1851 - Hursthouse, C. New Zealand: the Emigration Field of 1851. - Extracts from Sidney Smith's 'Emigrant' New Home', p 170-186

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EXTRACTS

FROM

SIDNEY SMITH'S

"EMIGRANTS' NEW HOME."

"THAT strange world-madness called war has, with so few intervals of peace or truce, raged over the earth, that some philosophers have concluded the natural state of mankind to be that of mutual devouring. The train of reasoning by which, a declaration of hostilities is arrived at is so ludicrously inconsequential, that the misery of its results is the only consideration which saves the tragedy from being farcical. That because two kings, or a couple of diplomatists, should differ in opinion, two hundred thousand men--one half in red, and the other half in green or blue--should, assemble with iron tubes to feed powder and carrion crows with each other's carcases, seems to partake to so great an extent of Partridge's favourite element of logic called a non sequitur, that one cannot help suspecting that battles arise rather from the universal spirit of pugnacity, than from any solicitude to find out a more rational apology for them. Invasions, plagues, the small-pox, famines, are still considered as so many substitutes for Malthus' prudential check to population. The progress of civilization, the improvements in science, which have so greatly diminished these sources of mortality, are regarded by the cynical as a thwarting of the tendencies of nature. They point to our thirty-three years of peace and its effects in intensifying the pressure of population on the

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means of subsistence, and the miseries of increasing competition and poverty, as a proof that over-civilization defeats its own end, and that social and scientific progression contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. They darkly hint at War, Pestilence, and Famine, as scourges to the human race, which are as yet essential to the fulfilment of the designs of Providence, and silently point to warriors and destroyers as the virtual regenerators of mankind. And truly when a prime minister, rubbing his drowsy eyes, calls to mind, as he awakes each morning, that 1,277 more subjects of the sovereign that day require bread, than when he laid his head on his pillow the night before, it is not wonderful that he should fall into antiquated habits of philosophising upon the best and speediest means of getting rid of them.

"Nor can the people themselves be less interested in the practical result of this enquiry. All Europe has been shaken to its very foundation by neglect of any endeavour to furnish a rational solution of the question. The very existence of civil society is perilled. Class is rising against class--crime is spreading with unerring consequentiality upon the heels of misery. We repose at the mouth of a volcano; like snakes in an Egyptian pitcher, each struggles to rear his head above the rest, for sheer air and breath; and a crowning selfishness seizes on us all, in the struggle to preserve ourselves from sinking in the crowd of competition for bare life, and from being trampled to death in the contest for existence.

"It is true we have still standing room in these islands, although how long that will be possible, with an increment of five millions in every ten years, and not a square inch increase of soil in a century, it is not very difficult, by the help of Cocker, to predicate. But this is not life--scarcely even vegetation--but a mere sickly and sluggish hesitative negation of dying. The Spitalfields weaver, the pale artizan, the squalid labourer, the consumptive sempstress, classes that count millions in the census, what optimist of us all can venture to say that that is God Almighty's dispensation of the life of immortal creatures gifted with discourse of reason? The starved clerk, with the hungry children and the

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pinched wife, nailed to the desk of the dingy office from year's end to year's end--the poor wretch that breaks highway metal by the measure, losing a meal by pausing a single hour--the spindle-shanked peasant, paid in truck with tail wheat, and the very marrow drudged out of his rheumatic bones, until toil is ended by a premature old age in the workhouse--are ceasing to be mere exceptions, and gradually becoming the rule of our population. The tradesman, the merchant, the professional man, what one among them who reads these pages, can tell any but one history--that of continual anxiety to sustain himself in his existing position--of a total inability to save anything for his children or the decline of life--of a war to maintain his place against the encroachment of bis neighbour, a mote troubling his mind's eye with the spectre of possible misfortune and contingent destitution.

"It was intended that we should toil to live, but never that we should live simply to toil; yet mere work! work! work! is literally the exclusive element of our existence. Rousseau's preference of the savage to the civilized state was not entirely Utopian. If the pride of our civilization would let us, a modest hesitancy might well whisper the question, whether the Cossack, the Kalmuck, the New Zealander, the Otaheitian, the Hottentot, or the North American Indian, is in very many substantial respects in a state of less dignified humanity, or of less ample enjoyment of the rights and privileges of sentient existence, than not a few of the mere drudges and scavengers of our toiling population.

--and such a town! Wherein a man ceases to be a man, and is drilled and drummed into a machine of the very lowest mechanical function, spending a whole life in making a needle's eye, or exhausting an existence in putting the head upon a pin! Look at that begrimed beer syphon, a Blackwall coal-heaver, or his archetype, the dustman, handling his 'paint brush,' in doing a bit of 'fancy work round a corner'--or the hand-loom weaver throwing his weary shuttle for eighteen hours a-day, to charm the daily loaf into his crumbless cupboard---or think of the pinched drudge 'in populous

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city pent,' who sees the sun only through the skylight of the dingy office, and hears nothing of the fields but the blackbird in his wicker cage on the peg, and scents the morning air only of the fluent gutter; whose world boundary is the parish march, whose soul is in his ledger, and whose mind is a mere mill for figure-grinding. Look at the slave of a dyspeptic huckster, and thirty shillings a-week, whose, and whose children's fate, hangs upon the price of green-grocery and open ports. Or call to mind the lodging-house maid of all work; or the cit's nursery governess; or the trudging peasant, who is in the country, but not of it, who cannot leave the high road for the open field without a trespass, or kill a hare without transportation, or pluck fruit from a tree, or a flower from a shrub, without a petty larceny. Last of all, picture the Irish cateran in a mud pigstye, without bad potatoes enough for a meal a-day, dying of starvation while exporting the very food he raised; and after that turned out of his only shed and his children's sole shelter, into the nearest bog, there to find some ditch that will shield their naked skeletons of carcases from the wintry wind. Think of these pictures and compare them with the picture of 'nature's freeholders,' who work only for themselves, and only when they have a mind; who are monarchs of all they survey, who fell the nearest tree when they want a fire, and shoot the fattest deer or spear the largest salmon when hunger bids them; to whom every soil is free, every fruit, seed, and herb, belong for the gathering; to whom every forest yields a house without rent or taxes; who never heard of a workhouse, and never saw a game certificate, and cannot conceive of a gaol or a gibbet. Compare the archetypes of sophisticated civilization, with this rude barbarism; and which of us can, without hesitancy, determine that social better than savage man enjoys the privilege of sentient existence, develops humanity, fulfils the earthly purpose of his mission in this present evil world.

"To talk of 'the love of one's native country' to the man whose sole outlook into it, is through the cracked and papered pane of the only window in his Liverpool cellar; whose youngest and oldest conception of England is that which the coal seam, in which he spent his life,

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presents; the only inspiration of whose patriotism is the dust cart he fills; the union in which he is separated from his wife, or the twopence-halfpenny she earns for stitching shirts for the slopsellers--is to display more valour than discretion.

"The cry of some that there is no need of emigrating, that there is abundance of food and employment at home, which would be accessible to all but for oppressive taxation, unwise restrictions in commerce, and a defective currency, does it not partake a leetle of fudge, and not too much of candour? Is not the objector thinking of his own pet panacea, when he should be remembering that 'while the grass grows the steed starves?' A sound currency and cheap government are goodly things, but the Greek Kalends are a long way off, and, meanwhile, the people perish. Why, the very insects teach us a wise lesson; it is not food and capital alone that they desire. The bee must have room to work, latitude and longitude without unseemly jostling. What is swarming, but emigration upon a system? an acted resolution, that whereas there is not space and verge enough for all of us here, therefore let some of us go elsewhither.

"There is no conceivable state of social circumstances which can make general independence, ease, and comfort compatible with a dense population crowded together in two small islands, and sustaining the incursion of a daily increment of 1,277 new competitors for work, food, and clothing. If to that evil be added the circumstance that only one person in every 108 can boast of the possession of even a rood of the soil of the country; that scarcely one-fourth of the population has any industrial connection with its cultivation; that the great mass, both of the numbers and the intelligence and enterprise of the nation exists in a state of the most artificial mutual dependence; that their prosperity is contingent on the most sophisticated relations of circumstances; and that their very existence in a state of civil society hangs upon the most complicated and the least natural arrangements of human occupation, industry, and subsistence--little reflection can be necessary to induce the conviction, not only that emigration is essential to the relief of the majority who

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remain at home, but to the safety and happiness of those who are wise enough to see the prudence of shifting their quarters.

"When a revolution in France destroys the means of living of millions in England; when the very existence of many hangs upon the solution of the question of the currency; when the fixing of the rate of discount seals the fate of thousands, and a panic in Capel Court or Lombard Street, may empty the cupboards and annihilate the substance of half a kingdom, he is a wise man who looks out over the world for a freehold on God's earth, which he may have, and hold, and make fruitful, and plant his foot upon, and call his own; in the assurance that, let the world wag as it may, he at least is inexpungably provided for.

"What after all is at the root of social existence?-- what is the basis of human industry and thought?--the craving maw that daily cries 'Give!' the empty stomach with its tidal fever, punctual as the clock, which must be filled else 'chaos is come again.' But this, the preliminary condition of society, the fundamental postulate of life itself, is almost overlooked among us; and nothing is perhaps less seriously regarded than the appalling fact that twenty-one millions out of twenty-eight of our population, have literally no more interest in or concern with the soil, on whose productions they depend for bare being, than if they were denizens of the arctic circle. Sweep away the leather and prunella of civilization, credit, a government, institutions, exchange, barter, and manufactures--and what would become of the people in this artificial cosmogony? Neither iron, copper, coal, nor gold; neither cotton, bills of exchange, silk, nor leather; neither law, medicine, nor theology, can do much to save them from a short shrift and a speedy end. No: plant a man on his own land, though it were a solitude; shelter him in his own house, though it should be a log hut; clothe him in self-produced integuments, though they were the skin of the bear he killed, of the deer he hunted, or the sheep he tends; and what contingency can give him anxiety, or what prospect bend him down with care?

"Revolutions of empires, reverses of fortune, the contingencies of commerce, are for ever threatening the

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richest with poverty, the greatest with insignificance, the most comfortable with every physical destitution. At this very hour how many thousands are there, who, by revolution in France, or monetary crisis in England, after being racked with anxieties, have been prostrated in the most helpless destitution! In densely populated countries, where the great body of the people live the dependants on mere artificial contingencies; and are destitute of any direct relation with the soil, half the mortality is traceable to a purely mental cause--the fear of falling out of the ranks of one's neighbours, of losing place, customers, or money--the dread of poverty, or the terror of starvation. But in America it is rightly said that there are, properly speaking, no poor; no man dependant for life or happiness on any other man; none without a freehold, or the immediate access to one. A freehold which would amply supply him and his with all that is truly essential to the due enjoyment of the glorious privilege of sentient existence on this beautiful earth; which every day, in sky and sea, in sunrise, meridian, and sunset, in cloud, and moon, and star, acts before us a succession of scenes to which all that wealth, power, or genius can add, is less than nothing and vanity. What are the hardships of the backwoods to the corroding cares of the crowded city, or what the toils of the body to the anxieties of the mind?

"To the man whose very constitution has become cockneyfied, who has long taken leave of nature, whose soul has become moulded in the artificial and conventional; to whom Warren's blacking has become a necessary of life; to the man who cannot exist beyond hail of the newsman, or out of sight of the town clock; whose tranquility is dependent on the possession of the orthodox number of pots and kettles, and who scarcely conceives how water can be accessible, except it is 'laid on' by the new river company, it may appear an unconquerable difficulty, and the most calamitous vicissitude, to be placed at once in immediate contact with nature and the earth; to be called on to use his bodily faculties in the discharge of the functions for which they were originally designed; to make war on the elements, and to provide for his wants.

"But to the man who yet has left about him human

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instincts and manly intrepidity--his thews and sinews, his ten fingers, his hardy limbs, will soon find their right use. To stand in the midst of one's own acres, to lean on one's own door-post, to plough, or sow, or reap one's own fields, to tend one's own cattle, to fell one's own trees, or gather one's own fruits, after a man has led an old world life, where not one thing in or about him he could call his own; where he was dependent on others for every thing; where the tax-gatherer was his perpetual visitant, and his customer his eternal tyrant; where he could neither move hand nor foot without help that must be paid for; and where, from hour to hour, he could never tell whether he should sink or survive--if there be in him the soul of manhood and the spirit of self assertion and liberty, it cannot be but that to such a one the destiny of an emigrant must, on the whole, be a blessing.

"As hounds and horses may be 'overbroke,' and wild beasts have been even overtamed, so man may be over-civilized. Each player in the Russian-horn band blows only a single note, and that merely when it comes to his turn. Division of labour, however cut and dried a principle it may be in political economy, cuts a very poor figure in the science of mental development. We are so surrounded with appliances and 'tendings,' that none of us is able to do any thing for himself. We have one man to make our shoes, another cobbler to mend them, and a third man to black them. Railways and steam-boats, gas lights, county constables, and macadamized roads have extracted the adventurous even out of travel. Almost without a man's personal intervention he is shoved in at a door, and in three hours is let out at another, 200 miles off. Our claws are pared; we are not men, but each of us is some peg, cog, piston, or valve in a machine. The development of our individual humanity is altogether arrested by the progress of the social principle; we get one man to clothe, another to feed, another to shelter us. We can neither dig, nor weave, nor build, nor sow, nor reap for ourselves. We neither hunt, nor shoot, nor grow what supports us. That variety of mental exertion, and of intellectual and physical occupation, which creates a constant liveliness of interest and cheerful healthiness of mind, is sorely ne-

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glected amongst us; and nervous diseases, mental depression, and the most fearful prostration of all our overstretched or under-worked faculties, is the consequence. We abdicate our human functions in promotion of the theory of gregarious convention. We lose the use of our prehensiles, and forget the offices of our limbs. We do not travel, but are conveyed. We do not support ourselves, but are fed. Our very manhood is no longer self-protective. We hire police to defend us, and soldiers to fight for us. Everything is done for, scarcely anything by, us. That universality of faculty which is the very attribute of man, is lost in the economy of exaggerated civilization. Each of us can do only one thing, and are as helpless and mutually dependent for the rest, as infancy itself. We spend our lives in introspection; turning our eyes inward, like Hindoo devotees, we 'look only on our own navel;' the mind becomes diseased from monotony of thought, and we vegetate rather than live through life's endless variety of scene, incident, and occupation. It is not royalty alone in Jerusalem palace that sighs, 'O! that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest... then would I wander far off, and remain in the wilderness.'

"There, the necessities of present life, the every-day calls upon our industry and action, the constantly shifting scene of labour and activity, the rural cares which become comforts, bid us live out of ourselves in the world of external realities. There, our friends are not our rivals, nor our neighbours our competitors. The sight of 'the human face divine,' sickens us not with a sea of the squalid visages of multitudinous population, but brightens our own countenance with welcome to a brother. The mind has no time to canker within itself; we have to grapple with the palpable realities of the physical elements and the earth that is around us, not to wrestle with the diseased anxieties of the brooding mind. The nervous energy which in populous city life festers in the brain, and eats into the heart, is exhausted in the healthful activity of muscular exertion. The steers have to be yoked, the cows low for milking, the new fallen lambs bleat their accession to our store. The maple yields its sugar, the sheep its

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fleece, the deer their skin for our winter integument; the fruit hangs for our gathering. There is no exciseman to forbid our brewing our own October, or making our own soap and candles. With the day's work, the day's cares are over; the soul broods not, but sleeps. Tired nature bids us take no thought for to-morrow, for we have the promise that seed time and harvest shall never fail; our house and land are our own, and we have fuel for the felling. Children become a blessing and helpers to us. Nature is within, and above, and around us. 'Behold the lilies how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' If then, the splendours of a royal court are as nothing to those natural glories which God, in the fields, by the rivers, and on the mountain side, has made accessible to the meanest and poorest of us, and which we may drink in at every sense; what is there in the crowded city, or the populous centre of wealth and civilization, that we should really prefer to the enamelled prairie, the echoing forest, the contemplative waterfall, or the fertile valley?

"Let him to whom a daily paper is an indispensable requisite, and whose evening's happiness depends on the cooking of his dinner; who has within him no mental resources, no self help; to whom the simplicity of nature is nothing, and who is made up of conventionalities, 'who must have everything done for him,' and 'cannot be put out of his way,'--let such an one, whether rich or poor, stick to the sound of Bow bells, and keep within the bills of mortality. Futile idleness, and worthless ineffectuality may prevail upon folly to mistake its pretentious bustle for useful service; but it could not so impose upon the settlers in the backwoods, nor the prairie farmers. Riches can do but little for the luxurious in colonial settlements, where every man is master of his own freehold, and will not own the service of any one. The tutor or governess that would rather bear--

--than plough his own land, or milk her own cows, let them, too, stay at home, and wait upon Providence. The man who has no internal resources, and no moral

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intrepidity, who has no external activity, and no spiritual energy, to whom work and physical labour of any kind are real hardships, whose whole feelings, habits, and sympathies are trained in the sophistications of high civilization, needs no advice from us to deter him from emigration.

"No doubt the life of a settler has its drawbacks. We cannot carry the conveniences of Cheapside nor the roads of Middlesex with us into the backwoods. To the member of the middle classes there will be found the absence of the same obedience and servility of servants and labourers to which he has been accustomed. His frame-house will not be so fine as the brick one he has left behind him. He has not at his elbow the shops, the social helps with which he was surrounded. He must often serve himself where he was formerly ministered to by a hundred alert appliances; he must oftener do as he can, than do as he would; and he must not be ashamed to work with his own hands. His wife must lay her account with often being deserted by her servants, and of being compelled always to make companions of them. The doctor, the apothecary, the blacksmith, the saddler, the carpenter, will not be so near within hail as in England. Furniture will not be so good, nor ordinary appliances and wants so easily supplied.

"But if a man prefers toil to care; if he would rather have fatigue of body than anxiety of mind; if he would train himself in cheerful self-denying intrepidity; if he would rather lie harder that he may sleep sounder, than slumber fitfully in troubled dreams, under the Damocles' sword of 'thought for to-morrow;' if he would prefer his children's happiness to his own present convenience, then there can be little hesitation as to his choice.

"In England to seem is to be. An exterior is an essential element of business expenses. A man must spend an income, if he would earn a subsistence. Even life insurance cannot meet his case, because before he can die, he may lose the means of paying the annual premium. Where every advertisement for a secretary, a manager, a book-keeper, a buyer, a traveller, is answered by two thousand applicants; where hundreds are stand-

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ing by, gaping for dead men's shoes, or envying the snug berths of the living, and offering to supply their places for half the money; where the slightest slip or the most innocent misfortune, like a tumble in a crowd, crushes the sufferer out of his place, or tramples him out of his existence; frugality and thrift, which curtail the imposture of appearances, become absolutely shortsighted improvidence. The citizen must for ever bethink himself of Mrs. Grundy. As he can leave his children nothing which, divided amongst them, will enable each to sustain the position he is compelled to hold, he must spend his substance in the lottery of matrimonial speculation for his daughters, or in surrounding himself with connections who may be useful in pushing his sons into life. When he dies, his girls have the fate of the poor buffeted governess before them, and his boys sink into the precarious existence of eleemosynary employment. In Australia the former would become invaluable treasures, and if they chose, already brides before they had reached the harbour.

"And even where the material and merely outward prospect is fairer, what are not the thousand moral temptations and spiritual hazards to which a family of sons is exposed in the gay vice, the unthinking extravagance, the reckless dissipation of European cities! How many prosperous parents have their whole happiness poisoned by the misconduct or spendthrift thoughtlessness of pleasure-hunting boys; whose hearts, perhaps in the right place, and whose principles, sound and true at bottom, have their heads and fancy turned and captivated by the follies of the hour, and the 'pleasant sins' of metropolitan gaiety. In the bush, on the prairie, at the colonial farm, if the attraction be less, the safety is the greater. The hot blood of youth sobers down in the gallop over the plain, or falls to its healthy temperature as he fells the forest king.

"Where all women are reverenced, and respect themselves, the gay bachelor can fix his regards only where he is ready to repose his prospect of happiness for life. Where vice presents no artificial gilding, and debt and dissipation are equally despised, there is small temptation to improvident extravagance; and no inducement to leave the beaten path of useful industry.

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"Emigration saves many a pang to the anxious mother's heart, and renders the duties of a parent easy and pleasant to many a thoughtful husband. Nor, while the bubbling hell-broth of European convulsions still turns up its poisoned scum, and momentous social questions allow mankind no rest until they are solved, will parents fail to reflect on the tranquillity of the transatlantic solitude, or the hopeful security of young society in Australia.

"No man can deliberately reflect on the fact that our population has doubled since the commencement of the nineteenth century; that every trade and occupation is so overdone that there are thousands of applicants for every vacant situation; that the social fabric of all Europe has been shaken to its very centre; that internal discontent festers in every community; that monetary panics and commercial crises recur at increasingly proximate intervals; and that the condition and prospects of the great body of the people are becoming yearly a less soluble problem--without having the doubt suggested as to whether mere prudence and security are not consulted by removing one's self from European vicissitudes, and taking up the impregnable position of a freeholder in a new country and a fertile wilderness.

"The science of accumulation comes to some perfection among us--but the philosophy of distribution seems every day to become more retrogressive and confused. The few get richer, the many get poorer, and all are dependent, even for their existing position, upon such contingent circumstances and precarious conditions, that a grave thought crosses the mind of the possibility of England having reached its climacteric. A scanty population, on a fertile soil, and abundance of laud, can stand, a great deal of mislegislation and bad government; but when the population becomes dense, and the territory proportionately scanty, so that subsistence no longer depends on natural production, but is contingent upon artificial relations, every increase of population makes the management and support of such numbers more difficult; and any economical blunder, in the shape of an imperfect distribution of wealth, more fatal. A people who are all planted on their own land, in a fertile country, and themselves the producers of what they consume.

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are independent of the contraction of issues at the bank, of unfavourable exchanges, of panics, and of reverses in trade. To people who have no rent, and only nominal taxes to pay, even the want of customers becomes little better than an imaginary hardship. To the man who grows and weaves the wool for his own coat, who fells his own fuel, builds his own house, kills his own mutton, bakes his own bread, makes his own soap, sugar, and candles, it is obvious that a dishonoured bill, or the refusal of credit at the bank, is scarcely to be regarded as a matter of substantial consequence. But the man who has to buy all these things, and who has rent to pay for his house and lands, is, without money or credit, the most destitute and helpless wretch of whom it is possible to conceive.--Place many such in this predicament, and there will be disorder and sedition; make it the case of a nation, and sooner or later it must produce a revolution. In our time, we have seen the whole of Europe scourged by the incarnate mischief of a great military dictator; more recently we have witnessed not only thrones, principalities, and powers, but whole classes of society, ruined and undone. We have seen such kingly vicissitudes as to persuade us that life was a romance, and stern realities stranger than the most improbable fiction, until the appalled heart and the sickened soul have sighed for the solitude and rude safety of the backwoods, or the security and certainty of the lonely prairie, where food and raiment, however rough and simple, were sure, and--

"Even where anxieties are imaginary, still they are anxieties. The competition of the competent among each other, the struggling jealousy, ambition, and rivalry of those, who in other regions would be friends all the more for being neighbours, the difficulties of setting up and getting off sons and daughters--the perpetual round of unnatural drudgery in the counting house with its risks, or the lawyer's chambers with their galley slave work, or the thousand offices which minister to the needs of society--do not they suggest the question, whether,

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under the most favourable circumstances, such avocations can stand a comparison with the healthy and athletic activities of agriculture; the freedom and leisure of the settler, with his plough, his spade, his rifle, his horse, his salmon-spear, and canoe. Is not life in the crowded city lost in the struggle to live,--does not the faculty of enjoyment pass from us before we have leisure for its fruition,--has not existence rolled past before we have begun to study how it may be made happy--have we not put off retirement, until it has ceased to please?

"We greatly mistake if these considerations have not sunk deep into the public mind. The powers of steam, and the improvement in navigation, are yearly, or rather monthly, tempting better classes of men to quit what some think a sinking ship, and to venture their fortunes in the land of promise. America is within twelve days of us, the Cape within forty, Australia within one hundred; passage money has become very moderate, and the previous emigration has facilitated every thing necessary for the reception and settlement of after-comers. As families get settled, they can offer a home to which others may at once repair on arrival, and while their own experience gives them the authority of the most unexceptionable witnesses, they acquire money and remit it home to aid the emigration of their relatives. As colonies become more populous, they offer new inducements to colonise, and the tide is likely to set in and know no retiring ebb. At last, colonies become mighty kingdoms, and either sustain the greatness of the parent country, or become its rival; but in either case retain its language, habits, sympathies, and wants, and become its most valuable customers."

Since this little work went to press, a letter has come to hand from a gentleman in New Plymouth, an old practical settler, so singularly corroborative of my statements as to the merits of the natives, and their great and increasing value as labourers, that, at the risk of driving my respected Publishers to emigrate them-

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selves; or, at least, of discomposing their "composing staff," I venture to have the following "extract" inserted here. I trust that the clear and forcible testimony which it bears, may tend to suppress the nonsense still occasionally talked as to the blessings of being without natives; and which aims at showing that the one, single, natural deficiency of Canterbury--its plains without a tree--is counter-balanced by the fact--that these plains are also without a native.

"* * * * There is now a Doctor, a Barrister, and an Attorney, besides an Architect, and a Civil Engineer, in Omata. 1 Newsham's section is occupied by a Mr. Greenwood, a gentleman of property who, by the bye, has two brothers, Lieutenant Colonels. A nephew of Lord Wharncliffe (a Mr. Corbett), has also settled in the district, whilst the Honourable Henry Petre will most probably locate only a little to the south; so you see, Omata will be rather an aristocratic quarter.

"Our labour market has been abundantly supplied during harvest. Our wheat growers have had their crops reaped entirely by natives at from 9s. to 10s. per acre. In fact, native labour has never been so abundant. Our Maori friends have been particularly well-behaved lately, and most anxious to get employment. They are cutting down forest, making roads, clearing fern land, reaping, &c. &c.; and in consequence of this, a great deal of land has lately been brought into cultivation.

"The new little Church at Omata is being fitted-up. * * * *"

FINIS.