority of working professors, but was otherwise ‘lay’—that is, although some or most of its members might have received a university education, they had no connection with university teaching or students expect the administrative one. But the function tended to greater and greater complexity, because examination involved the definition of courses, and the Senate, meeting normally only once a year, therefore determined a great deal of the essential life of the colleges, and perforce determined it often in a casual way. It might consult teachers in the colleges, but it did so irregularly and as an act of grace. It had no function of stimulating research, it had no funds to disburse to the colleges, though it did grant scholarships to students on the results of the examinations it conducted, Between meetings of the Senate, administration was carried on by the registrar, under the direction of the Chancellor—who thus occupied a position of considerable importance.

There was no organic connection between this ‘University’ and the colleges, which were simply ‘affiliated’ to it, tied externally by the statute of 1874. The governing bodies of the colleges had no connection with the governing body of the University. University teaching, university life, in any intelligible sense, existed only in the four colleges. Here, in the fundamental faculties of arts and science, and largely in law, professors and lecturers taught, or were supposed to teach, according to a syllabus imposed on them from outside—i.e., drawn up by the Senate—and their students were examined by examiners appointed from outside—i.e., by the Senate—and resident mainly in Great Britain. The teacher ignored the requirements of this system at his peril. If he did not ‘get his students through’ their examinations he would be unpopular, and whatever he knew about his subject, however painstaking his philosophy, nothing could alter that fundamental fact. The system, to put it in personal Victoria College terms, called for Garrow and not Richmond. There was no machinery by which meetings of teachers of the same subject could be arranged, apart from their own enterprise and at their own expense; and there was no machinery by which they could of right put the Senate in possession of the fruits of their experience, or make on it such demands as they deemed important. There was no machinery by which teachers from the four colleges, simply as teachers, might meet and help to determine policy; for ipso facto, as teachers, they were excluded from the determination of policy. Whatever advantages might come to the University through the growth of knowledge and widening of experience were supposed to come from ‘English examiners’, whose advice and reports were some how to exercise a continuous and fructifying influence on the whole field of university education. Under such conditions, a successful student was a student who passes his measured in examination marks. It was no importance whether a candidate was a ‘full-time’ or ‘part-time’ student, as long as he ‘got through’. (it was of no very great importance, indeed, whether he attended a college or not, as long as he ‘got through’—and students exempted from attendance ‘got through’. This might even be advantageous, as it was held to prove ‘character’.) The position of Victoria College itself was made all the worse, because it was, almost in the very terms of its foundation, created for part-time students, it was organized from the very beginning as a ‘night-school’. All this was natural enough, in view of the general New Zealand attitude to education, and of the history of university education in the colony. It was not unnatural, also, that the teachers, who had so little to do with the government of the University, should have no part in the government of the college. Where they not employees? What the students had been making of this situation we have seen. The handicaps imposed by inadequate financial resources need no further stressing; real enough, bitter enough at the time, there comes a point when they seem almost comic. But to the reformers of Victoria College they did not seem comic: theirs was a hard and baffling reality. As much as any student, though they did not contribute elevated verse to Spike, they wanted their college to be great—or at least to be of respectable intellectual pretensions.

The documentation of the University Reform movement can become Quite formidable. It is fairly exhnustively given in my University of New Zealand, pp. 712–4 and Chap. Vii. See especially Hunter, Lady, and von Zedlitz, University Reform in New Zealand (Welling, 1911), and the Following Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatidves: 1911, 1–13A (Education Committee. Report…); 1912, E–7A (Report … by G. Hogben); and 1913, 1–13A (Report of the Education Committee…). Von Zedlitz, in The University and the Community (Wellington, 1946). pp. 288–90, casts some useful gleams.

perhaps the Reformers, those young men, did not set out deliberately to annoy. Picken, said dear witty Kirt, always gave the impression that he thought he was a tactful man. But there were those whom this tact stimulated to loud anger. It was Picken, in a sense, who began it all, though, as we have seen, the students had canvassed the nature of university life, and exalted fellowship, and opposed ‘more cram’ from the college's earliest days. Nor can we forget Easterfield's attempts on the voyage out to convert the apostles to the ideal of independence, or the manifesto of his inaugural lecture. Easterfield had lived up to that manifesto. At his second lecture he found that his students had fallen off considerably in number, for there were those who did not fancy the arduous career he promised them. Was this the way, they asked, to ‘get through’? In the next few years he and his colleagues had their hands pretty full of work. It was their own fault: they were conscientious men. As the college grew the proportion of evening students by no means became less. ‘I may say’, testified Easterfield later, ‘that it has been no uncommon thing for my colleagues to teach these students up to 11 o'clock at night, and when I have left the college at half-past 11 I have left my colleagues still there.’ But it was Picken, coming new, looking freshly at the whole thing, who first registered his shock. In 1908 he gave the presidential address to the Debating Society, on University Ideals. They were not the ideals of the parliament that passed the Victoria College Act. The function of the university was firstly to rear men and women who would dare follow the truth if they knew it, and secondly to train in them the powers of thought by which they might arrive at knowledge of the truth they were to follow. University students should be standing aside for a few years from the hurry and bustle of the world; their central principle must be the broadening of the basis of culture. The ‘examination system’ was a tyrannical system, ‘it has had its day, and there is nothing but stagnation to be had under its domination now’. The address was brilliant, said the Debating Society. Others Said so too; it found its way into the public press; people began to talk.

Then came Laby, who as an Australian knew better than Picken what he was coming to. Laby first delivered himself of his sentiments in Sydney, on the way out. When he had had a little experience of New Zealand he found that his sentiments had been too mild; and it was at this stage that, apparently feeling that he had delivered himself up to bondage for five years, he first approached the Council with his discontents and proposal for a more elastic contract. He agreed to remain; but staying on, he resolved to so something to the New Zealand university system to make it more tolerable to men like himself. Without Picken's candid brow, he had all Picken's candid though, all the logical ruthlessness of the Crusading scientist. He was quite prepared to turn his talents as a researcher on to the University of New Zealand. ‘He could see the defects of our system, and there was nothing to prevent him from saying so’, writes von Zedlitz, in his own characteristically too modest vein. ‘He spent hours almost daily in my study saying it. How could we, he asked, who knew better, sit still and draw salaries without telling the truth? Easily, I thought, having much to lose and being comfortable as I was. Not without bitterness I reflected that Laby had no ties in New Zealand and no intention of staying here for long. To come into the open, to denounce the bestowers of favours in the University and in the government, men with whom I was on good terms, to make enemies of many decent New Zealanders who [would] resent criticism of any New Zealand institution; the thought of all these things was abhorrent. In the end Laby's gadfly persistence and an irreducible Minimum of conscience won the day.’ It did not take much Stinging to set Hunter's blood on fire, and the rebellious cogitations of the three began to find utterance in print. Laby sent letters and articles to the New Zealand Times, contrasting what he regarded as the miserable facilities for higher education in New Zealand with those in Australia; he was seconded on general principles by von Zedlitz, and Hunter wrote a series of onslaughts on the system of external examination. It was not long before Picken found to his pleasure that he too could wield a lively controversial pen. By then trouble was certain.

It is not to be thought that these four invented rebellion. It Was not necessary to invent anything for Easterfield, or for Kirk; and a number of their other colleagues were with them. (The conversion of that cautious man Brown, who was a member of the University Senate, certainly took a long time and was never complete, and Mackenzie, even slower to move, nourished a feeling that they were bent on ‘Germanizing’ the University-an accusation which he elaborated in a pamphlet Signed ‘Festina Lente’) Indeed reform in a general way was In the air. In Britain and Australia, royal commissions had Reported, or were sitting, on a number of universities, and the Haldane Commission was engaged on the gigantic task of overhauling the University of London itself. In New Zealand there had been a number of proposals for the reform of courses of study; and most recently, in 1907, there had been the Memorandum of President David Starr Jordan, of the Leland Stanford Junior University, California. Jordan was visiting Australia and New Zealand, and on Stout's invitation he had Given his advice. His advice was definite and comprehensive. He did not like the New Zealand courses of study, and suggested instead the ‘majoring’ system of America. He did not like New Zealand college administration, and suggested the virtual transformation of the chairman of the professorial board into an American university president. He did not like the position of the New Zealand professor- ‘the professor as teacher has far too little initiative in Australasian Universities’. He did not like New Zealand degrees: ‘Degrees should not Be granted for extra-mural study, and in general not for attendence on might lectures or extension lectures. To do work really worthy of University recognition, the student should enter the University atmosphere.’ And he did not like English examination for New Zealand degrees. This, he argued, was injurious to the University. It converted education into cram; it degraded the professor to a coach; it checked all originality of thought and method; it did not mean a higher standard. A local faculty would be more eager to uphold standards than remote examiners whose interest and responsibility were far less; as university teaching was certainly adequate for examining. Finally the tendency in modern education was to ask not what degree a man had, or where he obtained it, but who was his teacher—and even in New Zealand there were men whose names as teachers counted abroad far more than the New Zealand degrees. All this was perhaps rather more than stout had bargained for. It might all have been said by more than one discontented spirit in New Zealand. But coming from so eminent an American it attracted more attention than any New Zealander could hope to gain; and for the Victoria College reformers it was a gift from heaven.

Much would depend on stout, because he could support, or fight, them on two fronts. Not only was he the Chancellor, but he was still exceedingly able, with a vast experience, and an ardour in what he thought good causes that nothing could ever damp. A decade on the bench as Chief Justice had not blotted out his skill as a politician, his eloquence as an advocate, his maddening capacity of seeming to see only one side of a question; nor had life done away with the mischievious streak in this endlessly benevolent man, which made him delight to tie up unwary academic persons in the deceits of standing orders—how often was there a flicker in the innocent eye, while the victim discovered that once more he had voted for stout instead of against him? It was not until Hunter, in the course of his own education, began to study this invaluable technique, that Stout began to lose points; and then, it must be said, he lost them like a connoisseur. Meanwhile there was the question: what would the Chancellor do? He had held the office for only five years—the System could hardly be held to have mastered him. He, who had appointed the first Royal Commission and had made the famous speech of 1886, could hardly be deemed uncritical. His American leanings were notorious and it was he who had asked President Jordan for advice. When he spoke to the Senate in 1908 he called it to careful consideration of the Memorandum. Certainly, examinations must be carried on, and the time must come when we must depend on ourselves and not seek examiners from outside of study promised improvement. ‘I am strongly of opinion that we may get more hints for University reform from America than from Europe. The social conditions of our country are more analogous to those of the countries of the new world than to those of the old, and what suits the American communities will suit us.’ The Senate appointed a recess committee to consider the whole matter, and with characteristic complacency, let it drop. Still, the cyhancellor's words on record, and when our young men began to organize they had high hopes of him. Perhaps, even, he would lead them?

Laby's harangues of von Zedlitz were bearing fruit. The college was in a state of unrest. The next step was due. At the general Education Conference of February 1910 good organization resulted in a recommendation to the Senate, to arrange that English examiners and local professors should collaborate in examination; and then, on 31 May, the first grand broadsides were fired. A public meeting was held in the Town Hall with the mayor in the chair and the Wellington members of parliament on the platform—together with an ally of great weight, thought of independent judgment, George Hogben, the Inspector-General of Schools, himself a member of the Senate. There were apologies from the Governor and the Prime Minister, and a letter from the Chancellor. There was a large audience of students and general public. Stout, it appears, was becoming a little suspicious. But he could hardly avoid the appearance of sympathy. He was not opposed, certainly, to that reasonable amount of reform which came gradually, which was suited to our circumstances, which realized that w e were a small people and must go cautiously, that in human affairs the ideal was ever in the distance. Then rose von Zedlitz, with urbane, sardonic, destructive and ingratiating eloquence. He and his colleagues, he proclaimed, were committing a fraud on the public if they continued to receive their salaries without asserting the need for reform, without calling attention to the ‘comic opera principles’ on which the Senate conducted its business. New Zealand was clinging tenaciously to the antiquated in organization and curricula; when he came to the country he did not expect much from the pompous statements of calendars, and he had not been disappointed; professors were doing their best, students were intelligent and active, and it was these who prevented him from being absolutely hopeless (great applause from students present). What were imposing examination results under such conditions, even sent out by ‘eminent gentlemen at Home’? He was followed by Easterfield, eloquent also on behalf of science and of students. The meeting resolved to set up a University Reform Association, which came into being a week later at another meeting, this time at Victoria College. The stage-management was superb: the president was A.L. Herdman, a Wellington member of parliament; the vice-presidents included leaders in the ecclesiastical, professional and administrative life of the city, with T. R. Fleming from the college Council and H. H. Ostler from the college graduates (both Ostler and Herdman were elected to the Council the following year); on the committee were Kirk, Laby, Picken, von Zedlitz and Gray the lecturer in education; untiring Hunter was the secretary, and Easterfield the treasurer. The army began to advance.

At this point Stout, his position still uncertain, gave some advice. It was at the college graduation ceremony, at end of June. Reform, he said, was a perennial subject in all universities, and therefore the mention of reform in New Zealand was not surprising. He presumed that Victoria College had kept in touch with university reform in Europe. Were the reformers agreed on what the aim of a university should be? Had our syllabus failed?–It was one, he thought, after much enquiry in England and Scotland, of which we had every reason to be proud. It might be made more logical, the ‘majoring’ system might be introduce; but out B.A.'s were just as well educated as ordinary B.A.'s of any university anywhere. The demand that professors should examine their own students was more serious; certainly the time must come when all examining would be done in New Zealand, but that did not mean that only professors should examine—and beyond this demand the reformers seemed to have discussed nothing. Here was a blatant accusation which gave those reformers pause. The shift from America was significant. Nevertheless they did not hesitate. They were studying, with a vengeance, what the aim of a university should be, and how that aim should be pursued. Reports of royal commissions, the standard books and newer writings, all were well thumbed. Jordan had given them an index to action. The objects of the University Reform Associations, as formulated, were to increase the efficiency of university education in New Zealand; to improve and co-ordinate the government of the University and the colleges and to obtain for the colleges an assured finance; to secure the abolition of external examination; and to improve the libraries and other equipment of the colleges. Sub-com- mitteescommittees studied the existing system in all its detail. A circular letter briefly describing it, with President Jordan's memorandum attached, was dispatched to one hundred and fifty Authorities on university work in Great Britain, America and Australia (including many examiners for the University of New Zealand) with the questions: Ought some new form of examination to be introduced, in which the opinion of teachers were taken into account?– and what general powers should be given to professors in the organization of the University and the colleges? Before the year was out Parliament was petitioned by ‘T. H. Laby, H. B. Kirk and eleven others’, all members of the college teaching staff, for a royal commission.

The Education committee of the House referred the petition to Hogben in his official capacity. Hogben was cautious. The notes which he supplied bore out the statements of the petition; yet as a recess committee of the Senate was to report on the reformation of the bachelors' degrees, with power to call a conference of professors, he suggested waiting till the results of these deliberations were available. Accordingly the petition was held up till September the following year. By that time everyone knew where he stood. In November the conference of professors had met and recommended a number of improvements in university courses, regretted the exclusion of the examination system by the Senate from its competence, and agreed that it should meet annually with unrestricted scope of discussion. In January 1911 the Senate had gathered for its annual meeting, and Stout had made clear decision. Like Moloc, sceptr'd King, he might have said, ‘My sentence is for open Warr’. The Reformers had sounded him; they thought they had him. What happened they could never quite make out, though in after years Hunter put the disaster down to the intervention of Macmillan Brown, once a professor at Canterbury who had profited largely from the System, conservative, obstinate, influential, and Stout's successor as Chancel- lorChancellor: he had ‘talked to’ Stout. Now, and henceforth, was Stout less than judicial, magnificent in misrepresentation, the advocate, the leader of a part; now were issues to be confused, and principle to become tortuous in debate, and points to be scored that made the Reformers' path a sort of dolorous way of exacerbation. There were upholders of reform on the Senate, a sad minority. They could but vote, and hope in the future. There was, declared the Chancellor, a ‘demand for investigation by some of the officers of one of our affiliated institutions’; they had inaugurated ‘a campaign of depreciation’; they wished to dominate all our university institutions. ‘I do not wish to make any charge against those professors who have been advocating what is called reform. I assume that they are actuated by the very highest motives… The young men and young women of New Zealand now… have greater opportunities than past students had, and if they do not succeed as past students succeeded, the fault does not lie in the students, nor in the buildings, nor in the poverty of the libraries and the laboratories. The reason must be sought elsewhere.’

‘The reason must be sought elsewhere’? Stout had his own method of depreciation. But the Senate agreed with the Chancellor; postponed for a year consideration of all the recommendations of the professors' meeting and referred all the points it had made to the individual professorial boards and courts of convocation. As obstruction this was masterly. The Reformers, however, were baffled only to fight better. They urged one another on. Women and children of course had to suffer. Laby, who was not married, and whose life was imperfectly controlled, thought nothing of ringing up his colleagues at two o'clock in the morning. The piles of ammunition grew. They had received sixty-five replies to their circular from the authorities abroad, some of whose opinions were extremely wounding to the University of New Zealand—sixty- threesixty-three, indeed, united in condemnation; and these they now proceeded to print as an appendix to a little book entitled University Reform in New Zealand, edited by Hunter, Laby and von Zedlitz. This traversed university organization, the method of appointment to college staffs, finance, examinations; libraries, research, and plans for re-organization; and it unkindly carried as another appendix the demand for reform which Stout had made in that famous speech in 1886. It was dedicated to the Minister of Education. The production of this book had its difficulties, Men of more experience would not have appointed a triumvirate to edit; two of the three, Laby and von Zedlitz, rapidly fell out over the use of the English language, and Hunter had to mediate and agree with each alternately, Laby, who could not spell, thought von Zedlitz ignorant and pedantic; the soul of von Zedlitz withered within him at Laby's scientific jargon; they went to the printer's independently and altered each other's proofs. But somehow the book got done, and excellent summary of defects and needs, excellently documented, answerable only in terms of flat contradiction; and flat contradiction, against our young men, would have been unwise argument. University Reform in New Zealand was for general consumption; it was also designed to present the case to the Education Committee, as strongly as possible, in favour of the royal commission. The Students' Association was with the Reformers, as were the local graduates in their Graduates' Association and their Court of Convocation; the Council, during the hearing, while not expressing any final opinion on ‘the points raised’, registered its conviction that the need for a commission had been established.

From 1 September to 10 October 1911 the Education Committee took evidence, reporting a fortnight later. Von Zedlitz, Hunter, Laby, Kirk and Easterfield all appeared, not without allies, with Herdman, a lawyer, to marshal the case; on the opposite side were Stout and two others. In between was Mr Charles Wilson, now chairman of the Victoria College Council, who felt very strongly on the question of college finance– it was ‘horrible’, he said; the college was overspending its income at the rate of about £800 a year—and equally strongly on the Reformers, with some of whom he had a personal feud, and whose statements he found both lamentably inaccurate and in very questionable taste. (Mr Wilson's own taste can be called impeccable only with an effort). No one can read the evidence without being impressed by the combination of intellectual power and moral force which gave the Reformers' case its weight, whether they were discussing evening classes or research or the position of teachers in relation to courses of study or their own insecurity of tenure: without Stout made against them. For the Chancellor now had his own case made up, and when he found it wanting he could improvise; while with a sort of Olympian insolence he turned defence of principle into attack on personal character. Who were these sixty-three persons whom the Reformers had managed to collect to support their case, out of the thousands of authorities in the Empire? Why had the Reformers embarked on this campaign of depreciation and denunciation, instead of seriously pointing out to the Senate the reforms they thought the University should adopt? He was forced to ‘regret and reprobate the mode in which many of the members of the University Reform Association have attempted to enforce their views’. Of course Sir Robert did not object to honest criticism, of course he agreed with progress—but by slow evolution, not destruction; and here destruction was going on at the hands of men like Laby, who had no right to express opinions, as he had done, before he had had time to form them. All this, added to the accusations of bad taste, impertinence, and error, should perhaps have been more effective than it actually was. The Reformers' ranks remained unbroken; they themselves remained scrupulously polite. In the end the Education Committee was more impressed by the advice of Hogben than by that of anybody else. It agreed that a case had been made out for reform in the constitution of the University, and that the professors should have more part in the framing of curricula and the conduct of examinations. It saw evidence that the Senate was moving towards a scheme of gradual reform on the necessary lines; it recommended uniform college fees, adequate endowments and statutory grants, the strengthening of libraries, and an enquiry into the financial needs of each college, to be carried out by the Inspector-General. This was not very satisfactory to the Reformers, but it was something; and if the Senate was going to embark on reform, well, they would watch the Senate.

They continued to take counsel together. They met those senators of liberal leanings. When the Senate assembled in Wellington in January 1912 Picken went down as a spectator, ‘a Sub-Committee of the University Reform Association’, and contributed a running commentary on its proceedings to the newspapers, which though it made men laugh, did not tend to enlarge their admiration of the august body. Stout, in fact, might have called it destructive. As the graduates were to elect a member of the Senate in the following May, it was decided to put up Hunter. But there were gains at this Senate meeting. The Victoria Professorial Board, reporting on the matters referred to it by the Senate the previous year, had pressed for further general professorial conferences; and this recommendation, taken up by Mr James Allen, a moderate reformer from Otago, in a form suggested by Hogben to the Education Committee, was finally adopted. This Conference was given power to consider curricula and examinations. What else could be done? Pending the Conference and the Senate's consideration of its results no grand attack could be carried on. It would be better to aim at direct professorial representation on college councils, and to see that could be done about amendments to the Victoria College Act, to meet members of parliament, and to attempt propaganda meetings in other centres. The Professorial Board had already elected Herdman to the Council in 1911, and the graduates Ostler in the same year; the graduates put on C. B. Morison, another vice president of the Association in 1913.

The Council, too, was undergoing its education: the reform movement was a very educational process. It was no longer the council of 1899; the much-suffering Blair had long gone, and there were few of the original members left. Wilson was one of them. He did not like the rebels, and they did not like him. He believed in the subordination of employee to employer. Were not professors, to use Stout's word, ‘officers’ in the employ of the Council? On the whole, nevertheless, the governors of the college got on well with the staff, though when the use of the Council room was requested for meetings of the Professorial Board, they acceded only after first refusing. A certain derogation of dignity was feared, a certain blurring of the proper relations. But those relations no longer seemed so simple; some of these professors were becoming public personalities, and while they were never so impolite as students were, they had displayed an uncommon ability in arguing the point. Undoubtedly they had the interests of the college at heart; undoubtedly, also, their ideas had the support of great men. Lord Bryce spoke at the graduation ceremony in 1912, and while he was all courtesy, it was clear that he was on their side. Yet when the demand for direct representation on the Council was discussed by that body in September of the same year, the first reaction was to agree to a cunning motion by Stout that the chairman of the Council should be ex officio a member of the Professorial Board, and the chairman of the Professorial Board ex officio a member of the council. This was not at all what the professors wanted. The following month there seemed every chance of an awful breach. Picken had made a public speech which was far from tactful. This candid Reformer, following the truth wherever it might lead him, had found himself led into very hot water indeed. ‘The University Professor is a man whose value to the community should consist in his personality, his individuality of outlook, and his originality of thought, but such qualities would chiefly serve to make life a burden to the men whom we call “professors” in New Zealand (so that there is some consolation in the thought that the conditions have minimized the danger of men with these qualities being imported).… So far from the work being done for which the University existed, a great majority of the students left the college less sound in body and mind and soul than on the day they entered, except for the salutary influence of their personal contact with one another.’ The dreadful utterances were entered on the Council's minutes. Some councilors announced their determination to impose ‘disciplinary action’; some of Picken's colleagues, Hunter and von Zedlitz among them, announced that disciplinary action would be followed by their resignations. For a fortnight the atmosphere was tense. Stout proposed a committee to investigate such ‘grave reflections’ upon the work of the college. Luckily he was with the minority; the Council, on consideration, regretted the speech, but thought no good would come of pursuing the matter, further. Peace descended; and when in 1913 professorial representation was again considered, the Council rescinded its previous resolution and declared in favour of adding two professors to its number. Stout, supported by Wilson (whom Ostler had replaced as chairman) and one or two others, fought, amendment by amendment, to the last.

Meanwhile the general agitation had not stopped. In 1912 the party of Seddon had at last been painfully pushed from office, and Mr James Allen of the reforming wing on the Senate became Minister of Education. The Reformers went in deputation to him and Mr Massey, the new Prime Minister, to plead once again, and again ineffectually, for a royal commission. Hogben's report on the colleges appeared in October, in November the Professorial Conference met. Hogben did not satisfy the Reformers; he was forced to assume the continuance of the existing system, even if his recommendation implied a pretty severe condemnation of the way it had been worked. Certainly he wanted greatly increased expenditure, capital and recurring, and increases in staff; and for Victoria both increase of fees and an annual grant from the income of those Taranaki reserves which had been denied to it. But his recommended annual expenditure on libraries of £250 each, however revolutionary for other colleges, was less than Victoria College was spending already. The Conference was, however, very satisfactory, though only seven out of its thirty members came from Victoria. It had agreed on sweeping reform of the bachelors' degrees, with courses subject to the approval of the Professorial Boards; it had declared for abolition of external examination within five years. After four extremely busy days it left its permanent constitution for discussion the following year. It sent an agreed report to the Senate. Reformers were jubilant.

Alas! that Conference was quite too successful. Stout attacked it with a preposterous fury, the Senate rejected its resolutions. Final insult, it was abolished altogether. The Senate had its own reforms—very tentative ones; it would allow university teachers to suggest examiners, it would consult them on curricula; before deciding on ‘vital questions’ relating to the constitution or working of the University it would take the opinions of other bodies involved; it would even set up a committee to confer with these bodies on the expediency of a bill to reconstitute the University, on lines that would associate the colleges more directly with University government. (The Reformers knew well what happened to such committees.) Hunter, duly elected to the Senate, managed to get passed a motion providing for a recess committee in each centre to report on special schools and other matters best considered locally.

His proposal to have an Executive Committee appointed in Wellington was taken as a personal attack on the Chancellor—until the University registrar was found to have carried out extensive depredations on the University funds.

He failed in another proposal: as Stout had been so severely critical of the Reformers' circular letter to overseas authorities, would not the Senate draw up a letter itself, descriptive of the examination system, and send it out to the Reformers' late correspondents with a request for their opinion? That sort of flippancy did not win the sympathy of his colleagues at all; the motion fell still-born, without a seconder.

Surely now, thought the Reformers, they would get their royal commission: had not the Senate, with the responsibility for reform thrown back on it, behaved with the extreme of irresponsibility? Not one, but six petitions this time descended on parliament, signed by there quarters of the professors in the country, let alone lecturers and graduates and other interested persons. They went to the Education Committee, which again took evidence, from July to September 1913. As before, the phalanx of Victoria men appeared, this time reinforced by Brown, the late convert, and Adamson, and by supporters from Canterbury and Otago. Hogben defended his report; Stout defended the University, though driven to agree that it was exceedingly disappointing in some respects. Tactics were now masterly. The Chancellor would insist on repeating his accusations that all that the professors really wanted was to rule, and that ‘the whole unrest’ had been created by a few ambitious men in Wellington. With full hearts the Re- formersReformers conceded his good intentions; he honestly and sincerely, they would admit, desired to benefit the University, but he was ‘pitifully unable to realize’ that that was what they too were aiming at, and that the main question was one of means. Almost everybody by now, certainly, was in favour of some reform, which would embody somewhere in the university structure a properly constituted body of teachers. The Senate's system of committees and reports and endless reference back and forth promised nothing but delay. Yet the Education Committee still would not recommend the royal commission. Virtually, it treated itself as a royal commission. It recommended legislation to the government that would reconstitute the Senate from the college councils, and that would provide the professorial body that everyone wanted; and the main points of Hogben's report were accepted.

The Reformers had agreed that it there were to be no royal commission their Association should be dissolved. They had done all they could. But before they slew their child they issued a final pamphlet, critical of the Committee's procedure and its unsatisfactory report. It had professed to solve certain very difficult problems, it had ignored others, its financial recommendations were quite inadequate. When the Senate committee at last, in April 1914, produced a draft bill to amend the University Act, providing for a ‘Board of Studies’, the college, professors, council and graduates alike, still maintained the principle of a deeper reconstitution—the Court of Convocation even submitted its own scheme for a federal university. Before parliament could do anything the country was plunged into war, and it was a quite non-controversial bill that Allen submitted in the end, in November, to the legislature, and that passed practically without debate. The Senate objected to a draft clause for its own reconstitution, which the Minister at once expunged. The New Zealand University Amendment Act, 1914, created the Board of Studies and provided for ‘national research scholarships’; it made some minor alterations in the machinery of administration. Financially, it provided for grants to the University and to the colleges of a proportion of the ‘National Endowment’– for the colleges, about £1000 a year each, which would rise as land values rose. It increased the statutory grants, so that henceforth Victoria would get £9000–£3000 added to the original £4000 and the ‘specialization’ grant of £2000; and it made regular provision for subsidies on gifts. This act followed on another, passed in September, the Victoria College Amendment Act, 1914, which reconstituted the Council. The most important change was that which gave the Professorial Board the right to elect two of its own members, who were nevertheless to have no vote on salary questions. Members of the legislature had shown little interest, and their power to elect was abrogated. The three representatives of Education Boards and primary school-teachers, and the three appointed by the Governor-in-Council, were reduced to two each, while the Court of Convocation representation was increased to four. In an attempt to enlist the attention of the city—vain attempt—one representative was given to the City Council; while the demand, still strong, for democratic control—or rather for the representation of every conceivable interest, real or unreal, gave one to the governing bodies of secondary schools and one to teachers in secondary and day technical schools. It was an odd arrangement, however much it might be thought to tie the college into the fabric of general education, and it could hardly fail, at times, merely to bring together a rather cumbrous body without any corporate knowledge of, or (apart from professorial and graduate representatives) a great deal of individual sympathy for, the pattern of university life; but it may at least be said that in the succeeding years the college had, under the system, more luck than it might have had, and that a number of councillors gave disinterested and devoted service. To limit the Professorial Board somewhat, lecturers were henceforth excluded from it, except as the Council might decide. To add still a little to income, power was given to charge a fee for general tuition, the ‘college fee’. To meet the wishes of both students and Council, who were appalled at their chances of being confused with secondary schools, the college was henceforth to be known as Victoria University College.

Thus, certainly, there had been some advance. If victory was still far off, defeat was by no means total. Teachers were to have some part in the control of the college; teachers were to have some guaranteed part in the forming of university policy. A little had been done for libraries; a very little, but at least something, for research. The regular income of the college was rather less derisory than it had been. Huge problems remained—amongst them, for the college, that of day and evening classes, and of its relationship to the University; for the University, that of examinations and its own constitution. But though the Infamous Thing had not been crushed, it had been frightened; the System had been badly rocked, its base was a little insecure. In the next few years there were other matters that had to be thought about. Our Reformers had added a good deal to their own education. They had had it well rubbed home that, to quote the benevolent and formidable Chancellor, ‘the ideal is ever in the distance in human affairs’. They had had plenty of excitement, and the pleasure—no inconsiderable one—of saying what they thought about a number of things they objected to. Nevertheless this sort of campaign can be both exhausting and exasperating, and not everyone had Hunter's appetite for administrative detail and the tactics of committee work—the appetite that led him to his ten years' duel with Stout on the Senate. The work of the reformer, the reformer even of a university or a university college, makes demands that are not always easy for human beings to meet. Rebellion was no simple way out of any problem. Von Zedlitz, speaking with the full weight of his magnificent intelligence, his magnificent awareness of the issues, could state the case for all of them, whether or not they shared his personal background. The professor in New Zealand, he said, went under dangerous temptation, temptation encouraged rather than lessened by the examination system. Not a soul cared whether he spent his day in working or in sleep. ‘Consequently there is nothing in New Zealand but one's own conscience to keep one straight, and no tribunal but the invisible and imaginary tribunal of the opinions of the university teachers and workers outside New Zealand. It is with them I should like to stand well. You will understand that if I am satisfied that they would approve my course of action, I do not care in the least what anyone in New Zealand thinks of me. Besides, there are my old teachers, some of them left; there are the many old friends and acquaintances in Europe who are now making their mark in or out of universities; there are the leading statesmen and thinkers of the world—I may never see any of them, and they may never hear of me—still, it is in their judgment that I would like to stand well, even if it means incurring the displeasure of many influential New Zealanders.… We felt that if we kept silence we should disgrace ourselves in the opinion of the men whose opinion we value most, and we have avoided that stigma. We have nothing left to gain by the success of this agitation and much to lose. There is the danger of half-hearted reforms worse than the present. If we succeed completely we shall have a lot more work, worry, and responsibility, instead of the easy job of irresponsible criticism.’ It is sometimes good not to keep silence, and they did not keep silence.

VI War Years

In the years that were now at hand the college shared fully the life of the community to which it belonged: it also, very early, found itself in radical opposition to the demands of the community. It suffered doubly from the war—that depressing and frightful struggle that was first The War, then the Great War, and then, more depressing still, as possibly the first of a series, merely World War I. It suffered as every institution suffered whose life depended on youth, in the death and wounds of its members, in the maiming of function, in the snatching from civilized life of so many men whose duty to civilization seemed to be expressed in the grim paradox of denying civilization, in the breaking down of those values of wisdom and beauty which the college existed to perpetuate. At the same time it suffered from that other paradox that whenever it, or one of its teachers, upheld one of those values –truth, decency, tolerance, honesty—in some specific application, apart from resounding principle, it incurred odium. To ‘fight for freedom’ overseas was an admirable thing; to stand up for freedom and justice in New Zealand in such passionate and word-confused days was another thing altogether. For this was a democratic war, and democracy, which sacrificed so much so selflessly, was quite prepared to regard as the least of its sacrifices its duty of thought and its power of rational judgment.

Possibly, indeed, these were the years that laid the foundation of the college's unpopularity with a good many of the respectable people of the community. In this particular community, with its lack of an educational tradition, it would have been hard for the college to attain real ‘popularity’ in fifteen years, but at least it seems to have been tolerated. The less important citizens, certainly, took a positive pleasure in the foolery of Capping Day, and the news that the students were out was enough to fill the Post Office Square with a throng prepared for any piece of vaudeville, however gauche. But this was not quite the impact of education on society. Degrees that were won, the capping photograph, all white fur and rolled diploma, gave pride to parents; but perhaps this was not quite the impact of education on society either. It was something subtler that caused a vague unrest. It may have been partly the circumstances of the college's founding; there was something of the poor relation about the institution, in a day when the ‘poor relation’ still carried the Victorian penumbra of unease and lack of quite enough breeding. Persons of the ‘Middle District’ who might have contributed something to its material welfare preferred to regard it as a night-school, as a bad second-best among colleges; the country genteel too often preferred the superior gentility of the South Island. People—more important citizens—who might have given the college active support, possibly were relieved to find some reason which made plausibly virtuous the withholding of support. It might have been better for the college if its professors had been pillars of the church: Wellington was not an unusually godly city, but there is something reassuring about pillars. Instead they were, too many of their small number, restless and critical, disrespectful of established in- stitutionsinstitutions; instead of getting on with their teaching they talked about research and held heretical views on examinations. The University Reform Association had never a very wide public following: it caused too much trouble. Professor Mackenzie thought religion was a luxury; Professor Picken, to whom religion was a necessity, said dreadfully awkward things; it was beginning to be whispered that Professor Hunter was a socialist. Should one entrust one's sons and daughters—the question was sometimes asked—within the ambit of an influence determined by these unprincipled persons? Even as the college was developing a richer corporate life, becoming in its small fashion more truly a universitas, it was growing away from the community. Or rather it may be said that, not a natural spontaneous growth of the community, but placed there from outside by the ‘the Government’ (no very assiduous gardener), it had not succeeded in pushing down real roots in the ungrateful soil. There is something symbolic about the clay of the Old Clay Patch.

Yet, with all these modifications, the college did somehow express the community. For the community was not unitary, it had its dissident elements. The life of the college was all the richer in so far as it transcended its own dissidence and created out of its own being something corporate, something perhaps a less forced growth than the admirable but rather self-conscious feeling of the first years. There was room now for quite violent differences of opinion. In the next few years a new strain is to strengthen and proliferate in a number of ways, the social conscience which has already been seen in the Christian Union, working amateurishly in Tory Street, and the Officers' Training Corps drilling amateurishly for it knew not what event. The social conscience is there in Laby and Arnold Atkinson, contemplating at their Round Table the vast unmanageable bulk of that British Empire that they so much wanted to arouse and reorganize; it is there, simultaneously. in the editor of Spike, who in 1911 made the grand onslaught on imperialism in the name of a New Zealand nationality, and in Boadicea, the extravaganza of 1914, which professed its disbelief that the colonizing methods of Britain had been particularly noble. It is there in the great majority of the six hundred men of the college, of whatever years, who went to fight in the Expeditionary Force, and in the hundred and fifty who died. And often enough (so queerly does the human conscience work) what seemed moral compulsion to one student seemed scandalous levity to another: until war imposed what seemed to all a common duty. Meanwhile something had gone, the first flush and excitement of being a college, the witty verse, the devotional verse—gone with the group of witty and devotional writers who had made the place their own, the high-spirited Victorian-Edwardians. After 1914 no one would ever be quite so high-spirited again. Perhaps that is wrong; for it is impossible to be young and not sometimes high-spirited, in spite of all; perhaps it was merely that the light heart had departed from the world.

There was, at the outset of this brief unhappy period, some change in the professorial staff. Early in 1915 both Laby and Picken left for Melbourne—not before Laby had called on the Prime Minister and urged him to form a National Government –Laby to fill there the chair of Natural Philosophy, Picken to become Master of Ormond College, a residential college that was part of the University. They continued as brothers-in-arms; when Laby had worn himself out in academic and public service and died in 1946, it was Picken who wrote the memoir of his friend for the Royal Society. As things were, they were bound to pass from Victoria College, where they had learnt so much. Laby wanted to organize a great laboratory, and in Melbourne he had the chance, which here he could not have, to stimulate research in X-ray analysis and optics, precision measurement and radio-physics and the modern field of nuclear physics.

There is little doubt that Laby was the most distinguished physicist working south of the equator; that he built in Melbourne the finest and most influential school of physics in the Southern Hemisphere: and that he fostered in Australia an integrity and scientific tradition upon which the present high standard of Australian scientific work is founded.– Professor M. L. Oliphant in Picken, Thomas Howell Laby, in Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 5. May 1948, p. 754.

He was like Rutherford, it had been said, in that, although a hesitant and uninspiring lecturer, he yet inspired a remarkable number of young men and women to follow physics as a career. As Australian science was largely founded on him, our college may take some pride that its very defects contributed to the education of his character. Picken, for himself, was positive about the value of the Reform movement– although he, also, was in the wrong place. A mature mathematician, brooding over fundamental things, he suffered, as Maclaurin had done, from the paucity of adequately trained students; nor even under the act of 1914 was there scope for his administrative ability. He could tolerate the system no longer. At Melbourne things were better, but from Melbourne this sensitive man continued to hark back, even more than thirty years later, to the young life which had so impressed itself on him in 1907.

Laby was succeeded by Ernest Marsden, and Picken by D. M. Y. Sommerville. Marsden, and Englishman, had taken his D.Sc. at Manchester; he had been lecturer in physics at the East London College and gone back to Manchester as lecturer and research assistant. With military leanings, he had commanded the O.T.C. at East London and the Manchester Wireless Company, and before long he was off again to France in the N.Z.E.F. While he was away an able and energetic American, Harry Clark, occupied the chair, not to its disadvantage. Then, within three years more, Marsden, who had also administrative leanings, left the college for the Education Department. Sommerville was a more static person. He continued the Scottish procession; a St Andrews man, he had lectured at his own University, and came out as an F.R.S. of Edinburgh. Quiet, not of abounding physical strength, an excellent teacher, a considerable student of his subject—he was described as the ablest Scottish geometer of his time, the most distinguished mathematician his University had produced for a generation at least—and the writer of more than one book of first-rate importance in its field, he conferred a measure of international academic luster upon the college without stirring controversy; a rather shy and charming man, it seems not unfitting that, with all his mathematical talent, his hobby should be water colour painting. His sudden unostentatious death in 1934 left the college scarcely quieter, but certainly intellectually poorer, than it had been.

There were other things in the air. In 1912 Thomas George Macarthy, an eminent brewer and patron of the Turf, had died, leaving a large bequest to be managed by trustees for the benefit of education and charity in Wellington. It was natural for the Council, in 1913, to turn its eyes in this direction, and to make plans. The professors were anxious that a fund should be secured that would make day-time teaching possible at least in science, and the Council was not unsympathetic; alternatively, would not a chair of economics be desirable? Economics was the coming subject; everybody was beginning to talk about economics. The college might specialize, if not in law, then in economics and commerce. That ought to appeal to Wellington. The trustees were sounded and seemed to be quite reasonable. Why not a professor of economics (it was now 1914) who could act as Dean of a Faculty of Economics, Commerce and History? But there was a war on. By 1915 there had been little progress beyond proposals for a professor, a lecturer in economics who would assist with the newly founded Workers' Educational Association, a lecturer at an inferior salary in history, and lectures (at even more inferior salaries) in accountancy and commercial law. Would the Macarthy trustees contribute £500 per annum or its capital value? The trustees were prepared to be generous, they would grant £10,000. But war continued. Something must be done, to give earnest of the college's good intentions; and in 1918 Bernard Edward Murphy was appointed lecturer in economics. This was an exceedingly clever fellow, a New Zealand graduate in arts, law and commerce; he had been a junior and senior scholar of the University, and coming to Victoria from Otago, had been one of the able trio, Hunter's students, who all got firsts in 1906. Mr Murphy the lawyer was said to have used his clients mainly as an audience for his views on economics, and Mr Murphy the debater (he had helped to win the Joynt Scroll in 1907) found equal scope in that dubious science. There arrived on the college staff in Mr Murphy, certainly, one of the most brilliant lecturers that the country has ever had, and a man of wit.

But by 1918 we have come nearly to the end of the war. It is necessary to turn back. It is necessary to record, it may be with a tinge of irony, the other great gift of 1915, the Sarah Anne Rhodes bequest of £10,000 for the education of women –which was all to be expended on the popularization of ‘the sciences and arts relating to the home’, sciences and arts with which the college had nothing to do, and from which its women therefore could not profit. It is necessary to record, as an index to the growing complexity of our college life, the appointment, in succession to the capable part-time. Powles, of a full-time registrar—G. G. S. Robsion, who watched over growing complexity until the end of 1948. This too was in 1915. And it is necessary to record that tragic episode in which the college found itself at odds, not merely with the community of nits own university district, but the whole of New Zealand—the episode which was for some years referred to as ‘the von Zedlitz case’.

Von Zedlitz, it will be remembered, was son of a German father and an English mother. The fact that he was a German baron, and entitled to call himself the Count von Zedlitz, had given some passing pleasure to students, who found it useful in capping songs; but like other things in that pre-war era, it had ceased to seem important. Von Zedlitz himself had left Germany, except for fleeting visits, at the age of nine; his education, apart from two years in Switzerland, had been English, and his teaching experience, before he came to New Zealand, had been Scottish. Nationality, in a formal sense, in that lost pre–1914 European Eden, was another thing that had ceased to seem important to educated persons. One travelled without passports, one belonged to European civilization. So it happened that von Zedlitz, the good European, had never been naturalized a British subject. It cannot be said with any confidence that he was a German subject either. A German law of 1870 deprived those who had left the Fatherland of their nationality after ten years' consecutive absence, and von Zedlitz had long been struck off the list of persons liable for military service. But an amending law of 1913 had made it possible to revive nationality thus lost, the English courts refused to regard the loss as absolute, and failing naturalization, it seemed that von Zedlitz must be regarded as more rather than less German.

When war at last sundered Germany and Russia, on 1 August 1914, this man in his early forties, who had been out of Germany for thirty years, was visited by ancestral stirrings. To liberal Germans, when the enemy was Russia, it was also barbarism; and conscience, or a sense of noblesse oblige, a feeling that the individual had no right deliberately to stand aside from the agonies of his fellows, took this one to the German consul in Wellington to volunteer to return to Germany for Red Cross or some other non-combatant work. The consul, at that moment more of a realist, declared the impossibility of the step; and von Zedlitz, having made his honourable gesture, reflected that he had long ceased to be a German subject (on his reading of the law) and that the German authorities would probably have refused him admittance as an alien enemy. For on 4 August the war became a British one also, and the case of conscience was automatically decided. Unfortunately the gesture, however honourable, had consequences. A people unused to war had been plunged into that greatest of mass emotional crises, and emotion had to have some outlet. Young men enlisted—before a year was out two hundred Victoria College men had enlisted—but older men, and women, who could find nothing useful to do, fell back on the organization and propagation of their own hysteria. It was a period of ‘Patriotic Societies’, of wild charges and denunciations, of a sort of mania which the social psychologist can regard as natural (the social psychologists learnt many lessons from that war) but which was the despair of the rational man. So von Zedlitz, the honourable, the civilized, the humane, became the target of every uncivilized fool in the country who could write an anonymous letter to a newspaper. He was a menace to democracy, obviously he was a spy, he had been seen signalling to German submarines; by implication, he was responsible for the invasion of Belgium and the sinking of the Lusitania and the whole host of atrocities which became one of the staples of anti-German propaganda. It was even possible for Mr H. D. (shortly to be Sir Francis) Bell, the Minister of Internal Affairs, who had been a member of the college Council and who knew von Zedlitz well, to write to him in what must be taken as a friendly letter: ‘I am aware that you are of German birth and race, and that you have retained your national character and sympathies, which are at this present time as widely different as possible from the sympathies and aspirations of England and of New Zealand’. And Bell had the reputation, not undeserved, of being a clear-headed man.

The von Zedlitz sense of honour made the bearer of the name write to the chairman of the Council on 4 August, offering to resign. After all, he was certainly part-German, he was unnaturalized, and he was in a British university. The chairman at the time was Ostler; he consulted members of the Council, and assured their professor that such a step was unnecessary. Any possible conflict between the Council's attitude and law or government policy was removed by the proclamation of 19 August 1914, declaring the maintenance of the legal rights of all German subjects in New Zealand (saving Crown prerogative), ‘within the peace and protection of His Majesty in the same manner as if they were the subjects of His Majesty’. Then began the struggle. Unnaturalized Germans in the public service had been dismissed; Germans considered dangerous were interned on Somes Island. The Patriotic Societies began to pass motions; the anonymous correspondents began to demand that von Zedlitz should be interned. Bell wrote his letter, on 2 December, asking for a written assurance that his friend would hold no communication with nor give any information to the enemy: ‘not for my personal satisfaction, for my knowledge of your sense of honour and duty is sufficient, but I desire to be able to refer to your own word of honour as well as to my confident belief’. He wrote with the concurrence of Allen, the University senator, who was Minister of both Defence and Education; and von Zedlitz gladly gave the desired assurance, in (said Bell) ‘entirely satisfactory terms’. This German, it seems, was not to be sacrificed to popular clamour; and at the beginning of January Bell sent the correspondence to Ostler, as ‘of use in allaying any feeling of doubt’ as to the attitude of the government. In May he freed the Council to make any use, private or public, of the correspondence it thought fit. May was a critical month. The assault on Gallipoli had begun on 25 April, public excitement and distress over the casualty lists was great, and a fortnight later, on 7 May, the Lusitania was sunk. Helpless horror found its outlet in the demands for stricter treatment of Germans in New Zealand. The Council was assailed with such demands; it was called on with a rising bitterness to dismiss its man. By this time von Zedlitz was not merely the object of the queer personal hatred which is method out to the scapegoat, he was also a symbol. He was also mixed up in an oddly inverted sense of justice: he might be an admirable person, it was argued, with the most impeccable connections; but if other Germans were dismissed and interned, why not he?

Against all this noise and confusion the council stood like a rock. Certainly there were one or two waverers, and there was Wilson, who disliked von Zedlitz intensely for his criticism of the administration of the General Assembly Library; but Clement Watson, who succeeded to the chair when Ostler left the Council, in May, was kept in line. Stout was no waverer, but under the provisions of the 1914 Act, he retired in June. More rock-like than all were A.R. Atkinson, the lawyer and journalist (to seduce Atkinson would have been to seduce Abdiel), C. B. Morison, the University Reformer and immensely able K.C., and William Ferguson, the Harbour Board engineer. No one could accuse such men individually of lack of ‘Patriotism’; they were all, even, in politics supporters of the Reform party. They were prepared to stand against a whole eternity of howling mobs. But they were men of affairs as well as men of principle, and they were not above taking precautions. So when in May the matter was raised by Wilson it was referred to the Finance and General Committee. A deputation waited on Bell, to get clear the legal as well as the moral position. The Minister, possibly thinking that the Council wished to bow before the storm, said the government would do nothing to help it put an end to its contract with von Zedlitz—indeed the Council was persuaded that the government even desired that he should be retained in office, and that in so retaining him, it was acting not merely in the best interests of the college and the community, but with the full approval of ministers. This was certainly the impression of von Zedlitz himself, who was anxious above all not to be a cause of embarrassment. The Council had received a memorial, almost unanimously signed, from the Professional Board, and another from fifty modern language students and past students begging for his retention in the most serious terms. It was aware that though the war had caused a decline in the total number of students, those studying under von Zedlitz had increased. Finally the Committee could report that a royal to public safety, before which the case would presumably come; and its conviction that his services should be retained. At the June meeting an amendment by Wilson that he should be asked to resign was thrown out and the Committee's report adopted. In due course, in July, the royal commission, the so-called Aliens Board, held its enquiry and came naturally enough to a favourable conclusion. The battle seemed won.

But it was not won. The popular outcry went on, a chorus in the midst of which von Zedlitz himself had to go on with the struggle was carried into parliament. On 25 August the Prime Minister was asked ‘whether in view of the strong public opinion throughout the Dominion, the Government will take steps to deal with the case of Professor von Zedlitz in the same way as they are treating other alien enemies; an if not, why not?’ It will be noticed at this point that the case had been ‘dealt with’ fully by a properly constituted body, the Aliens Board, quite apart from Bell's precautions; and that ‘strong Public opinion’ was by now simply a loud irrational demand for the victimization of the bearer of an alien name. ‘Public opinion’, certainly, could no be expected to exercise any scruple over the obscure legal question of nationality; but it should be noted also that New Zealand, unlike the United Kingdom, denied naturalization during war-time. A man must pay, it was clear, for his selection of a birthplace, It was clear because the government made it clear. Cabinet, which had started in 1914 with good intentions (to judge from the names of Bell and Allen) had decided to capitulate to hysteria.

The curious thing about this capitulation is that Massey was now in a stronger position in the country than he had been since his accession to power in 1912. For though the general election of December 1914 had returned only 40 of his party, against 34 Liberals and 6 Labour members on 12 August 1915 he had become the head of a National Government. The opposition in the house was reduced to the six Labour men, but of course, the pressure of his own followers was immense, In the national Government, Bell, though his prestige was great and he was Messey's principal adviser, had relinquished Internal Affairs to the Liberal, G. W. Russell– ‘Rickety Russell’. This man was an unfortunate change, from the college point of view. Apparently Massey did not know about the Bell-von Zedlitz exchange of letters.

Mr Massey did so with the mixture of confusion, self-righteousness, and bellicosity characteristic of statesmen in false position; and in a statement which, when read in the newspapers, hit with complete surprise a Council which had been led to give the government the trust one gives to honourable men. The words of his answer to the question deserve quotation: ‘(1) Whether Professor von Zedlitz should retain his position or not is a question to be decided by the Victoria College Council, not by the Government, he being a servant of the Council, and not of the government’. (2) The House should understand that the Government has, since the outbreak of war, strictly carried out the instructions issued by the Imperial Government, to the effect “that care should be taken not to arrest persons whose known character precludes suspicion, or who are personally vouched for to the satisfaction of the Gov- ernmentGovernment.” (3) In addition to what has been said above the Government wishes to make clear that, if necessary legislation will be introduced before the end of the session to deal with the situation, inasmuch as it is of opinion that neither in University Colleges nor Public Schools is it desirable that unnaturalized enemy subjects should continue to give instruction to the youth and children of the Dominion. ‘The answer’, he went on in debate, ‘speaks for itself, and he did not think anything could be clearer of plainer: that, if steps were not taken by the Professor himself, or by the University Council who controlled the position, to remove him from his present position before the session came to an end, the Government would introduce legislation for the purpose.’

N.Z.P.D., Vol. 173. p.145.

The Council, to quote also its words, ‘was no more disposed to yield to the threat of interference on the part of the Government and the legislature than to the popular clamour which had inspired it’. At this stage von Zedlitz moved again. To rumour and clamour and anonymity he, no more than the Council, had ever felt disposed to yield; though, as he said, it had not been pleasant to face almost daily attacks in the Press, and to receive threatening letters couched in the vilest language, But the pressure was now so great—on the Council, not on himself—that he wrote, on 1 September, relinquishing all rights he had, and desiring the Council to deal with him as it pleased. But the Council still ‘controlled the position’, and as long as it did so it was determined to do justly. The New Zealand patriotic Society asked it to receive a deputation. It was willing—it never failed in courtesy; but by the date set things had gone too far. On 14 September Massey introduced the Alien Enemies Teachers Bill. This, like the third paragraph in his reply to the question of 25 August, was deliberately general in form: it disqualified all ‘enemy subjects’ from employment in any educational institution supported wholly or in part from public revenue, ended any existing contracts for such employment and provided that compensation for the dismissed person should not exceed one year's salary. Von Zedlitz thereupon urged the Council to allow him to retire, lest legislation passed expressly to sacrifice him should affect others. There were, as everybody knew, no others, On 15 September the Council resolved that a resignation thus tendered could not honourably or consistently with its dignity be treated as a voluntary one, and therefore could no be accepted. Prendergast Knight, who before the introduction of the bill had put forward a motion to give twelve month's notice, now withdrew it; and the Council unanimously agreed to present a petition against the bill to both houses.

This petition was presented on 17 September. The Legislative Council ignored it. The Petitions Committee of the House of Representatives heard evidence on 29 September. Those who managed the Council's case put extreme importance on this occasion, and also on the giving of evidence by von Zedlitz himself. If the honour and decency of one man could only be exhibited, they appear to have felt, the outcome could not be in doubt. They seemed justified. Von Zedlitz gave his evidence. A member of the House rang up a professor who, unable to bear the tension, had left the hearing: ‘It was all right, the bill was dead’. Alas for honour and decency; there was not to be this easy outcome. The government felt its own interest, its own prestige in the country, too much at stake. To drop now, merely at the dictate of justice, a bill which had been introduced to meet that country's clamour was unthinkable. The Petitions Committee must be converted as rapidly as possible. There was one way, to lie. It was stated that the government possessed a letter from von Zedlitz to Bell, written at the beginning of the war, informing the then Minister of Internal Affairs of his preparedness to fight for Germany against England. A more fantastic lie was probably never invented, much more plausible lies have never been believed. A more stupid lie, considering the course of government policy until towards the end of August, would be hard to conceive. But this was was-time, the emotions of members of parliament were not guided by logic, and the report of the Petitions Committee was that ‘That subject matter of the petition being one of public policy, the Committee has no recommendation to make’. It may possibly be argued that Sir Francis Bell should have shed on the subject some of the light of the truth with which he was acquainted, if not on grounds of public morality, at least on the narrower consideration that he had been, ‘an old and trusted friend’ of the victim—to use the victim's own words. Possibly Sir Francis Bell would have replied that as a member of the Legislative Council he had nothing to do with the activities, or the committees, or the untruths, or the confusions of thought of the Other Place. Possibly he salved his conscience in one of the other ways known to persons of high political culture.

A deputation to the Prime Minister did no good.

The deputation included the first Mrs A. R. Atkinson, a sister of Kirk. The Kirks were ancestrally Baptists. This able and eloquent woman, with all the moral fervour of a member of that church, tried hard to instill some of her own highmindeness into Mr Massey. The effort was vain; but as the visitors turned to go, the Prime Minister, anxious to end on a more agreeable note, said, ‘Well, Mrs Atkinson, I hope next time we meet you won't treat me so hardly,’ ‘Tchk!’ exclaimed the indignant woman, turning on that large figure with something like savagery, ‘Why can't you show some backnbone!’

Von Zedlitz. Wearied beyond endurance, wrote to Mr. Massey himself, saying that he was about to insist on resignation as a matter of dusty—and this he did in a letter to the Council of 4 October. The bill came up in the House for second reading on 6 October, introduced by the Prime Minister, who said he felt ‘somewhat strongly on the subject’, There was indeed on this occasion a sort of patriotic moral orgy. The bill, it was insisted, was ‘general in application’; notwithstanding which the major part of the debate was devoted to the infamous letter. One nobly calm and reasonable member only, A. S. Malcolm of Clutha (he had a copy of the letter) pointed out its exact meaning, and argued that a feeling that one ought to do non-combatant service in a war against Russia, on 1 August, was not identical with a determination to fight against Britain on 4 August; but Malcolm's plea for justice and tolerance might just as well have gone unsaid. Robert McCallum, a member of the college Council, would carry opposition no farther (for was not the bill ‘general in application?’) than to urge in committee the adoption of the section of the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, 1914 which allowed naturalization in war-time—an amendment which was duly negatived. The bill passed on the voices. It was introduced next day in the Legislative Council by Bell, Who appealed rather needlessly, for support. It was a bill ‘general in application’ J. G. W. Aitken, like McCallum a member of the college Council, thought It would have been improved by the addition of the English provision, but beyond that contented himself with speaking in praise of von Zedlitz: ‘The whole responsibility is in the hands of the government, and I am content to leave it there.’ His colleagues had no hesitations at all. They spoke as denunciatory prophets. Nothing could stop that bill.

The desolating series of speeches, which must be referred to technically as the ‘debate’ on the Bill, will be found in N.Z.P.D., Vol, 174, pp, 706–17 (House) and 722–5 (Council). They are interesting as illustrations of the effect of war on legislative opinion—as illustrations, also, of individual character.

Two days later, on 9 October, the college Council, at a special meting, still did not know whether the bill had received the Governor's signature or not. If the bill was law, and its man had been dismissed, then it would certainly not stultify itself by accepting his resignation—however many times, and with whatever insistence, he might resign. When it met again, on the 20th, all doubt had been resolved. The Council exercised the right that had been left to it, and voted him a year's salary, in a motion that recorded both its appreciation of his work for the college and its regret at the mode in which that work had been cut short. A large number of its members had intended to resign office and to submit themselves for re-election, ‘to obtain an expression of opinion from their electorates as to whether the Council were justified in declining to sacrifice an innocent man to a popular clamour’, The government, however, in a perverted way, was exceedingly wide-awake. Such procedure was made impossible by a clause added to the Education Amendment Act, which provided for the suspension of any election thus caused, and the filling of cil fell back upon the publication of carefully drafted Report of the essentials of the case, with an appendix of the documents. It is, even after the lapse of thirty-three years, a moving little pamphlet. The Council had done all that men could do. It had the support of the staff, the students, the graduates, the men of the college who were ‘at the front’. Against the people of New Zealand it could stand indefinitely. Against the sovereign state it was bound to go down. Was it right in refusing to accept that resignation, so often and so honourably proffered? Would it have been better advised to have gone with the storm rather than to be overwhelmed by it? The mind can produce plausible reasons for any surrender. Depressing as is this story of defeat, there is nothing in the college's record of which its men and women have the right to feel more proud.

The impact of the war on the college was evident not in this controversy alone but in all those ways in which a body of young men and women can be affected by international catas- trophecatastrophe. The young men and women did, to a considerable extent, keep their heads. Clubs, of course, suffered: football, athletics, tennis went to pieces; the Easter Tournament, after 1915, was abandoned. Under the first shock of August 1914 the Debating Society put and end to its programme; the Heretics' Club ceased to exist. There were no capping carnivals– to the annoyance of one critic at least who thought that extravaganza profits could have been handed to ‘one of the numerous and deserving charitable funds’. The women were assiduous knitters of socks; Kirk, in a famous victory, obliterated the flies of Trentham Camp. As time went on there were ‘patriotic entertainments' and concerts, like the Gentle Gertrude, or Drugged and Drowned in Digbeth, of 1915–’ the most pleasing thing of its kind ever attempted by any victoria College amateurs'–or The Profs' Progress of 1918. Spike itself at first suffered badly and was much smaller than usual; with club members either on active service or preparing for it clubs had little or nothing to report, and literature was for the time being in eclipse. Instead, with 1915, came ‘letters from the front’ and Gallipoli casualty lists; and then, from France, the casualty lists lengthened. By October 1918 spike was beginning to look back. That year, it recorded, had been much as other war years had been. Men were in the minority, and most them were young. Some, wounded and discharged from the army, had returned : but men were constantly leaving as they reached military age… they went very quietly, and it was often along time before it was discovered that they had gone into camp. There had been Memorial Services in the Gym. By October 1918 indeed the list had become long, for one small college, of those whose fate it had been to ‘carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man’. In that list were outstanding men and ordinary men; men who had made the college its best self and men, unknown even to college fame, who had simply been students; men who heroically, or with the plainness of so many other thousands, laid down a limitless potentiality of life. If any one man could stand for them all, as a summary of the college, perhaps it was Allan McDougall, the Rhodes scholar, whom his friends thought ‘its most perfect student’; but can any one man stand for all that loss and grief?

Even with depleted numbers, however, and the sombre background of those years, life went on. The Debating Society did not pick up till 1916. In 1914 it had held the first of its debates with the Social Democratic Party, and the second of these was the only event that starred that depressing year 1915 with excitement. ‘The Society is clearly doing right in arranging these annual meetings’, noted its reporter. Did the progress of human society depend upon the triumph of Social Democracy? Would the highest form of morality be found in a socialist state of society? Mr Harry Holland and Mr Peter Fraser and Mr Tom Brindle came to know the boards of the platform in the Gym almost as well as did the winners of the union Prize, as they asserted the nobility of man under socialism; and such high themes were a change from the theories of Norman Angell and the probable effects of the attitude towards anything of the U.S.A. The Women's Debating Society for a short while seemed to be letting the college down (‘That vegetarianism is beneficial; That Smoking is objectionable’, etc.), but in 1916 women suspended their separate activities for the sake of the general welfare; and then it was that judges were reminded of ‘the palmy days' of the society. That year 1916, also, saw rising on the ashes of the Heretics a club that, phoenix-like, claimed direct relationship, the Free Discussions Club. Its title was perhaps a little cumbrous, thought Spike, a little lacking in grace, but its objects were unimpeachable; for this club had been formed’ for the purpose of enabling those students who take an interest in the deeper things of life, to met and discuss those questions, discussions upon which nearly all other college clubs as a rule forbid', (Certainly the Debating Society steered away from religion and sex.) So we have the ransacking of Nietzsche's moral views, Ann Veronica and the status of women (the women present took part in a keen manner, and Miss England was good enough to give the benefit of her views) and the Moral Effects of War, and Harry Holland on socialism again, and eugenics and Maeterlinck on Death, and the Conscription of the Clergy, and Militarism and Citizenship and of course University Reform. By 1919 a certain very late back-door flowering of the Aesthetic Movement had set in (some of the leaders of college thought were beginning to discover with admiration the wit of Oscar Wilde and to lend their prose a rather strained air); and naturally we get Morality in Life and Art– ‘The highest art was always above morality. Morality was but a passing phase' art was eternal.’1 On a lover level the club had to act as executor in disposal of the Heretics' library—which was divided gracefully between the Philosophy Department, Mr Ward's Library, and the Christian Union. There was by then a good deal of sauntering, almost arm-in-arm, on the borders of Christian Union and Free discussion. Perhaps the liberal religion preached at the Unitarian Church was beginning to have its effects. Perhaps rather, the religion of undergraduates was undergoing the same metamorphosis under the pressure of war as that of other people. Certainly, as yet, there was at college no organized fundamentalist sect. There were still those, of course, whose feelings were subject to outrage: as when (1916 again—how full that year was) Spike had the first of its incursions into blasphemy, with the celebrated sonnet ‘Nay! Christ! I seek no mercy at Thy Throne!’ Whereat the president of the Christian Union wrote in protest to the Editor, and the Editor wrote largely in impassioned terms of Freedom of Thought, and the controversy spilled over into 1917–when, the Editor having departed to the war and being ‘unable to answer the peculiar accusations brought against him’, his judicious successor thought it might be safely dropped.

The social conscience continued to be active. In 1914, even before the war, the Christian Social Service League had turned its women's work over to the Y.W.C.A. The men of the League still carried on for a while some work with the Boys' Institute, but the war ended that. Then came (in 1916 again) an attempt at a Women's Social Investigation League, not altogether a college club, though the inaugural meeting was held in the Women's Common Room, and the officers were closely connected with the college. It was one of those leagues bound to meet frustration, but, merely in connection with the college, it is ‘significant’. To educate members in their social and civic duties; to create a wider scope for women in public life; to originate or take part in such public movement as might be thought desirable; to work by means educative, legislative, co-operative—how excellent, how familiar it sounds! There is a more positive note: ‘Any evil that needs exposure, any problem that needs investigation, should be made known to the league—which will do its best to remedy things’. It was composed, it confessed, of humble individuals for the most part, and knew that its work would be painfully slow. One sighs, indeed, thinking of that inaugural meeting, and the years that have gone past. Very little more seems to have been heard of the Women's Social Investigation League; and when a rather odd motion was brought in 1918 by one of its leaders before a special meeting of the Students' Association, to affiliate that body to the Women's National Council, the opposition was noisy and flippant and effectual. The social conscience at the end of the war had its practical application in the great Epidemic, when all examinations were stopped, and students, for some reason little affected themselves, slaved at relief depôts, or as hospital orderlies, drove ambulances, and dug graves. Then in 1919 came the arguments over conscription and disarmament. Spike denounced the proposals of the Minister of Defence, and another special general meeting refused, after long argument, to declare those proposals detrimental to the best interests of the community. After all this, it is mildly surprising to find one Spike correspondent accusing the college of complacency: its reformers were complacent and ignorant, its Free Discussions Club was utopian, its debates were without humour, the Christian Union had poor executive, and people scrawled on notices. But it was probably a young Tory, alarmed by the onrush of Bolshevism far away, who made the other accusation that the ‘university man and woman’ were not taking enough part in the national life of New Zealand. Were they too smugly self-satisfied, too engrossed in their pursuit of private ends? There were acute problems arising out of the war. ‘Are you going to join the ranks of the active workers for the nations, or are you going to stand idly by and watch the country being overwhelmed in a deluge of anarchy born of ignorance?’ As the country did not undergo this unpleasant experience it must be presumed that our students had the right answer.

Spike itself continued to register the ‘tone’ of the college (true, it also registered its editor's predilections). We may say perhaps, varying the metaphor, that it was covered all over with the bootmarks of the march of mind. The ‘letters from the front’, with their cheerfulness in the midst of death and mud, were balanced by the solemnity of domestic writes. The essays on Sincerity and on Flattery, the ‘Pastel in Prose’, were prodigiously significant of the change. Verse was booming, though carefully ‘screened’ by conscientious editors. The poets, suggested one of these functionaries, should study the rules of poetic diction; for though they had plenty of ideas, they had also an unfortunate disregard of metre. But were not rules breaking down in the world at large? We see in Spike not merely signs that New Zealand was catching up on the early Yeats, but the first tentative essay in vers libre. Naturally at all this the critics roar. As early as 1915 there was a loud roar. Spike ‘did not suit a student community. It never aimed at portraying the students as they were. Men who worked vigorously, played vigorously, prayed vigorously, and blasphemed equally vigorously, when they came to reflect the glamour of their doings on paper suddenly became dull and cold and issued a journal that had neither the moral fibre of strong conviction nor the material fibre of good shaving paper’. When there was moral fibre the journal was upbraided for its sombre and sober tone. Why had it discarded sparkle and snap? Why not have a bit of a row? Spike, complained another, was too cultured. ‘Be true to your old self and be sane. Above all, be cheerful.… Just try to be more of a New Zealander and less of a stilted schoolmistress.’ At that the worm-like editor turned: it was a good thing to have a host of willing critics, but, he thought, ‘if these same students would put their shoulders to the wheel and direct their energy towards producing some real, live copy, they would have no reason to worry about the future’. A brighter day was to dawn; but who, now, really can blame those unfortunate pages for reflecting their age?

In 1918, at last, the war ended. Possibly it was reaction from grimness that stimulated the formation in that year of the Haeremai Club. The old club for men had gone, but there was a fresh breed of those souls who hold that ‘there are moments when men want to be alone’, and that with ‘wit, hilarity and good fellowship’ as ‘sponsors’ they could be advantageously alone. With smoke-concerts and hakas the members managed to achieve a satisfactory degree of hilarity and good fellowship. A new Women's Club was begun also, but apparently under less elevated auspices. Then came the first year of peace. More and more men returned from the army; the sight of them lessened ‘that vague sense of incompleteness’ that had been about the college in the war year; there was stir and bustle; now, it was thought, the tendency to a general level of mediocrity would be overpassed, there would be giants again, now would college tradition be revived, college spirit be strengthened. The Students' Association held social teas, the Glee Club dragged out old music and sang again. There was again a real Capping Carnival, a procession wound its way to the Post Office Square and the usual deluge of rain, danced round policemen and invaded the pubs; an extravaganza modelled in form on the best precedents, wherein Tommy Hunter was burnt at the stake, assailed the intolerance of critics of student activities and above all that scandalized correspondent of the Evening Post, ‘Parent and Guardian’. Students' working-bees, headed by the chairman of the Council, had already done something to improve the breakneck Mount Street approach to the college; now students wanted to plant creepers to beautify the building; there was a great scheme for a Consolidated Club Fund to stabilize all finances. The Council had been discussing the needs of the college— had not the time come to embark upon day classes? The building was crowded, the student population was now over five hundred, Students' Association, Council, Professiorial Board, Graduates' Association were all talking hostels and residential college—could the land to the south of the existing building be levelled and laid out in playing fields and living quarters? Could the college perhaps be moved altogether to the site of Government House? Could the Taranaki reserves question be re-opened and some of that locked-up wealth utilized for urgent needs? A committee of the Council had reported on the best methods of improving the work of the college ‘in response to the Educational progress of the community’. There was need for the northern and southern wings of the building originally planned; the staff, obviously, must be increased, the Library must be enlarged, parliament must be asked for an increased annual grant. Then came the news that there was to be at least a new northern wing of four stories, containing a great Library itself tow stories high. It was almost like 1904, or 1899. ‘The world's great age begins anew.’

VII The Twenties

But even as men used the hopeful Shelleyan phrase, the bright hope faded. It was used a good deal in the earliest twenties, when three empires had gone like wrecks in a dissolving dream, and the intoxicating vision of Education, as the maker of all things new, stood before the eyes of youth and age alike. So optimistic was mankind, in that brief day. Mr H. G. Wells wrote his history, and there at the end of it was Life, standing upon the earth as upon a footstool, stretching out its realm amid the stars. If some of the other prophets were less ecstatic, they could all somehow be assimilated; for faith and scepticism, Wells and Gilbert Murray and Bertrand Russell and J. B. Bury, the League of Nations and the Russian Revolution and the New Psychology, somehow everything seemed capable of being sorted into a general plan, if only human beings would consent to be tolerant, and progresssive, and liberal, and rational, if only they would think about social reform and abandon secret diplomacy, and read Areopagitica and Mr Russell on Free Thought and Official Propaganda. But it could not last; people, in New Zealand as elsewhere, would not do these obvious things. The student was afflicted by persons, even among his fellow students, who betrayed a strange reluctance to be interested in everything, and to wish to reform everything, to try everything in the light of reason and convict most of it. When these unfortunate and exasperating persons were sceptical, they were sceptical the wrong way round. They had, most of them, never heard of Bertrand Russell; and when they were told about him, they generally concluded that he should be in goal. In spite of the wreck of empires, in spite of Education, and of the New Psychology, and of the New History, and of the Obvious manifestations of the reasonable mind, it became apparent that a new world was not going to be born.

So the 1920's present themselves as an interesting decade in the history of the college, years that were certainly educative for a great many students, and which had their excitements; years that were important for the physical growth of the institution and set it on an altogether larger basis; but years that were in some ways rather unhappy. For once again the college came into conflict with the community. It was not now the Council which stood on a lonely peak and defied the forces of unreason—the Council appears as a rather embarrassed body, anxious to conciliate, itself the scene of argument, of close divisions, and much discussion in committee; it was the students who fought a guerrilla struggle with all sorts of critics outside, from Ministers of the Crown to churches and chambers of commerce and that odd small excitable rather secret body for the defence of the status quo, the New Zealand Welfare League. But unrest, struggle, criticism and counter-criticism were inevitable in the world just then. The consequences of the war, and of the peace, political, economic and social, were all-pervading. There was a series of minor depresssions to embarrass the government and to lead to cuts in university grants, to wage-cuts and to strikes; it was impossible not to be interested in Bolshevism, and impossible for the Respectable not to fear it—not (apparently) to see it creeping under doors and in at key-holes, the enemy of the Empire and the Sunday-school, the corrupter of the trade-union and the University. Those awful shadows, Lenin and Trotsky, loomed up at every despiteful criticism of the Arbitration Court; they stood behind Mr Peter Fraser on the platform of the Debating Society. And was the Empire indeed crumbling, under onslaughts within as well as without, as rash constitutional expermentalists from other Dominions probed it here and pushed it there? Did the New Zealand of which William Ferguson Massey was Prime Minister want a British Commonwealth of Nations? Could the government in which the Hon. C. J. Parr was Minister of Education look with approval on the intellect tual explorations of any student body? When the proceedings at Versailles were the object of so much criticism and those at Moscow of so much admiration could a minister not be alarmed? Could a government refrain from censoring books and pamphlets? And who now, a generation later, remembers or has heard of that sinister volume Red Europe? Alas for mutability! the day may come when the same question will be asked of the Hon. C. J. Parr.

The new wing to the north went slowly up, with its memorial stone to the dead (mortalitate relicta immortalitate induti vivunt), its provision for great-windowed library and women's common room and new tea-room for Mrs Brook; and while it was still being raised came the ‘delightful and almost incredible’ tidings that the government had granted £20,000 for a new southern wing as well, with special accommodation for physics. Now at last something was to be seen on the scale originally envisaged by Easterfield. But by the time the foundations for this large mass were being laid

The architects for these two wings were Messrs Swan and Lawrence.

Easterfield had been gone for a year and more. There had been a certain swing in his interests, and after twenty years of his chair he was beginning to have a sense of frustration. He had given the college, he seems to have felt, what he had it in him to give, and this feeling that his period of usefulness was over, coming with his concern for agricultural research made it easy for him to accept the offer from the newly-founded Cawthron Institute to become its Director, in 1920. The chemistry chair was offered to, and accepted by, P. W. Robertson, the tall and brilliant experimenter of the earliest years, who had been to Oxford and Burma and London, and added aesthetics to his science, and become enamoured of the practice of English prose; and under Robertson of the wide interests and the gentle smile chemistry went on to the end of the first fifty years. Easterfield became the college's first professor emeritus.

These early twenties were full of professorial change. There should have been one restoration; von Zedlitz should have come back. French teaching had been carried on during the war by Mrs McPhail, a devoted little woman; but after her death it was plain the chair must be filled. A new chorus went up from the most irresponsible bodies all over the country, from certain branches of the Returned Soldier's Association, from school committees and town boards and education boards and borough councils: their protests came to the college Council in shoals—von Zedlitz must no be re-appointed.

An Auckland newspaper, the Star, had the effrontery to state that his re-appointment would be unanimously opposed by the country's returned soldiers; and when one of these, de la Mare of the college, protested, refused to publish his letter

For this hysterical and contemptible outburst there was not even the excuse of a war; but the Council had changed, some of the strong men had gone, and they had not been replaced by strength. It seemed safer to bow down before the demands of the Philistines; the motion to re-appoint was lost. There perhaps lay the real tragedy of the famous case; but it was not Von's tragedy, it was the petty tragedy of men who feared to do a just thing. Then came to the college—or rather blew in like a storm that had gathered strength all the way from Western Australia, bursting open doors and rattling windows and sending weaker students scurrying like pale leaves before the blast—Edwin J. Boyd Wilson, the black-haired the enthusiastic, the man who worked like forty devils and expected others to do the same. Boyd Wilson was a New Zealander who had taken his first both at Canterbury and at Cambridge, who had taught Belgian young ladies at Antwerp and Australians at Sydney and Perth, and whose superabundant and terrifying energies boiled over in every outdoor activity known to man. He made his students speak French, he instructed them in continental wit, he acted in plays with them; he poured a steady stream of them into the Cercle Française down town; he came in the end almost to regard the senior scholarship in French as his department's property; he built, he gardened, he slew deer and goats and fish, he had been a passionate footballer, the Tararuas were his second home. It was with Boyd Wilson that the college Tamping Club came into existence. In the bush, some timid scholars felt, it was possible to regard him with less fear than in the lecture room. In the bush he became invaluable. He was another, distinct, variety in the extraordinary assemblage of character the college had not ceased to accumulate.

In 1920 the Macarthy chair of economics was finally set up, and Murphy, of the mocking ready tongue and the careful lecturing technique, was promoted to fill it. As long as he was there, the successful joke would not be annually repeated; as long as he was there, the community could be assured that students would not be encouraged to become socialists. Under the University Amendment Act of 1919, raising the monetary grants to the colleges, the government had earmarked a sum for a chair of education (for it too was affected by that current in the air), and J. S. Tennant, the lecturer and Training College principal, was elevated. Tennant's calibre was considerable— with both literary and biological interests, he was a really well-read man, and could quote Holy Writ to advantage. In courtesy he was second only to Kirk. He was followed in 1927 by W. H. Gould, who was to hold the chair for twenty years— Gould the optimistic, the liberal, the lover of his fellows and of his profession as a teacher, the planner of improvements. No great scholar was Gould, but a simple unpretentious man who always rose to the measure of any task he was given to do; who had begun his professional life as a pupil-teacher, and had worked important and revolutionary changes as a Director of Education in Tonga; who, as Training College principal, was a standing challenge to the authoritarianism then rampant in education, and as professor one whose eager and honourable service to the college was rewarded by a full measure of affection. And how enthusiastically ingenious he was at his vacation boat-building in his beloved Marlborough Sounds! Chairs of geology and history were founded in 1921. To the one was appointed Cotton, busy putting the finishing touches to his Geomorphology of New Zealand, the work which was to carry his name beyond the seas, the first of an impressive series of studies; to the other Wilson—the genial ‘F.P.’—now with his subject at last released from the danger of mere subordination in a school of economics and commerce. Marsden, who had lectured breezily and well, in 1922 astonished his colleagues by being appointed to the Education Department as assistant-director, and was followed in the chair by D.C.H. Florance, a Canterbury man who had worked in Rutherford's laboratory and taught at Hong Kong. In 1924 G. S. Peren was appointed professor of agriculture. Agriculture? Agriculture, like education and economic and history, was in those post-war years in the air. Government and farmers were struggling with problems of marketing, the economic foundations of farming were revealing some instability, there was a vast need of fundamental research, there was not a real school of agriculture in the country. Sir Walter Buchanan of the Wairarapa, whose voice in 1897 had denounced Seddon's Victoria College Bill as an abortion, in 1923 presented £10,000 to found a chair. It was another of those generous gifts which left the college where it was, for Salamanca Road was no place for a farm, and a school of agriculture could not be based merely on a chair; so that when, almost simultaneously, Auckland was also endowed with a chair of agriculture, the two colleges, with less dissent than generally accompanied the foundation of a ‘special school’ of the University, pooled their resources in the Massey Agricultural College to which Peren went as principal. At the end of the decade, to conclude these professorial notations, Garrow resigned his chair, to be succeeded for a short span by H. H. Cornish.

Professorial comings and goings are not the only ones that a faithful and exhaustive chronicler should now record. It was in the twenties that individual departments at last, and none too soon, began to expand by the acquisition of ‘full-time lectures,’ as distinct from the ‘assistants’ which professors had so far had to help them with their junior work, with corrections of exercises and the like. Now there arrived the first of those men who were personalities in their own right, who became, some of them, as much part of the college and its fructifying life as most professors, men who were to contribute in time a large totality of scholarship and labour and independent thought. Some moved elsewhere, as professors of lecturers, some remained as lectures, mainstays of their work, or succeeded to chairs in the college. They were a new sort, some of these men, also; mostly returned postgraduate travelling scholars, if they were New Zealanders, trained in research in arts as well as in science, full of London and Paris and modernity. Others had traveled in war. To A. D. Monro, who came to chemistry in 1921, students and staff have owed much; Ivan Sutherland was an immensely stimulating influence for thirteen years in philosophy; John Elliott was a first-rate teacher in classics. These may stand for their brethren. But they cannot stand also for another class that may be nameless indicidually, the ‘student-assistants’ who began to be appointed for the session's work, new graduates mainly, squires to the professorial knights, young fellows bursting with zeal and self-confidence, quite prepared, if they were given a chance, to run their own departments or, indeed, the whole college. In this lowly home-grown manner started more than one academic career that was to come to greater note with advancing time. Let the memory of their youth live, if it live at all, in the minds of those whose essays they marked.

But let not the memory of two other men, who in those years passed from college eyes, be cavalierly dismissed. James Southcombe Brook, he of the clasp of keys and glorious clocks, died in 1926. Few men had loved the college as he had, and its grief was real. Nevertheless a Brook still reigned, his son W. S. Brook, the college carpenter and indispensable one— ‘Young Brook’ or ‘Bill Brook,’ out of earshot; ‘the Finger-snapper,’ if Homer could have given him an epithet; for never did man have hall and corridors better under command than did Young Brooke, and that snap of the fingers at 10 past 5 was as mandatory as a machine-gun.

Young Brookie himself died in 1943—the end of a short but notable dynasty.

Two years later died the only person connected with the college, perhaps, for whom Old Brookie had a real distaste, the one he called, with a kind of pitying impatience, ‘the Reverend Gentleman’—Horace Ward. Mr Ward had never treated Mr Brook with a proper respect. Poor Ward's asthma and the years had told on him heavily; black-coated and frail, he had to seek for help, when days were windy, to cross the road to his nearby house on Kelburn Parade, close to that other so different house, the scene of jollity and hospitality, Mackenzie's; and he died not long after he retired, in 1928. To the Library came one who wished to make it great, Harold Miller, a college Rhodes scholar, a very different personality from Horace Ward. Trained in economic and philosophy and history (with, some of his colleagues considered, a rather sinister learning towards theology), and with an argumentative bent that made him difficult to deter from the consequences of any principle he had adopted, he settled in and began to build. He built to some purpose, the emissary of the Carnegie Corporation of New York was impressed, Mr Miller went to the United States to see what was done there; and as the Library in the next twenty years swallowed professors' rooms and lecture rooms, and stackroom followed packed stackroom, as Carnegie music collection succeeded Carnegie art collection, as bequest after bequest was assimilated, and Ward's carefully-written catalogue was swamped by cards from the Library of Congress, something rose before which the workers who had set on the shelves in the little room with the oriel window the Library of 1906, of which they were so proud, might well have paused in awe. Yet, at the end of the twenty years, it all seemed no more than a good beginning, and those who were most closely concerned with the Library were talking of the next step, a separate library building.

All that is worthy of record, but the centre of interest now rests, really, with the student body. For three years, said Spike of September 1921, we had thought we were working back to normal, to the standard of university life that existed before the war. There had been tournaments and capping carnivals and as many meetings and dances as the Professorial Board would suffer. But we had not struggled back to the pre-War standard; we lived in a different era.—This was true; one of the evidences was the doubling of student numbers, as the editor pointed out, the disappearance of the ‘corporate whole.’ Another of the evidences was the bewildering character of the post-war world itself, a conditioning factor of college life to which reference has already been made. In this different era it availed pre-war hens little to cluck indignantly after post-war chickens. But there was a great deal of clucking. One many pass briefly over the great public controversy whether students should be allowed to play tennis on their own tennis-courts on Sundays—how peculiarly remote seems that ‘Sunday tennis’ rage, with its letters from church-goers, its protests from Sunday-school organizations, its denials and compromises, and the final victory of tennis in 1923! Certainly a social revolution was in progress.

This Sunday tennis controversy is worth chronological summary, as a short chapter in the social history of New Zealand. In 1913 the Tennis Club reported to the college Council, hopefully, that Sunday play had been forbidden by the Professorial Board. The Council took no action. In 1914 the club appealed against the ruling of the Board, which the Council upheld, a minority of three dissenting. In 1919 the club again approached the Council, this time with the Board's support; but repeal of the previous decision was lost on the chairman's casting vote. In 1922 the Council agreed to allow Sunday tennis, but only between the hours of 8 to 10 a.m. and 2 to 6 p.m.—the argument being that that would leave an hour both morning and evening for players to get ready for church, or that, if they did not go to church, the eyes of church-goers would not be afflicted with them; and not at all in the Summer Recess— the argument here is obscure. In 1923 this prohibition of vacation play was removed. And some time later the limit of hours also went. These later decisions do not appear to have been followed by any local Deluge, at least of unusual proportions.

It cannot be said that students were more irreligious than the society they lived in, the Christian Union had lost nothing in fervency, and certainly there was among students who thought for themselves at all no inconsiderable interest in religions as a human characteristic. The Free Discussions Club had an animated Christian Union fringe; and what may perhaps be described in later jargon as the college intelligentsia was found of dividing its Sunday evenings among the churches—particularly the Unitarian Church in Vivian Street, flourishing for a brief period under the sardonic eloquence of the Rev. Wyndham Heathcote, and St John's, where the Rev. Dr Gibb boomed and thundered. But it was not religion, or the absence of religion, that was now to cause so much trouble, it was something to which society in the twentieth century devoted a great deal more discussion, it was politics.

A period of strain in the affairs of the world will always make vocal those persons who set store on a ritual of ‘loyalty,’ on the outward observances of oaths of allegiance for school-teachers and regular saluting of the flag for school-children; and such persons will always shudder at criticism, however tentative, of the social order under which they live. In the early twenties such strain was, as we have noted, one of the consequences of the war; political or social criticism was in our country to be equated with communism, and from the young it was not to be tolerated. But to be young was often, happily, to be critical. This obvious truth did not, unhappily, strike the post-war, Minister of Education, Mr Parr, as one of perennial validity, and with the full approval of a large number of farmers and local bodies, he set out to eliminate it from the scheme of things in New Zealand. To a politician of this temperament the college provided an ample amount of scandal —the Debating Society alone was an offence of the rankest description; but curiously enough, though the Minister had been becoming very restive, it was the Teachers' Training College that stimulated his first really grand outburst. In August 1921 a student of that college was convicted in the Magistrate's Court of ‘selling literature encouraging violence and lawlessness,’ and was fined £10. A number of her fellow-students, and a number of Victoria students were present in the court, and some contributed to a collection taken up outside to pay the fine. The Minister thereupon, it seems, lost all sense of proportion and all sense of the decencies of administrative be- haviourbehaviour. He found willing enough supporters. The chairman of the Education Board forthwith conducted an enquiry into the polities of the Training College and the young woman was dismissed. Not only was she a member of the ‘Wellington Socialist Society’ but also a B.A. of Victoria College. The connection seemed complete. The Minister wrote to the Council, demanding an enquiry into the antecedents of young woman herself, into the teaching at the college, and into a number of societies said to be permeated with ‘undesirable influences’—to wit, the Debating Society, the Heretics' Club, and the Free Discussions Club. The college was somewhat taken aback. There were members of the Council, however, who showed distress that any student should lean towards communism, and it was decided to hold an enquiry. Would the Minister, as official Visitor, join with the chairman in conducting it? The Minister would not, though prepared to hold an enquiry himself; but in the meantime, to ensure (possibly) that there would be a sufficiency of condemnation, made a public statement which, complained the chairman, had been ‘very detrimental to the reputation of the college’. The Minister's charges had been so reckless that the Professorial Board, in justice to itself, also demanded investigation, while the Students' Association asked to be represented at any enquiry that was held.

Though the Council was rather nettled by Mr Parr's policy of verdict-first-trial-afterwards, the chairman did his work manfully. The communist, a thoughtful, gentle and conscientious young person, was not in 1921 a student. She had been indoctrinated with her savage views by neither Professor Murphy nor Professor Hunter. She had belonged to neither the Debating Society nor the Free Discussions Club. In her time at college she had disseminated neither her literature nor her views. Of course, there were students who owned copies of the ‘banned books’—about that they were quite candid; when was it not a point of honour to read a banned book? Perhaps something sinister could be found about ‘undesirable influences' in the clubs. That too was difficult; it was difficult to find corruption in the Heretics' Club, which had perished seven years before; really the chairman could see nothing objectionable about the record of the Free Discussions Club; and really it was difficult to see that the Debating Society had done anything definitely wrong. Its practice of inviting’ leading Socialists' to debate was said to give these gentlemen (Mr Parr's political opponents) ‘an unusually favorable opportunity of expressing extreme views and sometimes views bordering on revolution’; but in this very year 1921 the Society had begun to invite politicians of the other parties to its platform.

The first debate with the ‘Socialist Party’ had been held as long ago as 1903—after 1904 the practices seems to have lapsed till 1914.

In fact, concluded the chairman, there was no reason to believe that any student was other than a loyal British subject, and he touched on the War Record. The Council accepted his report; in regard to the most bitterly assailed of college institutions it passed the emotion that ‘as long as they keep within the law the students should be free to select the subjects and control the procedure of their own debates’; and as far away as Christchurch newspapers carried the headline, ‘Victoria College Asserts Its Innocence’.

By that time, to assert innocence was idle. If one cared to believe that the college was a hotbed of sedition, one believed it. Mr Parr, that precipitate and unwise man, was not deterred by evidence, and his political associates year by year gave utterance to their horror. His odd successor as Minister of Education, the Hon. R.A. Wright (who had also strong views on Sunday tennis) had been particularly violent. It cannot be said that the offending students were oppressed by a feeling of disgrace. Spike, which was all for greater intellectual integrity and widespread denunciation (‘The social condition of Wellington, if we only realized it, is ghastly’), and the editorials of which gave by copious quotation a pretty accurate index of the editor's current and dangerous reading—Spike lampooned the Minister with vigour, joy, and a proud sense of public duty.

There was a squib, entitled A Vision of Judgment, which in this connection enjoyed some passing celebrity. The leader of the Labour party, Harry Holland, wishing to have the Vision, wrote to the editor, for ‘a couple of copies of your bright little paper’, The horrified editor, who regarded Spike as an Organ of Opinion, could only reply with noble dignity that his ‘bright little paper’ was already sold out but would no doubt be obtainable in the General Assembly Library.

The Debating Society had one set-back that hardly discouraged it. Since Lord Plunket's day the Governor had been the Patron of the Society; but in 1922 Lord Jellicoe was unwilling. Mr Parr had landed him in a difficult situation. The Governor-General could have no polities. He sent for a copy of the syllabus; His Excellency, wrote his secretary, ‘does not feel he can accept the position, as the subjects chosen for debate include some with which he does not think he can properly associate himself’.

Specimens of the subjects may be here given: That the New Zealand University should exist for the purpose of general culture and not for the purpose of providing a specialized training for an industrial or commercial or a professional career; That insistence upon external symbols of loyalty retards rather than assists true patriotism (one for Parr); That the New Zealand Labour party is fitted to govern (lost by one vote); That the present parliamentary system of government in New Zealand should be abolished (carried); That only by the adoption of Socialism can the highest form of intellectual freedom be attained (annual debate with the S.D.P.—Messrs Fraser and Brindle); That the right of action in English law for Breach of Promise should be abolished; etc.

The Society decided to do without a patron, and went on to some years of the most spirited and crowded meetings it ever had. ‘Thanks to profound intelligence of some of the chosen representatives of this young democracy,’ ran its notes in 1922, ‘the Society's activities are now appreciated from the North Cape to Stewart Island. Such a splendid advertisement seldom falls to the lot of any Society and the gratitude of our members knows no bounds. The real point at issue was as to whether a group of politicians may with impunity set up a dummy, and have him, under the shield of privilege, defame certain of his fellowmen. Such tactics may be good politics with elections near at hand, but we would have these politicians know that while we pity their failure we despise and detest them. It would be wearisome to make further comment; suffice it to say that it is high time every intelligent being in the community awoke to the deplorable level to which politics have sunk in this country, and came to realize the truly terrible fact that less than one per cent of the men who go through the New Zealand University enter politics. Surely this is a damning indictment of present-day education and citizenship.’

With these sentiments, the Society proceeded to do its best to redeem present-day education. Audiences were large and enthusiastic. Visitors' debates were jammed full. Should there be a referendum before the country entered a war? Should the peace treaty be abrogated? Should the Great Powers intervene in the internal affairs of China? Saturday night followed Saturday night and the officers rubbed their hands. This was almost like Oxford. Debates were held in the vacation. Students crushed in, the public streamed up to the Gym. In 1923, to answer the criticism that motions were carried by visitors from outside, two votes were inaugurated, one of students, the other of the whole audience. In 1924 part of the syllabus was left blank to provide for particularly topical subjects. The newspapers reported the debates in detail (except that evening which declared in favour of the railwaymen's strike for higher wages; ‘we feel glad that our representatives in the Joynt Challenge Scroll [contest]—Messrs. P. Martin Smith and R. M. Campbell—expressed our opinions of the Press in no hesitating manner’.) Theological subjects were excluded by the constitution. How interesting to see what could be done with religion! thought one party; a perceptive secretary saw a way; against a storm of opposition the proviso was carried: ‘This shall not preclude the committee from selecting social subjects even though they have theological implications'; and the path was open to discuss whether social progress was more retarded than assisted by the Christian religion. Then, at the end of July 1924, came the great attack. A guarantee was needed for a proposed tour of a debating team from Oxford. The outraged Tories of the college wished to bar Sedition—or if it could not be barred, to force it exclusively on to Oxford. They worked diligently and with speed; the formal membership of Society rose in a week from 65 to 300; but in a packed meeting the regular members were able to get a very short amendment substituted for a very long motion’, leaving approval of subjects to the executive of Students' Association. It was enough for the Tories. They supplied a report of the meeting to the newspapers, announcing that the subjects presented for debate, and the general conduct of the Society of late years, were so repugnant to the vast majority of students that they had decided to depose the committee. The college had suffered a decline in public estimation, it behoved students to make clear that they were loyal, Spike, appearing at that very moment, carried a letter on free speech (appealing, as usual in these crises, to Milton), and traversing some inaccuracies of the opposition statement; another special general meeting was held in a fever of excitement, jammed and gasping; the eloquence was tremendous; a motion of no-confidence was defeated—for, 76, against, 113. And yet the accomplished gentlemen from Oxford, when they came in 1925, were no anti-climax, the Town Hall was taken by storm. Another English Universities team came in 1926, then a one-man American team; Auckland and Victoria exchanged visits, and by 1929 a Victoria College team was touring the United States and Canada.

And the Governor-General came back to the fold. Sir Charles Fergusson succeeded Lord Jellicoe. It was decided in 1925 to reinstate the office of patron and to elect His Excellency subject to his written assent ‘obtained within a reasonable time’. His Excellency scrutinized the syllabus, and accepted with pleasure. Two years later a philosophical note appeared in Spike. Parliament, by general agreement, had just passed the War Disabilities Removal Act, 1927, to bring to an end the civil penalties placed upon conscientious objectors after the war. In 1923 the Debating Society, at a visitors' debate led by two M.P.'s on each side, with others in the audience, had condemned the disfranchisement of these persons. It was looked upon as the most important debate of the year; the gymnasium, somehow, was ‘filled beyond its capacity’; ‘a certain section of public opinion indeignantly charged the Debating Society and the University with treasonable motives, and openly seditious utterances’. Now parliament had followed the Society. Was not that vindication? Then, later in 1927, the Society underwent a sudden slump, that lasted a year or two. It could not forever exist on the peak of things. But it recovered well enough.

The Free Discussions Club, though its light did not blaze from the North Cape to Stewart Island, nevertheless experienced its own golden age. It filled pages of Spike with the accounts of its long grappling with Truth. Every year Hunter opened the season with denunciation of some branch of obscurantism, a Hunter more and more indignant as the evening wore on; the modern press and democracy, Anglo-Catholicism, the part of Woman in Modern Progress, academic slavery in America (what a furore was caused by Upton Sinclair's The Goose Step)—all were pulled to pieces. How redolent of character is the subject of Mackenzie's address, ‘Ireland: the Despair of Rational Religion and the Empire’! what confusion Father Gilbert carried into the ranks when he came to discuss the Roman Index and Freedom of Thought, and proved that there was no real freedom save within the Church! For Free Discussion too had its visitors: Dr Gibb on Disarmament, and Mr Walter Nash on Unemployment, and Mr A. P. Harper of the Welfare League on the Revolutionary Movement in Great Britain, and Harry Holland, who ‘laboured valorously to wreck our patriotism,’ and Elsdon Best, whose discussion of Maori and Christian Mythology was so electrifying that the club published it. The club had its own struggle with reaction. In 1922, the year of Chanak, when Mr Massey promised Mr Lloyd George help for another war, when some of a new generation of students rushed to Buckle Street to enlist, and Mr Wilford proclaimed ‘My country, right or wrong,’ the final meeting was devoted to The Recent Crisis and its Moral. Dr Gibb and Mr Nash came; Dr Gibb and Mr Nash were shouted down by the loyalists, who also released, not very efficiently, stink-bombs; the loyalists removed the meeting to the Gym and there once again proclaimed the Patriotism of Victoria College. But that was exceptional. More characteristic, even if unusually intensive, was the opening of the 1925 season, the successive evenings devoted to the ‘copec’ reports on Christianity and the contemporary problems of peace and war. Fifty ministers of religion were invited, and two or three came. The organizers were highly satisfied with their week's orgy, ‘one of the most stimulating series of meetings the Club has ever had, both for variety and intensity of discussion.’ Perhaps their conclusion is hardly to be wondered at: ‘the general impression … seemed to be that Christianity had seen its best days.’ After all, it was the Christian Union (which about this time became the Student Christian Movement) which based its discussions on the premise that Christianity was an adventure.

It would be a mistake, nevertheless, to imagine that the college did nothing but revolve the destinies of humanity. On the superficial social plane, there was an occasional skirmish between the sexes. In 1920 the ‘flapper’ came to college. ‘These young girls’, One of the Old School informed Spike, ‘have neither the maturity of mind nor the sobriety of conduct that is becoming to a University student. Surely it is not too much to ask of women students that when they attend lectures they put up their hair’. Four years later Sorrowing Graduate was irked by this new fashion of hair worn down; Justitia replied that she had once seen a boy on the college premises in shorts, and that the late secretary of the Tramping Club had even gone into the Library looking like a boy scout; then in 1925 it was complained that women were wearing hats to lectures. The young women continued to scandalize the Old and Sorrowful as they thought fit. It was in 1925, too, that the annual general meeting of the Students' Association decided—in the sacred cause of ‘college spirit’—that undergraduates should wear gowns. For hard materialist reasons the Professorial Board refused to countenance the proposal. The Middle Ages were not to whisper their enchantments here. Apart from arguments over fashion, there was activity enough. All through the decade students, ‘loyal’ or ‘seditious’, attended their nightly lectures, rushing in between to Mrs Brook's tea-room for much-criticized refreshment-until the vexed old lady died, two years after her husband, and the experiments in management began which ended with the taking over of the institution by the Students' Association. All through the decade they worked and took degrees, and won scholarships of various sorts, and did their bits of research and wrote theses with such goodwill that even Debates and Free Discussions come to seem, sometimes, merely minor works of supererogation. They continued the Easter struggle. They kept on celebrating capping, now and again in a fierce frenzy of controversy—controversy with the Professorial Board, over the ceremony and the procession, controversy among themselves, over the extrava- ganzaextravaganza. Their Executive, periodically, was worried to distraction. They kept on starting clubs, and clubs kept on dying, and being revived. They kept on criticizing the University, and following their elders in demanding reform. In the middle of it all came three events, in successive years, which both summarized the past and gave hope for the future; the Silver Jubilee, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the college's founding, in 1924; the Royal Commission on the University, of 1925; and the Weir bequest for a student hostel, of 1926.

What made the year 1921 so fertile of club association? Probably the first fierce post-war devotion to formal studies had spent itself, that making up for lost time from which the college so much took its pattern, and the student was drawing breath. He was expending it too, as we have seen; and now came a Mathematical and Physical Society, a Dramatic Club (which professed to find histrionic talent imperceptible to the more jaundiced critics), the Haeremai Club, and the Tramping Club. In the Haeremai Club gathered those choice spirits who thought that it was sometimes good for men to be alone, sometimes good for them to riot in procession or in the gods at Fuller's Theatre. It was in 1921, too, that college football began one of its great periods of fame, when, though Official Persons might frown upon the unquiet mind of the institution, citizens flocked to Athletic Park to gaze with rapture at the team, and small boys brooded ecstatically upon the existence of George Aitken, chevalier sans peur et sans reproche; for George Aitken was not merely captain of the college first fifteen, but also skipper of the All Blacks, the men who fought the Springboks. There was to be nothing like this till 1928 and 1929, when the team won the senior championship. Must one turn from that blaze to chronicle the death of the Women's Club or its rebirth, the Social Service Club which began in 1924, the short-lived Historical Society of 1925, the Glee Club revived in that year as a Musical Society? Yet the Social Service Club did good and unpretentious work over a period of years; it was a club that grew this time much more from radical social criticism than from Christian philanthropy, and it began by making some study of the causes of the poverty and insanity that gave it so much concern. At least it was a mode of immediate expression for, once more, that social conscience which could otherwise but expend itself in criticism or in aid to the more remote activities of European Student Relief. But of all the clubs of that day, the one most touched with morning was the Tramping Club. The first Sunday afternoon excursions faded into insignificance beside the first September week-end expedition to the Orongorongo, when fifty students straggled over to that watery magnificent valley, and a less number arrived at the top of Mount Matthews; and that gentle walk itself became nothing in comparison with snow-clad or tempest-smitten Tararuas, the exploration of lost spurs and brown-running stony rivers. Cold words cannot register that glory. There were cold words, such as those on a Labour Day week-end: ‘Some fifty miles of walking … over every type of country-road, bush-track, trackless bush, and river-bed.… two crossings of the Rimutakas; the first, by Matthews Saddle, … interesting enough, but not to be compared with the second traverse, made by map and compass near Bau-Bau trig. Ours was probably the first party since the early surveyors to cross these bushy ridges; certainly, no woman had gone through there before.’ But the college women went, in their ‘gym-frills’, or, dresses relegated to swags, in stout and well-tried bloomers. How was the elegance of the Tararua Club despised! There were tough days that became legendary with the participants: the descents of the long ridge from Alpha to Renata and to the Waiotauru stream, the mist and the rain and the supple-jack, eight miles in a twelve-hour day; crawling against the wind at Palliser Bay; the start at two in the morning, the first steep pull after breakfast. But oh the stars at two in the morning the deeps of the bush, the sun in the river-valleys, the sweep of the eye from the hill-tops. Fathers might uneasily feel the weight of swags, but they were repulsed with contempt. Mothers might hesitate—it was a generation ago; but it was all right, Professor Boyd Wilson was to be the chaperon; their daughters tramped. Then came the Christmas trips, to the Urewera (‘Them girl are eroes’ said the store-keeper at Ruatoke), to the Waimakariri; and then, the mountains having been tasted, to how many other peaks. In later days the club took to skis; but nails and crampons were all the founders aspired to; the first ice-axe was handled almost with awe, with a religious joy. The poets went tramping, and trampers became poets; for a while Spike was redolent of manuka and wet fern and the sun on hot hills. No one, unfortunately, kept statistics of rivers crossed, or of the billies of tea that Boyd Wilson boiled.

To come to the domestic problems of the students is to leave romance. The Students' Association, after long years of struggle, in 1924 at last managed to lay the basis of sound finance though the introduction of a special fee—which, not unnaturally, in course of time rose.

The absurdity of the Seddonian regulations for government control of the college could not be better illustrated than by the fact that, until the Victoria College Amendment Act, 1923, set the Council free to fix college fees without government consent, this fee was blocked by the Education Department.

All clubs were now to be formally affiliated to the Association, and, instead of charging each its separate membership fee, would receive a grant for its purposes from the general fund thus compulsorily contributed to; in return, every student was to have the right of membership in every club by simply applying to join. There was even greater difficulty in solving the major problem of Capping. Its members were hard to control. When the Haere-mai Club turned out in force the Executive was helpless. One year the ceremony might be subdued, the next pandemonium; arrangements with the Board were always breaking down. When Brown was Vice-Chancellor he was a much-afflicted man; for in the Town Hall his voice was inaudible, his address on academic ideals was liable to be swallowed up after four minutes in John Brown's Body, and when he threatened to close the proceedings the tormentors would sing For He's a Jolly Good Fellow. In 1927 the Council experimented (once only) with a capping ceremony in the Library, in 1928 there was no ceremony at all. Yet, argued Spike, could anybody deny that the Victoria capping proceedings were the most ority, on Board or Council, could only pity the martyrdom, and wonder at the endurance, of the other centres, and carry on the struggle. From time to time the procession was banned; from time to time the much-tried restaurant proprietors of Wellington refused to have the Undergraduates' Supper within their doors. Yet what memories cling round the sites of those departed firms, the Marble Bar and Gamble and Creed!—the cheerful noise, the home-thrusts between graduates and undergraduates, the professional witticisms, the crocodile march (‘Early in the morning, We went to London, To see all the puff-puffs, Standing in a row!’), the last vociferous sentimental chorus of Absent Friends. The extravaganzas of that period, too, had a chequered history. Women now came into them, at first to dance and then to take speaking parts. By 1923 the Students' Association found it was relying altogether too much On extravaganza profits for the financing of its yearly activities —which might be said therefore to depend on the availability of the Opera House; and the twin demands arose for the student levy and for an extravaganza of the early type, ‘more in touch with college life’. The latter demand issued in the prolonged and frightful struggle of the following year: should the extravaganza be produced by ‘an outside dancing master,’ or should it be, however lamely done, an entirely domestic arrangement? Difficulties accumulated; from 1925 to 1928 there was no extravaganza: and the successful revival of burlesque of 1929 was at the Town Hall on an almost bare stage. But whatever happened, the Capping Ball was a success. The Town Hall was taken. A thousand streamers passed from central chandelier to gallery, a mile of lycopodium hung round the walls, half the flags of the world were gathered into service. The gentlemen dashed hither and thither with their programmes with the fancy lettering and the little pencils hanging from them; the supper was reported promising; the decorations were admired; the gentlemen flicked their patent-leather shoes and pulled on their white cotton gloves; the ladies gave a last touch to the hair, the strap, the bodice; the orchestra struck up Destiny, and the waltz was on. And the Lancers: up and down that shining floor charged the enthusiastic cannoning youth; faster and faster swung the circle, with the laughing ladies off their feet, breathless and staggering as the figure ended; midnight passed into morning, it was the last waltz, the dead-beat piano, fiddle and cornet were summoning up their final energies, it was Destiny again, longing, romance, intoxication; and then it was Auld Lang Syne and the walk home.

There were other balls. Not least wonderful was the Tournament-Jubilee Ball of 1924, which concluded those athletic and sentimental celebrations. Tournament and Jubilee were a happy coincidence, and there was much organization. A special number of Spike appeared, cram-full of affectionate reminiscences which went back to 1899, another Ode, and (how could it be otherwise?) an articled on Freedom of Speech. It was Sir Robert Stout who unveiled that large expanse of stained glass, not altogether fitting for a library, the memorial to the men of the college who had died in the war, their names en- gravedengraved on the brass plates; unveiled it on Good Friday, April 18, the exact and symbolic anniversary of the first lecture. And it was the unveiling which the Ode celebrated. There had to be an Ode. But perhaps it was not quite so confident an Ode as that which had saluted the Foundation Stone of 1904. Too many men had died. The worship of Pallas was difficult.

‘Dear hill if many visions, false or true’— room had to be made for mistakes. There was much to do, a hard and infinite task, before the world was ‘swept of knave and fool’; wisdom, more to be desired than gold, was to be cherished even as it was desired.

You gaze upon the stars and on the sea— Be mindful of the trust you bear, O hill!

There was a luncheon, tremendously followed by eloquence and toasts, beginning with Sir Francis Bell, and rising to a climax for the students of the twenties with Mr Martin Smith, ‘who maintained in the face of all the world and its officialdom, the right of a University to free thought and free speech’. There was a famous concert for the old-timers. There was a church service in which, somehow, the Free Discussions Club and other rationalists got mixed up, marching in procession from the Town Hall to St Paul's in academic garb, led by Brown and—it must be told—the Hon. C. J. Parr. And Spike, recording all this, began to look forward to twenty-five years more and a real celebration, a substantial jubilee, a fiftieth anniversary.

Demands for University Reform had never ceased. Within the college students would burst into rage from time to time over examination methods, and Spike would denounce the System with all the fire of 1911. More effectually, outside the college, the Victoria and Canterbury reformers were carrying on their struggle through the Board of Studies that had been set up in 1914. They were determined not merely to do away with English examination, but to re-shape the bachelor's degree, to convert the old ‘six-subject’ degree, in its general effect so ludicrous, to the modern ‘nine-unit’ degree; and they were determined to reform administration. Even the re-shaping of the degree, however, met with strenuous resistance, and as early as 1919 the Board of Studies resolved in favour of four separates universities. Stout's relinquishment of the chancellorship in 1923 merely set another die-hard in his place, in Macmillan Brown. In 1924 Auckland, exasperated over the Senate's conduct of matters concerning the ‘special schools’, demanded separation. Hunter felt the time had come for a clean break. ‘The Senate is no longer a body that can deal effectively and honestly with the problems of university education in New Zealand’, he wrote. ‘These are centered in the colleges, and the sooner these teaching institutions are freed from the incubus of the University of New Zealand the better it will be for university education and for the higher training of the youth of this Dominion.

Special Schools: Attitude of the University Senate’, in The Spike, September 1924, p. 15.

Mr Parr was an Auckland man, and quite willing to shine as a reformer when Auckland demanded it, and indeed all the colleges except Otago now wanted a royal commission. Mr Parr promised one, and it was appointed, at last, in April 1925. Sir Harry Reichel and Mr Frank Tate recommended everything the Reformers had fought for, except the splitting of the University. In one respect they went farther—they recommended student representation on college councils. The long struggle, it seemed, was not to be uncrowned with victory. Even the Free Discussions Club had its reward. The club had written to the Commission, asking that its report should emphasize the necessity of freedom for university teachers, and ‘the freedom of students to interest themselves in all questions of what sort soever, whether academic in the narrow sense, or of contemporary political or social importance’. The Commission was sympathetic, its report was satisfactory on these points; it proclaimed that students should have unfettered control of their non-academic life. There was jubilation. When the president of the Student's Association, R.M. Campbell, went down to the Senate meeting in 1926 and persuaded the Senate to approve of undergraduate representation on college councils, there was almost stupefaction. Were the foundations of the world to moves? But that particular constitutional reform was not to come to college for twelve more years, not till the Statutes Amendment Act of 1938. The government gave the University as much reform as it thought fit in the University Act of 1926, and men settled down to see what they could do with the muddle.

Meanwhile all agitation for improvement within seemed to come at last, infallibly, to the necessity of a residential college. whether it was the decay in knowledge of the old capping songs, or the reluctance of large numbers of students to remain late at night discussing the cosmos, or the unsatisfactory nature of human relations, or the general impossibility of welding eight hundred students, the majority of whom were part-time, into one corporate whole, the remedy seemed to be a residential college—or at least a hostel. The Council agreed, everybody agreed. There was an architect's and engineer's report on the available college land, all ifs and buts. The gymnasium and the tennis courts might go; still, the exchange would be worth while. Then, quite suddenly, there was a suggestion that the college might acquire the Martin Kennedy estate, across the Kelburn tramway line; the government would make a grant of £5000, the Council began to negotiate with the Hospital Board for a clear title; and Spike called on students to do their part in raising funds. At that moment died Mr William Weir, bequeathing the college between seventy and eighty thousand pounds for the provision and maintenance of a hostel for men. Weir was a friend of Stout. And Stout had done his work well. It was astonishing, staggering. Under the University Act of 1914 a government subsidy was payable, pound for pound. A hundred and fifty thousand pounds! It was more than staggering, it was incredible. Incredible it turned out to be. The Martin Kennedy site was acquired, the architects drew up the plans. And the government amended the University Act to limit its subsidy on any bequest to £25,000. Well, even that meant £100,000. How wonderful it was; would not the domestic critics now be confounded?–would not ‘college spirit’ flower as never before? Was not one problem a step nearer solution?

VIII The Thirties

Before that question can be answered, one must consider the nature of the decade that was now at hand. The decade that had just gone began with an uneasy peace but had its days of hope; this one began with depression and ended with war. As the community suffered, so did the college; and as its students reacted with a lively intelligence to the ills of the world around them, it suffered also from the community. Once again academic freedom was called in question; one again, on both sides, there were bitter words. In the more cheerful air that came with a change of government and with the slow lifting of the depression, the college also shared; and again, reacting as it had done year by year to the pressure of the outside events which it could not control, it did what it could, without heroics, in a war which seemed to make ineluctable demands. Beneath a good deal of froth, the decade was a serious one. ‘All our traditions are in the melting-pot’, men were accustomed to say, in those weary or hopeful years; and indeed, from time to time there seemed to be a boiling-up of mores, of the customs as well as the relations of society, which resulted in the production of what the conservative chose to regard as scum. The college too was a crucible, beneath which the fire of ideas was perhaps a little hotter than it was outside. But the fire was no mere crackling of thorns; there was something fundamental about a great deal of the discussion that went on in those days, a sense that lives were at stake; a sense, which had never been so deep before, that the college was part of the world, and that students would suffer with the world, and that there was no escape. There was by turns an exasperation and rage, a tenseness and a solemnity, which would have seemed strange to the optimistic versifiers and footballers of the foundation years, could they have been undergraduates again.

Yet, of course, there was not always the sense of disaster. There was laughter, and argument about unimportant things, there were the skits as well as the impassioned harangues of college journalism, clubs continually sprang anew, the weary and the cynical were matched by the fresh and idealistic, there was the regular foundation of lectures and examinations, the output of degrees, the triumphs as well as the despairs of college life. Amid a world that seemed dedicated to the breaking up of civilized relationships, young men and women continued to dance and to read, to contemplate the objects of their admiration and to fall in love. The decade is a very tangled one indeed.

The depression hit the college in obvious ways. The government whose unhappy task it was to fight off ruin was ill equipped for its struggle in knowledge or in imagination. To economize was its simple creed; the National Expenditure Act was the legislative expression of that creed. Education was an expense which might well be limited, for it gave no immediate and material return; Ministers of Education were appointed not because they were interested in education, but because they were ‘strong men’. The teachers' training colleges were closed, and the university colleges lost students and students' fees. Statutory grants were reduced, so that Victoria, with £11,750 in 1930 and an additional grant for the chair of education, by 1932 was brought down to £7,350, no longer statutory but subject to annual vote; bursaries were heavily reduced, students found it difficult to pay fees, and there was the hostel débâcle.

More than anything else, in some ways, was there disappointment in the hostel. William Weir's bequest was magnificent, and the government subsidy it carried made it dazzling. So the plans drawn up were on a generous scale.

The architects were W. Gray Young and Francis H. Swan. There was to be a break away from Collegiate Gothic to a style entitled ‘English Renaissance’.

But this was reckoning without the subsidizer; the government had hurried to amend the University Act to limit the amount of its subsidies, even then it refrained from actually making a payment, and after the depression's onset refused to pay anything at all. It never paid anything. Meanwhile a large and massive system of foundations had been laid, Plans were modified considerably, a whole block was abandoned, then another re-designing became necessary in the alarm caused by the Napier earthquake, and when Weir House was finally opened in March 1933, it was, though a large building, not the hostel that had been dreamed of. Certainly, it accommodated ninety students in what seemed to the outsider a high degree of elegance, with warden and matron to watch over them; but it was clear that this admirable institution had by no means solved a problem. Its waiting list was all too long. Inmates did not wish to leave, and a certain proportion of the elders had to be dismissed each year to make room for others; a procedure which—the expelled gentlemen argued, with scandalized solemnity—gravely imperiled the ‘traditions of the House’ by removing all those of seniority, light and leading. It was sad, but it was equitable, and the need for hostels, before many years had passed, was greater than ever before. On the surplus foundations were built bungalows for the maids; notwithstanding which the college found, in due course, that it could not escape the Servant Problem. How difficult it was, one way and another, to run a school of learning! Nevertheless, with all the difficulties, Weir House gave the college something it needed; for a minority, at least, there could be the experience of a corporate life.

Corporate life, on whatever basis, was all the more valuable in these years of strain, when the student was so much inclined to feel himself on the defensive. There was, it must be admitted, at this period a strain even in the relations between the Professorial Board and the students, somewhat different from the happy ease of twenty years before. Of all gulfs, the gulf between the generations is hardest to bridge; and in the college, though the successive generations of students remained young, catching their tone either unconsciously or with eager awareness from the changing world, the senior members of the staff were beginning, as the years fled by, to lose their elasticity of mind and sympathies. How could it be otherwise? The Council also was unsympathetic to too much youthful ebullience, for ebullience tended to be radical, and as depression threw up its natural rebellion, the conservatism of age became more manifest. Could, the anti-authoritarian, the liberal and humane, was chairman of the Board over the most difficult of these years, and it was due to him, probably, that the strain was rendered tolerable. But even Could at times felt caught in forces very hard to withstand. The strain between students and Board was not continuous, differences was not deliberate, but often enough a puzzled irritation was there, the attempt to understand and remedy difference had to be deliberate. Why did members of the staff not take part in the social life of the college, the complaint was apt to arise, why did professors not know students, why was the ‘student point of view’ ignored? Why, the answer was apt to be made, were students so very prone to bad taste, why so reckless in bringing on their heads, in a time so anxious, the criticism of respectable citizens? The time changed, and circumstances changed, and the gulf became narrower again; but it is not a thing to be ignored in the life of any community. When for instance, in 1931, the Executive of the Students' Association sent a deputation to the government, on behalf of the students of the other three colleges as well as their own, to protest against the reduction in bursaries, neither the Board nor the Council would co-operate. Doubtless they felt it would be unwise to harass the government (the University was fighting the point), but to the young it seemed that their elders had weakly desisted, and left public action to the Association. On the other hand when the young became bitter over the fees they had to pay, they were not always careful to verify the justice of their complaints.

It was in 1933 that dissension exploded most forcefully both within the college and in the press; in a manner reminiscent of Mr Parr's absurd activities in the 1920's, but immensely complicated by the added stresses of this new time. It is necessary to recall clearly the nature of the time. In 1932 and 1933 the depression was at its worst, and the mind of the country was not normal. Parliament was alarmist, the public was upset; riots had taken place or were threatened, unemployment was vainly met by relief works and mayors' funds, by soup-kitchens and private beneficence; an outbreak of pamphleteering and the importation of ‘revolutionary’literature was met by repressive legislation of the most foolish nature; public servants and teachers were thrown into a state almost of panic by the threat of dismissal for any ‘public statement’ by which any one of them might have ‘sought to bring the government of New Zealand into disrepute’.

The Finance Act, 1932, Section 59. For this period the documents and narrative given in F. A. de la Mare, Academic Freedom in New Zealand, 1932–34 (Auckland, 1935), are very useful.

The university colleges were all, to some degree, affected by the excitement, though it was in Auckland that the greatest clamour was heard about the defences of academic freedom. In Wellington the issues were by no means so clearly defined, and they were bedeviled by stupidities on most sides of the many-sided argument. Over the college, it must be admitted, brooded a sort of fear: if there was another cut in the grant, would there be another cut in salaries?–or would departments be closed down, and which would be the first to go?–or would the last appointed be the first dismissed? Likely candidates for destruction began to be eyed with something of the interest bestowed, in an open boat, upon cabin-boys destined to provide the next meal for starving mariners, and anxiously did the cabin-boys search the horizon for a rescuing sail. Outside the college the foe that was feared was, of course, ‘communism’, though it may be asserted that relatively few people cared to find out what ‘communism’ was; and in the general alarm even persons trained in an older tradition of liberalism were liable to lose touch with reality. The more they lost touch, the more they conceded to the communist case. It is not surprising that a small number of able and critically-minded students (the really able critics are always few in number) were attracted by the seeming rigour of communist of the dialectic which they saw around them. They were vigorous speakers and writers, even if they did find it difficult to refrain from the jargon of the Faith. They naturally had a number of sympathizers, and just as naturally a large number of opponents, among their fellow students. They were not, on the whole, ‘tactful’; but there are worse things in young men than lack of tact. They represented at this time the social conscience that the college had always had, more alive and more urgent simply because the demands of life on the reformer were more urgent.

They were balanced by almost as many grades of reformer as existed in New Zealand, rationalist or Christian, and certainly students, with a capping procession to collect money for unemployed relief, a special extravaganza performance for the same purpose, and concert parties at relief camps, bore their part in the ordinary well-doing of the time. It was perhaps those efforts that enabled the mayor to say, at Capping 1932 (gaining an approval unusual for a mayor), that undergraduates represented the eternal spirit of unrest, and were thereby a foundation for progress; but other citizens had less tolerance for the eternal spirit of unrest. It was in that year that the Board also began to show anxiety;

Possibly at the direction of the Minister of Education, who seems to have warned the Chairman of the Council against allowing communists on the college premises.

it refused to allow the Free Discussions Club to debate the proposition that communism would give a better social order, unless the invitation to one of the outside speakers, a member of the Communist party, were cancelled; it ruled furthermore that no club should invite outside speakers to the college unless the list had first been submitted to the Board and approved. This caused indignation, but it was not till the following year that everybody was involved in struggle—student, with student, students with Board and with Council, students and Board and Council with the press, the gutter-press, and correspondents of the press. Never had there been such dissension; never did the official representatives of the college cut a less happy figure.

It is sometimes argued that poets derive part of their significance from being the advance guard of human progress, aware to, and registering, the aery currents of change. Students may share this significance with them—at least they do keep ahead of the ordinary sluggish mass of the community. Cf. Smad, Vol. 3, No. 1 (March 1932): ‘This is the era of the struggle of fundamental against fundamental. The sharp line of demarcation is being drawn between mighty rival camps. On the one hand stands the believer in the Divine Creator, on the other the atheist. The Capitalist and the Communist gird themselves for the determination of the basic rights of man. The Militarist clings tenaciously to the sword that the Pacifist would hurl into the deepest ocean. It would seem that these vital issues will in our own generation come to a head…’ etc. It was of course the students' duty to give a lead. It was just this sort of thing, commonplace now, and not very rare them, that New Zealand disliked. Very few people, indeed, even among students, like a clarlon call to action.

The year began, in April, with the passing by the Debating Society of the motion (on the Oxford model) ‘That this House will not fight for King and Country’. That was bound to cause a stir. Then a number of students took part in breaking a strike of ships' stewards—a proceeding that could hardly endear them as a class to the Labour movement. In May the Free Discussions Club began to publish a small, extremely radical stenciled, paper, student, which left little unattacked except the ‘cause of mankind’. (‘Varsity remains aloof from life, but its falseness is part of the great falseness that we see in life all around us.’) After two numbers, further publication was prohibited by the Executive on the score of blatant inaccuracy of statement, and when the editors defiantly issued a third the club was disaffiliated from the Students'Association. The ‘Welfare League’ was still in existence, and still attacking the college, and it was now joined by a quite suitable brother in arms, the weekly New Zealand Truth, the unrestrained eloquence of which was crowned by an article entitled ‘Twisted Teaching’–an elaboration of the theme that if students were disloyal, seditious, and depraved, they must have been guided into iniquity by their teachers. The Debating Society went on to discuss birth control, which in the contemporary world was being discussed a good deal. Then the league and its comrade found, in addition to the support of the usual newspaper correspondents, an ally in a Canon James, a rather foolish person with an ecclesiastical talent for overstatement, whom for some reason—perhaps his official connection with the pro-cathedral—the college proceeded to take seriously. ‘The opinion is widely held… plastic minds… deepest and most sacred convictions of the greatest part of the people of New Zealand… parents… apprehension… haunting dread … accepted moral standards’–this masterpiece of shop-soiled phraseology concluded with the desire that the authorities of the college would ‘assure us’ that the trust committed to their hands was honoured, and that abuse of it would not go unchecked. Even Could was alarmed. James was invited to make specific complaints to the Board. The Council, which had once defied the whole country, and was now the scene of a gratuitous attack upon Hunter by one of its own number, resolved to set up a committee of enquiry. The indignation of some members of the staff was ignored. The committee regretted debates on ‘sexual and religious subjects’, asserted that the religious faith of students was immune form assault and that disloyalty was under supervision; pointed proudly to the positions of honour occupied by old students in the Church, the Judiciary, Commerce and every other useful phase of activity; and remarked, of the ‘very small number [of Students] whose conduct and beliefs are in conflict with the great majority of the community’, that their influence must, and would, be restrained within reasonable bounds. The Council would welcome any assistance offered to enable it to fulfill its responsibilities; it concluded with reaffirming its confidence in the professors and lecturers. It is an ignoble document, but it is one the faithful historian cannot pass over. The Board forbade debates on religion, and ordered the omission of sex from all public discussion. Kirk alone had his say in the Evening Post on ‘Twisted Teaching’. That courteous man knew when and how to smite.

While the Council was thus deplorably engaged, spike was in preparation. It appeared in October, the month of the surrender to James and of the Board's manifesto on discussion and debate. It was an intelligent and ably edited number, to which students were later to look back as an example of excellent liveliness and fairness in the presentation of radically opposed points of view. It had a good deal to say about freedom of thought and expression, even to the severe censuring of the Students' Association Executive. That would not have mattered. It contained also an extremely able examination of the methods of the Law faculty of the college, entitled; Untwisted Teaching'.

Its author later joined the Law faculty himself.

That mattered very much indeed to Professor Admission, who had no truck with the modern sociological approach to his science. It contained also two articles which a legal person on the Council stated were seditious. No other legal person has ever appeared to agree with him, but the Board again took alarm. Spike was banned. Whether the alarm would have been so great, whether the ban would have been imposed if the outcries of Adamson had been less agitated, is a question that may be discussed; for when the withdrawn Spike was re-issued, not merely had the ‘seditious’ articles disappeared, but also ‘Untwisted teaching’. The Students' Association called a special general meeting to protest; the Board replied to the Executive's letter that it had merely banned sedition; the Council, that ‘both the tone and substance of the letter are, in the opinion of the Council, such as to show that supervision and control of student activities are required’. This was a snub very difficult to forgive. Graduates came to the support of students in an informal meeting of the Court of convocation, which demanded the resignation of Council members elected by it; which gentlemen of course did not resign. Within two years the Council, in making an appointment to the staff, was to show itself moved by a political bias which men had proudly thought alien to this college; and the fact that it nevertheless made an excellent appointment cannot exonerate it. Fortune, whose blind favours have so often passed Victoria by, has also on occasion been kind.

One turns with relief to other matters. Stout died in 1930, seven years after his retirement from the Council of the college he had done so much to bring into existence, and four years after founding a scholarship to celebrate his golden wedding. he gave the college books as well as money, and he gave it what may perhaps be called affection as well as advice. Whatever one may think of his educational career, that queer amalgam of wisdom, disinterested labour and clever and stubborn folly, one is not to think that he made enemies—how could be, when his attitude to the younger men he fought was one of almost paternal, as it was of gladly-remembered, benevolence? Stout was exasperating, but he was kind; and it is fitting that his portrait should have been hung in the Library in 1932, blessing, as it were, the workers there, in his chancellor's robes, and with that simple, that deceptively simple, smile. Other portraits followed in 1934, the subscription paintings of three of the first four professors, with a re-modelled, a stream-lined Maclaurin added by American bounty; with still another Ode, much reminiscent and good-humoured oratory, and a Spike full of college history. Then in 1935 the fine portrait of von Zedlitz joined them, the gift of one of his old students, happy in its symbolism, signal in its accomplishment; which he himself gazed at and mocked as the ‘simian sensualist’.

Stout's portrait is by Mrs Tripe: the foundation professors were painted by Archibald F. Nicoll: von Zedlitz, by Christopher Perkins.

In the following year the man whom college men and women had never ceased to call professor was made by the Council professor emeritus, a tribute which there was none who would not applaud; for the affection felt for Von had deepened into something like veneration.

The decade saw a good deal of going and coming; by its end the professoriate had become in large part notably young again. In 1935 there were three changes. Miles, mathematics lecturer since 1926, succeeded shy and learned Sommerville– Miles with his astonishingly wide reading and his steady refusal ever to be stampeded; ‘F.P.’, retiring to cultivate his garden, gave place in history to the judicious Wood, full of zeal for the tutorial system; and Cornish becoming solicitor-general, his place was taken by the brilliant Williams, whose young researches had cast light even into the Statue of Frauds. Then, at the end of 1936, Mackenzie retired. It seemed the end of an epoch; for, though Brown was left, he was left as a survivor, debating how soon he should leave the scene, and with his service prolonged almost ten years more only through the exigency of another war. Mackenzie was never more reminiscent, never more genial, than in those valedictory speeches of his, with the inevitable quips at Brown. Not for fundamental scholarships, not for fundamental reforms, not for any defiance of petty tyranny would he be remembered, but for fundamental humanity, tolerance, simplicity, generosity of spirit. He could not be said to leave at peace with the world—the old man had a battle to fight, he was going to assail the superannuation system as once he had assailed the Bible-in-Schools League. But, alas! he did not live long enough; only for three years more did his friendly visiting bulk climb the college stairs, and then the watch chain, the black clerical hat, the smile of greeting were gone. In the English department arrived another Scot from Edinburgh, one of Grierson's young men, the spirited, the critical and active Gordon. Within another two years, after a great deal of discussion on the relation of the University to the public service, the government had granted a sum for a department of poli- ticalpolitical science and public administration. Was Victoria at last to take the place which Stout's vision had assigned to it so long ago? At least a band of public service bursars were to come to it, for special training; and young Leslie Lipson, of whom the Master of Balliol spoke so very admiringly, spangled over with Oxford honours, was given the chair. There were new lecturers too, in most departments, in the second half of the decade, able—some of them extremely able—men. And in 1938, almost twenty years after the need had been first seen (by Stout, of course) the part-time office of Principal was instituted, an academic head of the college more permanent than an overworked chairman of the Professorial Board. The chairmen, from Maclaurin to Miles, had most of them given no inconsiderable service, but for a college with a thousand students even a principalship that was only part-time was something of a makeshift. To the new office, inevitably, Hunter was appointed. That startling event of the following year, his knighthood in the Order of the British Empire, could not add to his distinction in the eyes of those amid whom he worked, it took some getting used to; but certainly, it was felt, no man had deserved better of the Commonwealth.

That knighthood itself had significance. This was the first time that academic persons

There were two knighthoods thus conferred. The other was upon Sir William Benham, lately Professor of Biology at the University of Otago.

In New Zealand, outside the Medical School, had been so honoured, and it was indicative of the real regard which government was at last showing for university. With Peter Fraser as Minister (the same seditious fellow whose presence on the Debating Society's platform had caused that anguish in his predecessor Parr, and to whom Hunter had taken literary comfort in the Terrace Goal),

Mr Fraser, as a member of Hunter's W.E.A. class, was technically a student of Victoria College, so that the college may, for purposes of glorification, claim the present Governor-General, Prime Minister and Chief Justice, all three, as old students.

and with depression lightening, the effort was no longer to see how little could be spent on education, but how much. Staffing became easier, hearts became lighter. The previous government, in the election year, had materially raised the college vote, and in 1936, the first year of Labour rule, immediately it went up to over £14,000. In 1937 a grant for new buildings was announced—the Administration block and the large Biology building which would be Kirk's memorial even without the bronze relief and plaque affixed to its walls, and that £50,000 was followed by the annual £2000 for political science. More than in the twenties, it seemed, a great age lay ahead of the college; and then came the war.

Student numbers, which had been growing, with one or two minor setbacks, ever since 1919, fell drastically in 1933, with a corresponding rise in the number of those who were ‘exempted’ and working on their own.

Statistics of these numbers, taken over the whole course of college history, need a good deal of interpretation, but there can be no mistake over the effect of the depression. Relevant numbers (exempted students in parenthesis) are: 1919, 534(31); 1920, 680(58); 1930, 840(238); 1933, 670(344); 1936, 847(277); 1939, 1088(214).

The fall was temporary and it certainly, as we have seen, meant no cessation in student liveliness; though this student generation, like every other, flagellated itself for its lack of college spirit and looked back longingly on a legendary more heroic past. The opening of the decade found the Students' Association, or rather its Executive, wrestling with the constitutional problem. Certain reformers were not satisfied with the mode of election to the Executive—a democracy of eight hundred which elected its leaders at annual general meetings was indeed causing difficulties—and an ingenious system was thought out for a college of electors based on the clubs. The college of electors having been incorporated in the constitution, it was decided to redraft the constitution entirely; then women students found they were suffering under a gross injustice, with only three votes as against the thirty-one of the men; the college was riven by factions, and after a series of stormy meetings the new electoral system was thrown out in favour of general ballot over a period of days. Then the Executive was charged with spending too lavishly on sporting clubs; it was, ran one pathetic assertion, ‘turning the college into a species of Community Club for the cultivation of bone and muscle. I am a voice crying in a wilderness of goal-posts, hockey balls, tennis racquets and bone-heads’. Such things are the incidents of democracy, and they tend to right themselves when criticism is lively and incessant. There were more difficult problems facing the Executive, some of them temporary, some which seemed almost permanent. In 1932 the Association took over the running of the cafeteria, no easy business; in the same year a Permanent Building Committee was set up, to foster the idea of a Students' Union building more adequate to growing needs than the simple unpretentious Gym, which had had to serve so many different purposes, and which was now, as its overworked timbers began to give out, the subject of some natural if unmerited contempt. That involved the fostering of a fund, and extravaganza profits were set aside year by year as a nucleus—and unfortunate nucleus, however large it grew; for the longer the Association had to wait for a building, the higher the cost of a building soared.

On the much-suffering shoulders of the Executive fell also the management of relations with Board and Council at this singularly difficult time. If it now and again made a false step it may, with the passage of years, be forgiven. It was dealing, not with a quite isolated fragment of humanity, but with a piece of the uneasy world. Students were an unfortunate section of New Zealand society, in that suffering from the same strains, undergoing the same changes of mores as that society in that world, at that time, they were yet coherent enough and prominent enough as a group for their disturbances, their utterances, or their failings to attract an undue measure of attention and of rage. When society at large is (or should be) in a guilty mood, or is merely passing through a period of dislocation, nothing is so excellently useful as a scapegoat. And there, all too visible on its hill, was the Sabbath-desecrating, the seditious, the immoral animal, at the thought of which (according to Canon Percival James) parents shuddered; at the noise of which politicians trembled; at the sight of which policeman were warned to be ready. Indeed students as a group drank more than they used to, and drank more publicly, and in the depression period a lack of moderation on the outskirts of college dances forced the Executive to take a stern stand, and caused the Board to employ a ‘Commissionaire’ to patrol cars in the grounds. Was the phenomenon peculiar to students? More unfortunate, because it lasted longer, was the descent in taste that marked a new sort of capping programme, the annual Cappicade–a programme which could be sold in thousands, and so contribute to that justification of all endeavour, however, came during the later war years; and again is a mark not so much of a peculiar student depravity, as of the onset of the vast forces that were bestriding the world. The Verbal wit of Glibert had gone with the musical phrase of Sullivan. There is an erosion of manners as well as of hillsides; and the college, to some extent, was bound to suffer.

10The most damaging charge against university students is not, of course, the moral one that their ‘wit’ was ‘indecent’, but the intellectual one that it was so very dull.

Extravaganzas themselves were sometimes excellent—or rather, to define truth more exactly, excellent in parts; the Board itself congratulated the Association on Redmond Phillips' Murder in the Common Room, which went to some trouble to guy the professoriate; but though the extravaganza went on, in 1937 Cappicade was censured and the procession banned for an indefinite future.

Clubs continued to be born, to sink into oblivion, to be reincarnated. In the middle of the decade there were about thirty of them. Club notes in Spike had to be given a general preface on ‘Sport in Review’. A Harrier Club was added to the other agencies of bodily exhaustion in 1932, and basketball began about the same time. There was a Literary Society, which died and was succeeded by the Phoenix Club, more ambitious in its devotion to all the arts; a Commerce Society was started to ‘safeguard the interests’ of students in the Commerce Faculty and to secure the reintroduction of accountancy lectures, which had lapsed; there were a Photographic Club and a Biological Society and a Chemical Society; a Fencing Club and a Labour Club and a Historical Association. Tramping and debating flourished, drama had its best days. Religious faith had its surges and relapses; the S.C.M., reflecting, at some distance, the general religious movement of western Protestantism, had become exceedingly liberal in its basis, it hardly ever mentioned a missionary; it had become, the charge was made, a Slightly Christian Movement, a mere ‘ethical debating society’. Perhaps here was the reason for the foundation of the Evangelical Union, an odd body to find in this college, a small, naively fundamentalist group of earnest souls whose emotions needed some more thorough-going catharsis than was given by ethical debates. But ethical debates were coming to an end; the neo-Lutheranism of the theologian Karl Barth was seeping into student religion; ‘Zarathustra’ appealed for an organization (the Free Discussions Club, he argued, being moribund) to combat the propaganda spread by the S.C.M.; the ‘Oxford group’ movement had its temporary effect; ‘the present craze is Christianity’, noted Spike in 1936.

Spike continued to be a mirror of college life, but it was now not alone. Spike the critic had it own critics; it was ‘a pathetic periodical published by apathetic people’, charged one of them. Amid the continuous machine-gun rattle of argument, with the occasional heavy explosions, Spike, appearing but twice a year, was getting behindhand, it was even liable to be irrelevant; and the decision was taken to publish it from 1931 merely as an annual, of more specifically literary content. The throb and bustle of life was to go into a new monthly, Smad (Sapientia Magis Auro Desideranda), which in 1935 became a fortnightly, assuming a newspaper form, with an imposing list of editors and reporters, and equally imposing headlines. It proclaimed (though it did not define) the ‘natural rights of university students’; it was all for the pitiless light of publicity; it took to task, as occasion demanded, students—in the mass, in groups, or singly—the Board, or the Council; it was in fact very much what the first editors of Spike would have produced if they had been undergraduates in 1930 and not 1902. Its early numbers were highly diverting; they contained some really brilliant satirical writing, and some satire that had to be apologized for, by Executive or editors—did not Spike have to learn what a razor-edge one trod above the gulf of libel? Sometimes it jeered at, sometimes it pleaded for, Spike; and in 1937 Spike turned upon it, as a squib whose damp day was done. Smad (the charges have some truth) had become parochial, immature, feeble in diction, it had sunk to the standard of a form magazine in a secondary school, it was irregular in issue and in distribution; ‘if it cannot be reformed it must be abandoned’. Smad was abandoned and the weekly Salient was started. Salient was not going to be parochial. ‘The spirit of the times demanded’, said Salient's first number, in March 1938, ‘that any suggestion of Olympian grandeur or academic isolation from the affairs of the world should be dropped and should be replaced by a policy which aims firstly to link the University more closely to the realities of the world; and secondly, to comment upon rather than report in narrative style the activities of the college clubs’, Students were qualified to hold political views, ran the editorial dogma, and a number of able editorials expressed those views without mincing matters. Spike, reviewing the first year, admired: the paper had dealt intelligently, if not always impartially, with current controversy; let it beware of elique control and develop as a journal that would record and mould opinion both within and without the University.

Hang on to our ideals, urged Salient, and we shall achieve something. If we fail to play our part in achieving the ideal, ‘then the University is not fulfilling its function in the community and we, as University students, are grossly abusing our opportunities and privileged’. And indeed, from about 1934 the note of most serious college thought, whether it issued in journalism or not, was a note of urgency. There was plenty of ‘apathy’; there was plently of conformity with ordinary confused public opinion; there was plenty of opposition to the radical, the too-logical, the too-social (the strike-breakers of 1933 are not to be forgotten). There were still simple people who believed only in class-tests and football. The defects of some of the Weir House inmates were astringently criticized in the 1935 Spike, ‘as mainly an easily predictable result of building a palace where full-time students can break their contacts with the world outside and batten light-heartedly behind the cloisters.’ It was a result easily predictable, of course, only after the event, and the cloister'd vice, or fugitive virtue, was not peculiar to Weir. There, as a matter of fact, the ills of the world got a good deal of discussion. Discussion at large became more and more social, and social discussion more and more political. How could it be else? The very title of Salient, where so much of this discussion received a point, was characteristic of those days of the United Front, the Left Book Club, and the intellectual deference of Democracy—it was to stand out as the projection of the free mind, a fortification of the spirit. It had its japing moments, its bursts of aesthetic intoxication (the Russian Ballet came, or the B Minor Mass was played on the Carnegie gramophone), its rambling controversies; but what its editors wanted it to be one of them put into the verse:

Send out, Salient, the swift satiric point, To smart the sluggard mind awake, While Freedom anywhere in bonds is pent No compromise with falseness make. Those freed today tomorrow forth must leap Some further outpost there to take and keep.

Discussion, discussion, social and political discussion. How could a ‘literary’ pattern be imposed on Spike? College poets were social poets, they were up-to-date on their Spender and Auden. The Free Discussion Club, after its misadventures of 1933, tried a policy of college speakers, smaller meetings but keener discussion instead of polite questions to a lecturer. It could not last, there was the Italian consul to hear on Abyssinia, the Germen consul to hear on the Nazi theme, famous meetings which went on far into the night and sent the consuls away displeased (the German consul walked out);