The poet who wrote the hexameter quoted on the title-page meant it to be the first line of a Latin epic. The epic was not written—in Latin at any rate,—and the poet’s change of purpose had consequences of moment to literature. But I have always been glad that the line quoted was rescued from the fire, for it fits our islands very well. They are, indeed, on the bounds of the watery world. Beyond their southern outposts the seaman meets nothing till he sees the iceblink of the Antarctic. From the day of its annexation, so disliked by Downing Street, to the passing of those experimental laws so frowned upon by orthodox economists, our colony has contrived to attract interest and cause controversy. A great deal has been written about New Zealand; indeed, the books and pamphlets upon it form a respectable little library. Yet is the picture which the average European reader forms in his mind anything like the islands? I doubt it. The patriotic [2]but misleading name, “The Britain of the South,” is responsible for impressions that are scarcely correct, while the map of the world on Mercator’s Projection is another offender. New Zealand is not very like Great Britain, though spots can be found there—mainly in the province of Canterbury and in North Otago—where Englishmen or Scotsmen might almost think themselves at home. But even this likeness, pleasant as it is at moments, does not often extend beyond the foreground, at any rate as far as likeness to England is concerned. It is usually an effect produced by the transplanting of English trees and flowers, cultivation of English crops and grasses, acclimatisation of English birds and beasts, and the copying more or less closely of the English houses and dress of to-day. It is a likeness that is the work of the colonists themselves. They have made it, and are very proud of it. The resemblance to Scotland is not quite the same thing. It sometimes does extend to the natural features of the country. In the eastern half of the South Island particularly, there are landscapes where the Scot’s memory, one fancies, must often be carried back to the Selkirks, the peaks of Arran, or the Highland lochs of his native land. Always, however, it is Scotland under a different sky. The New Zealanders live, on the average, twelve degrees nearer the equator than do dwellers in the old country, and though the chill of the Southern Ocean makes the change of climate less than the difference of latitude would lead one to expect, it is still considerable. The skies are bluer and higher, the air [3]clearer, and the sun much hotter than in the British Isles. The heavens are a spacious dome alive with light and wind. Ample as the rainfall is, and it is ample almost everywhere, the islands, except in the south-west, strike the traveller as a sunny as well as a bracing country. This is due to the ocean breezes and the strength of the sunshine. The average number of wet days in the year is 151; but even a wet day is seldom without sunshine, it may be for some hours, it will be at least a few gleams. Such a thing as a dry day without a ray of brilliance is virtually unknown over four-fifths of the colony. I once had the felicity of living in London during twenty-two successive days in which there was neither a drop of rain nor an hour of sunshine. If such a period were to afflict New Zealand, the inhabitants would assuredly imagine that Doomsday was at hand. “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun,” is a text which might be adopted as a motto for the islands.
 
“PARADISE,” LAKE WAKATIPU
In the matter of climate the islanders are certainly the spoilt children of Nature; and this is not because the wind does not blow or the rain fall in their country, but because of what Bishop Selwyn called “the elastic air and perpetual motion” which breed cheerfulness and energy all the year round. Of all European climates it resembles most closely, perhaps, that of the coasts of France and Spain fronting on the Bay of Biscay. Round New Zealand are the same blue, sparkling, and uneasy seas, and the same westerly winds, [4]often wet and sometimes rising into strong gales. And where France and Spain join you may see in the Pyrenees very much such a barrier of unbroken mountains as the far-reaching, snowy chains that form the backbone of the islands of the south. Further, though mountainous, ours is an oceanic country, and this prevents the climate from being marked by great extremes. It is temperate in the most exact sense of the word. The difference between the mean of the hottest month and the mean of the coldest month is not more than fifteen degrees in most of the settlements. Christchurch is an exception, and even in Christchurch it is only twenty degrees. In Wellington the mean for the whole year is almost precisely the same as in St. Louis in the United States. But the annual mean is often a deceitful guide. St. Louis is sixteen degrees warmer in summer and seventeen degrees colder in winter than Wellington; and that makes all the difference when comfort is concerned. Wellington is slightly cooler than London in midsummer, and considerably warmer in winter. Finally, in the matter of wind, the European must not let himself be misled by the playful exaggerations in certain current New Zealand stories. It is not the case that the experienced citizen of Wellington clutches convulsively at his hat whenever he turns a street-corner in any city of the world; nor is it true that the teeth of sheep in the Canterbury mountain valleys are worn down in their efforts to hold on to the long tussock grass, so as to save themselves from being blown away [5]by the north-west gales. Taken as a whole, our land is neither more nor less windy than the coasts of the English Channel between Dover and the Isle of Wight. I write with the advantage of having had many years’ experience of both climates.
 
TE-WENGA
On the map of the world New Zealand has the look of a slim insular strip, a Lilliputian satellite of the broad continent of Australia. It is, however, twelve hundred miles from the continent, and there are no island stations between to act as links; the Tasman Sea is an unbroken and often stormy stretch of water. Indeed, New Zealand is as close to Polynesia as to Australia, for the gap between Cape Maria Van Diemen and Niue or Savage Island is also about twelve hundred miles across. In result, then, the colony cannot be termed a member of any group or division, political or scientific. It is a lonely oceanic archipelago, remote from the great centres of the earth, but with a character, attractions, and a busy life of its own. Though so small on the map, it does not strike those who see it as a little country. Its scenery is marked by height and steepness; its mountain ranges and bold sea-cliffs impress the new-comer by size and wildness. The clear air, too, enables the eye to travel far; and where the gazer can hold many miles of country in view—country stretching away, as a rule, to lofty backgrounds—the adjective “small” does not easily occur to the mind. Countries like Holland and Belgium seem as small as they are; that is because they are flat, and thickly sown with cities and villages. In them man is everything,[6] and Nature appears tamed and subservient. But New Zealand submits to man slowly, sometimes not at all. There the rapid rivers, long deep lakes, steep hill-sides, and mountain-chains rising near to or above the snow-line are features of a scenery varying from romantic softness to rough grandeur. Indeed the first impression given by the coast, when seen from the deck of an approaching ship, is that of the remnant of some huge drowned continent that long ago may have spread over degrees of longitude where now the Southern Ocean is a weary waste.
 
DIAMOND LAKE
Nor, again, is this impression of largeness created by immense tracts of level monotony, as in so many continental views. There is none of the tiresome sameness that besets the railway passenger on the road from The Hague to Moscow—the succession of flat fields, sandy heaths, black pine woods, and dead marshes. For the keynote of our scenery is variety. Few countries in the world yield so rapid a series of sharp contrasts—contrasts between warm north and cool south; between brisk, clear east and moist, mild west; between the leafy, genial charm of the coastal bays and the snows and rocky walls of the dorsal ridges. The very mountains differ in character. Here are Alps with long white crests and bony shoulders emerging from forests of beech; there rise volcanoes, symmetrical cones, streaked with snow, and in some instances incessantly sending up steam or vapour from their summits. Most striking of all the differences, perhaps, is the complete change from the deep and [7]ancient forests which formerly covered half the islands, to the long stretches of green grass or fern land where, before the coming of the settlers, you could ride for miles and pass never a tree. Of course many of these natural features are changing under the masterful hands of the British colonist. Forests are being cut down and burned, plains and open valleys ploughed up and sown, swamps drained, and their picturesque tangle of broad-bladed flax, giant reeds, and sharp-edged grasses remorselessly cleared away. Thousands of miles of hedges, chiefly of gorse, now seam the open country with green or golden lines, and divide the surface into more or less rectangular fields; and broom and sweetbriar, detested weeds as they are, brighten many a slope with gold or rose-colour in spring-time.
Plantations of exotic trees grow in number and height yearly, and show a curious blending of the flora of England, California, and Australia. Most British trees and bushes thrive exceedingly, though some of them, as the ash, the spruce, the holly, and the whitethorn, find the summers too hot and the winters not frosty enough in many localities. More than in trees, hedgerows, or corn-crops, the handiwork of the colonist is seen in the ever-widening areas sown with English grasses. Everything has to give way to grass. The consuming passion of the New Zealand settler is to make grass grow where it did not grow before, or where it did grow before, to put better grass in its place. So trees, ferns, flax, and rushes have to pass away; with them have to go the wiry [8]native tussock and tall, blanched snow-grass. Already thirteen million acres are sown with one or other mixture of cock’s-foot, timothy, clover, rye-grass, fescue—for the New Zealand farmer is knowing in grasses; and every year scores of thousands of acres are added to the area thus artificially grassed. Can you wonder? The carrying power of acres improved in this way is about nine times that of land left in native pasture; while as for forest and fern land, they, before man attacked them, could carry next to no cattle or sheep at all. In the progress of settlement New Zealand is sacrificing much beauty in the districts once clad in forest. Outside these, however, quite half the archipelago was already open land when the whites came, and in this division the work of the settler has been almost entirely improvement. Forty years ago it needed all the gold of the sunshine and all the tonic quality of the air to make the wide tracts of stunted bracken in the north, and even wider expanses of sparse yellowish tussock in the south, look anything but cheerless, empty, and half-barren. The pages of many early travellers testify to this and tell of an effect of depression now quite absent. Further, for fifteen years past the process of settling the soil has not been confined to breaking in the wilderness and enlarging the frontiers of cultivated and peopled land. This good work is indeed going on. But hand in hand with it there goes on a process of subdivision by which fresh homes rise yearly in districts already accounted settled; the farmstead chimneys send up their smoke ever nearer [9]to each other; and the loneliness and consequent dulness that once half spoiled country life is being brightened. Very few New Zealanders now need live without neighbours within an easy ride, if not walk.
 
ON THE BEALEY RIVER
Like the province of the Netherlands the name of which it bears, New Zealand is a green land where water meets the eye everywhere. There the resemblance ends. The dull grey tones of the atmosphere of old Zealand, the deep, unchanging green of its pastures, the dead level and slow current of its shallow and turbid waters, are conspicuously absent at the Antipodes. When the New Zealander thinks of water his thoughts go naturally to an ocean, blue and restless, and to rivers sometimes swollen and clouded, sometimes clear and shrunken, but always rapid. Even the mountain lakes, though they have their days of peace, are more often ruffled by breezes or lashed by gales. In a word, water means water in motion; and among the sounds most familiar to a New Zealander’s ears are the hoarse brawling of torrents, grinding and bearing seaward the loose shingle of the mountains, and the deep roar of the surf of the Pacific, borne miles inland through the long still nights when the winds have ceased from troubling. It is no mere accident, then, that rowing and sailing are among the chief pastimes of the well-watered islands, or that the islanders have become ship-owners on a considerable scale. Young countries do not always carry much of their own trade; but, thanks to the energy and astute management of their union Steamship Company, New [10]Zealanders not only control their own coasting trade, but virtually the whole of the traffic between their own shores, Australia, and the South Sea Islands. The inter-colonial trade is substantial, amounting to between ￡5,000,000 and ￡6,000,000 a year. Much larger, of course, is the trade with the mother country; for our colony, with some success, does her best to shoulder a way in at the open but somewhat crowded door of London. Of her total oversea trade of about ￡37,000,000 a year, more than two-thirds is carried on with England and Scotland. Here again the colonial ship-owner has a share of the carrying business, for the best known of the four ocean steamship companies in its service is identified with the Dominion, and bears its name.
With variety of scenery and climate there comes, of course, an equal variety of products. The colony is eleven hundred miles long, and lies nearly due north and south. The latitudes, moreover, through which it extends, namely, those from 34° to 47°, are well suited to diversity. So you get a range from the oranges and olives of the north to the oats and rye of colder Southland. Minerals, too, are found of more than one kind. At first the early settlers seemed none too quick in appreciating the advantages offered them by so varied a country. They pinned their faith to wool and wheat only, adding gold, after a time, to their larger exports. But experience showed that though wool and wheat yielded large profits, these profits fluctuated, as they still do. So the growers had to look round and seek [11]for fresh outlets and industries. Thirty years ago, when their colony was first beginning to attract some sort of notice in the world’s markets, they still depended on wool, gold, cereals, hides, and tallow. Cereals they have now almost ceased to export, though they grow enough for home consumption; they have found other things that pay better. They produce twice as much gold as they did then, and grow more wool than ever. Indeed that important animal, the New Zealand sheep, is still the mainstay of his country. Last year’s export of wool brought in nearly ￡7,700,000. But to the three or four industries enumerated the colonists have added seven or eight more, each respectable in size and profitable in the return it yields. To gold their miners have added coal, the output of which is now two million tons a year. Another mineral—or sort of mineral—is the fossil resin of the giant Kauri pine, of which the markets of Europe and North America absorb more than half-a-million pounds’ worth yearly. Freezing and cold storage have become main allies of the New Zealand farmer, whose export of frozen mutton and lamb now approaches in value ￡4,000,000. Almost as remarkable is the effect of refrigerating on dairying in the islands. Hundreds of co-operative butter factories and creameries have been built during the last twenty years. It is not too much to say that they have transformed the face of whole provinces. It is possible to grow wool on a large scale with but the sparsest population, as the interior of Australia shows; but it is not possible to grow butter or cheese without multiplying [12]homes and planting families fairly thickly on the land. In New Zealand even the growing of meat and wool is now chiefly done on moderate-sized land-holdings. The average size of our flocks is but a thousand head. But it is dairying that is par excellence the industry of the small man. It was so from the first, and every decade shows a tendency to closer subdivision of the land devoted to producing butter and cheese. Within the last few years, again, yet another industry has seemed to be on the road to more scientific organisation. This is the manufacture of hemp from the fibre of the native flax. One cannot call this a new thing, for the colonists tried it on a fairly large scale more than thirty years ago; but their enterprise seemed again and again doomed to disappointment, for New Zealand hemp proved for a long while but a tricky and uncertain article of commerce. It was and is a kind of understudy of manilla, holding a place somewhere between that and sisal. For many years, however, it seemed unable to get a firm footing in the markets, and when the price of manilla fell was apt to be neglected altogether. During the last decade, however, the flax millers have decidedly improved its quality, and a demand for it has sprung up in countries outside Great Britain. It is said that Americans use it in lieu of hair, and that the Japanese can imitate silk with it. Certainly the Germans, Dutch, and French buy it, to spin into binder-twine, or, may be, to “blend” with other fibres.
To the ordinary stranger from Europe, the most interesting of our industries are those that bear least [13]likeness to the manufactures and agriculture of an old country. To him there is a savour of the strange and new in kauri-gum digging, gold-mining, timber-cutting, and saw-milling, and even the conversion of bushes of flax into bales of hemp. But if I were asked to choose two industries before others to describe with some minuteness, I think I should select the growing, freezing, and export of meat, and the application of the factory system to the making and export of butter and cheese. Though my countrymen have no monopoly of these they have from the first shown marked activity in organising and exploiting them. In one chief branch of refrigeration their produce stands first in quality, if not in quantity. I refer to the supply of mutton and lamb to the English market. In this they have to compete with the larger flocks of Australia and the Argentine, as well as, indirectly, with the huge herds and gigantic trade combinations of the United States. Of the competitors whose products meet at Smithfield, they are the most distant, and in their command of capital the least powerful. Moreover, they are without the advantage—if advantage it be—of cheap labour. Yet their meat has for many years commanded the best prices paid for frozen mutton and lamb in London, and the demand, far from being unequal to the supply, has been chiefly limited by the difficulty of increasing our flocks fast enough to keep pace with it. In the contest for English favour, our farmers, though handicapped in the manner mentioned above, started with three advantages—healthy flocks and herds, a genial [14]climate, and an educated people. The climate enables their sheep and cattle to remain out all the year round. Except in the Southern Alps, they suffer very little loss from weather. The sunny air helps them to keep disease down, and, as already said, the best artificial grasses flourish in our islands as they flourish in very few countries. The standard of education makes labour, albeit highly paid, skilful and trustworthy. The farm-workers and meat-factory hands are clean, efficient, and fully alive to the need for sanitary precautions. The horrors described in Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle” are impossible in New Zealand for many reasons. Of these, the first is that the men employed in meat factories would not tolerate their existence.
There are thirty-seven establishments in the colony for meat freezing and preserving, employing over three thousand hands and paying nearly ￡300,000 a year in wages. The value of their output is about ￡5,000,000 a year, and the bulk of it is exported to the port of London. ............