CHAPTER XXI. CONCLUSION.
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CHAPTER XXI.
CONCLUSION.
IN conclusion, it may not be irrelevant to offer a few remarks on the advantages held out by New Zealand as compared with other colonies. These observations will in great part be little else than a recapitulation of what has already been written, and relate principally to the subject of land, the easy acquisition of which is one of the main inducements to emigration.
In selecting land for agricultural purposes, it will be cheaper in the end to give a comparatively high price for land of good quality, convenient to towns, and where water carriage is available, than a low price for land of equal quality badly situated.
Land in New Zealand, in its wild state, is usually classed under the following heads: viz. Forest, Fern, Flax, Tea-tree, Grass-land, and land bearing the shrub known as the Tupaki or Tout. Bush land is usually good in quality, but difficult and expensive to clear. The kauri-pines denote land of a poor quality: fern-land is easy to clear, but requires a fallow before it is used, and much heavy harrowing to clear it of roots: flax, grass, and tupaki generally denote a good soil, and where these grow in luxuriance, an excellent soil: the tea-tree, where it grows thick and high, also be-
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speaks a tolerably good soil: where the fern and tea-tree grow in a thin and straggling manner, the land had better be let alone.
On occupying new land, settlers will do well first to clear and break up as much land as they intend to use the first year; after breaking it up let them fence it in; by this plan the land becomes sweetened before being sown. Summer fallows are best in New Zealand, and autumn is the best planting season. Ploughs without wheels are generally preferred for new lands, and bullocks are of more use and less trouble to keep than horses. Strong short ploughs will break up fern, flax, and tupaki land; for commencement of a new farm, any distance from towns and blacksmiths, the short wooden-handled ploughs are perhaps altogether best. Newly broken land when in crop, is subject to visits from caterpillars; wheat, oats, barley and grass, are often checked in growth, and even destroyed by these pestilent visitors, it is therefore injudicious for men of small means to risk their all on a first crop.
Emigrants unskilled in agriculture should gain agricultural experience at the expense of others: it would be better for such people to work for one year without remuneration, rather than risk their capital in approaching that which is more dangerous than the racecourse, and to a novice even less uncertain in its results than rouge-et-noir or roulette. There is no short cut, no royal road, by which a knowledge of farming may be arrived at. "Why do you think--why does everybody
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think that he can farm without having learned how; that agriculture is an exception to every other human labour or pursuit, a contradiction to all natural law, and will bring livelihood without study, cost, or apprenticeship," are words written by one who had well studied his subject theoretically and practically. Well would it be, if emigrants to new lands did, on their voyage out, amuse themselves with "Talpa, or the Chronicles of a Clay Farm," the work from which I have just quoted. "Talpa" speaks more truth in a laughing pleasant way than any work of its length I have met with. "Talpa," "Stephen's Book of the Farm," and works on cattle and sheep, should be purchased by all emigrants who can afford to buy them, previous to leaving home.
"Talpa" points out many errors to be avoided in farming; we are reminded not to grow thick hedgerows, to avoid unnecessary enclosures; twenty acres is small enough for one field; we are told not to crop land, before by fallowing and draining, the land is fit for cropping; and lastly, "Talpa" seeks to bring before us, how necessary it is to introduce steam to agriculture, and with steam, implements adapted to steam power. "The spade is suited to human power, the plough to horse power, neither the one nor the other to steam power." "Spade work is perpendicular, horse work is horizontal, machine work circular."
New Zealand, with its large breadth of land, untrammelled by fences and free from forest, offers a fine
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opening for the more effectual introduction to agriculture of the right power for the present age; and with such markets as are offered by Australia, those who have capital need not hesitate to employ it in New Zealand, where land of the richest description may be had at a nominal price, and where the produce of the land realises far higher prices than in the old country.
In England, frost and snow often put a stop to agricultural pursuits; America in this also resembles England, and adds further impediments by its ague fever to those engaged in active pursuits; in Australia, the dreaded drought not unfrequently burns up the crops, after money and labour have been expended in their production; but in New Zealand, through a large average of years, the seasons are favourable at seed-time and harvest-time, and the climate promotes health and vigour to those who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. In England men toil early and late for a small remuneration, their children half starved when young, too often are driven to crime by want; competition is carried to that extent that capital often has to be employed at a loss, and labour can claim little but its duties. The rich man frequently becomes poor, the poor man has in his old age only the workhouse to look forward to, while those who by business have gained a small capital, find it difficult to make a secure investment of their money-- their hard-earned savings being too often swallowed up in bubble companies, or by dishonest bankers.
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In Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, no workhouse need be feared; the artisan and labourer can easily save money from their wages, and the money saved can readily be invested in land, the only safe investment to be found for capital; at all events, as Mr. Hoskyns says in his Talpa, "The soil is the primest, eldest investment of our capital; to risk our earnings and accumulations in any other channel till this field is first exhausted, is a course that men may indeed be driven to by the operation of foolish laws or customs, but which few, from either will or circumstance, would voluntarily choose." In New Zealand much of the land is of good quality, plentiful, cheap, and unshackled by "the pestilent tyranny of parchment, and obsolete forms, which, added to its high price, renders it almost locked up to the man of small means at home."
Therefore, I would urge on those who have energy, and are dissatisfied with their lot in the old country, to emigrate; and whether they may select the Canadas, Australia, or New Zealand for their future home, all who enjoy health, and are able and willing to use the "strong right arm," in either colony, will find their time more profitably employed than in listening to mob-orators in Smithfield, in joining unions, or in tramping through a country in search of labour where the labour-market is over supplied. To whatever colony the emigrant may go, he will find a ready investment for capital, and labour a capital in itself, by means of
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which he may soon become an independent man, a landowner, and the possessor of a political existence.
As I firmly believe that New Zealand is more calculated to make a happy home for Englishmen than any other colony, I shall be more than repaid for the trouble this pamphlet has given me, if, by its perusal, a portion of those who are undecided as to what colony they shall emigrate to, are persuaded that the "Star of Empire" does not merely "glitter in the West," but that another "Sea-girt Isle" is ready to receive them, which promises some day to become a second England-- "a British Empire" of the Southern Seas.
