THE ISLANDS AND THEIR CITIES
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 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 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, 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 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.
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, 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.
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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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. The weight of meat sent to the United Kingdom last year was two hundred and thirty-seven million pounds avoirdupois. Then there are about three hundred and twenty dairy-butter or cheese factories, without counting a larger outer circle of skimming stations. To these the dairy-farmers send their milk, getting it back after skimming. That completes their share of the work; expert factory hands and managers do the rest. As for meat-freezing, from beginning to end the industry is scientifically managed and carefully supervised. At its inception, a quarter of a century ago, the flocks of the colony were healthy and of good strains of blood. But they were bred chiefly to grow wool, and mainly showed a basis of Merino crossed with Lincoln or Leicester. Nowadays the Romney Marsh blood predominates in the stud flocks, especially in the North Island. Lincoln, Leicester, Merino, Border Leicester, Shropshire, and South Down follow in order. For five-and-twenty years our breeders have brought their skill to bear on crossing, with a view to producing the best meat for the freezing factory, without ruining the quality of their wool. They still face the cost and trouble of importing stud sheep from England, though their own selected animals have brought them good prices in South America, Australia, and South Africa. Flocks and herds alike are subjected to regular inspection by the veterinary officers of the Department of Agriculture; and though the slaughter-yards and factories of the freezing companies are models of order, speed, and cleanliness, the Government expert is there too, and nothing may be sold thence without his certificate, for every carcase must bear the official mark. From the factory to the steamer, from one end of the earth to the other, the frozen carcases are vigilantly watched, and the temperature of the air they are stored in is regulated with painful care. As much trouble is taken to keep freezing chambers cold as to keep a king’s palace warm. The shipping companies are as jealously anxious about the condition of their meat cargoes as they are for the contentment of their passengers and the safety of their ships. At the London Docks the meat is once more examined by a New Zealand official, and finally at Smithfield, as the carcases are delivered there in the small hours of the morning, they are scanned for the last time by a veterinary expert from the Antipodes. Moreover, since our meat goes now to other British ports as well as to London, and since, too, nearly half of what is discharged in the Thames no longer finds its way to Smithfield, our inspectors have to follow our meat into the provinces and report upon the condition in which it reaches such towns as Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, and Manchester. Furthermore, they do their best to track it a stage farther and ascertain its fate at the hands of the unsentimental retail trader. Most New Zealand meat is now honestly sold as what it is. Some of the best of it, however, is still palmed off on the consumer as British. On the other hand, South American mutton is sometimes passed off as New Zealand. The housewife who buys “Canterbury Lamb” because she likes all things Kentish is not yet altogether extinct. For all this the clumsily-drawn English law, which makes conviction so difficult, must be held mainly responsible. New Zealand butter, too, suffers at the hands of English manipulators. It is what Tooley Street calls a dry butter—that is to say, it contains on an average not more than some eleven per cent of moisture. This renders it a favourite for mixing with milk and for selling as “milk-blended” butter, a process at which makers in the colony can only look on wrathfully but helplessly. Otherwise they have little to complain about, for their butter has for years past brought them prices almost as high as those of good Danish, while during the butter famine of the first few months of 1908 as much as 150 shillings a hundredweight was paid for parcels of it. Before shipment in the colony, butter and cheese are graded by public inspectors. Every box bears the Government stamp. In practice the verdict of the grader is accepted by the English purchasers. Relatively the amount of frozen beef which we export is not large; but our climate and pastures are too well suited for beef-growing to make it likely that the discrepancy will continue. Probably frozen beef will give place to chilled; that is to say, improvements in the art of chilling will enable our beef to be carried at a temperature of, let us say, 30° Fahrenheit, instead of 12°. It will then arrive in England soft and fit for immediate use: thawing will not be needed, and a higher price will be obtained. But, however far behind New Zealand may as yet lag in the beef trade, enough has been done in other branches of refrigeration to show how scientific, well-organised, and efficient colonial industry is becoming, and how very far the farmers and graziers of the islands are from working in the rough and hand-to-mouth fashion that settlers in new countries are supposed to affect.
The purpose of this sketch, however, is not to dilate upon the growth of our commerce and industry, remarkable as that is in a country so isolated and a population only now touching a million. My object, rather, is to give something of an outline of the archipelago itself, of the people who live there between the mountains and the sea, and of the life and society that a new-comer may expect to see. Mainly, then, the most striking peculiarities of the islands, as a land undergoing the process of occupation, are the decentralised character of this occupation, and the large areas, almost unpeopled, that still remain in a country relatively small in size. New Zealand was originally not so much a colony as a group of little settlements bound together none too comfortably. Its nine provinces, with their clashing interests and intense jealousies, were politically abolished more than thirty years ago; but some of the local feeling which they stood for and suffered for still remains, and will remain as long as mountain ranges and straits of the sea divide New Zealand. Troublesome as its divisions are to politicians, merchants, ship-owners, councils of defence, and many other persons and interests, they nevertheless have their advantages. They breed emulation, competition, civic patriotism; and the local life, parochial as it looks to observers from larger communities, is at least far better than the stagnation of provinces drained of vitality by an enormous metropolis. For in New Zealand you have four chief towns, large enough to be dignified with the name of cities, as well as twice as many brisk and aspiring seaports, each the centre and outlet of a respectable tract of advancing country. All these have to be thought of when any general scheme for opening up, defending, or educating the country is in question. Our University, to give one example, is an examining body, with five affiliated colleges; but these colleges lie in towns far apart, hundreds of miles from each other. The ocean steamship companies before mentioned have to carry merchandise to and from six or eight ports. Singers and actors have to travel to at least as many towns to find audiences. Wellington, the capital, is still not the largest of the four chief towns, rapid as its progress has been during the last generation. Auckland, with 90,000 people, is the largest, as it is the most beautiful; Wellington, with 70,000, holds but the second place.
Decentralised as New Zealand is, large as its rural population is, and pleasant as its country life can be, still its four chief towns hold between them more than a quarter of its people, and cannot therefore be passed over in a sentence. Europeans are apt to be impatient of colonial towns, seeing in them collections of buildings neither large enough to be imposing nor old enough to be mellowed into beauty or quaintness. And it is true that in our four cities you have towns without architectural or historic interest, and in size only about equal to Hastings, Oxford, Coventry, and York. Yet these towns, standing where seventy years ago nothing stood, have other features of interest beside their newness. Cities are, after all, chiefly important as places in which civilised men and women can live decently and comfortably, and do their daily work under conditions which are healthy and neither degrading nor disagreeable. The first business of a city is to be useful, and its second to be healthy. Certainly it should not be hideous; but our cities are not hideous. What if the streets tend to straight rigidity, while the dwelling-houses are mostly of wood, and the brick and stone business edifices embody modern commercialism! The European visitor will note these features; but he will note also the spirit of cleanliness, order, and convenience everywhere active among a people as alert and sturdy as they are well fed and comfortably clad. The unconcealed pride of the colonist in material progress may sometimes jar a little on the tourist in search of the odd, barbaric, or picturesque. But the colonist, after all, is building up a civilised nation. Art, important as it is, cannot be the foundation of a young state.
In the towns, then, you see bustling streets where electric tramways run out into roomy suburbs, and where motor-cars have already ceased to be a novelty. You notice that the towns are even better drained than paved, and that the water supply everywhere is as good as it ought to be in so well-watered a country. The visitor can send telegrams for sixpence and letters for a penny, and finds the State telephone system as convenient as it is cheap. If the hotels do not display American magnificence they do not charge American prices, for they give you comfort and civility for twelve-and-sixpence a day. Theatres and concert-halls are commodious, if not imposing; and, thanks to travelling companies and to famous artists passing through on their way to or from Australia, there is usually a good play to be seen or good music to be heard. Indeed, if there be an art which New Zealanders can be said to love, it is music. Their choral societies and glee clubs are many, and they have at least one choir much above the average. Nor are they indifferent to the sister art of painting, a foundation for which is laid in their State schools, where all children have to learn to draw. Good art schools have been founded in the larger towns, and in some of the smaller. Societies are buying and collecting pictures for their galleries. At the International Exhibition held in Christchurch in 1906-7 the fine display of British art, for which our people had to thank the English Government, was welcomed with the enthusiasm it deserved. The picture galleries were thronged from beginning to end of the Exhibition, and the many thousands of pounds spent in purchases gave material evidence of the capacity of New Zealanders to appreciate good art when they have the chance of seeing it.
The same may be said of literature. To say that they all love books would be absurd; but of what nation can that be said? What can truly be affirmed is that all of them read newspapers; that most of them read books of some sort; and that all their books are not novels. Booksellers tell you that the demand for cheap editions of well-known authors is astonishing in so small a population. They try to write books, too, and do not always fail; and a small anthology—it would have to be very slender—might be filled with genuine New Zealand poetry. Domett’s reputation is established. Arthur Adams, Arnold Wall, and Miss Mackay, when at their best, are poets, and good poets.
Of course, however, it is in the newspapers that we have the plainest evidence of the average public taste. It is a land of newspapers, town and country, daily and weekly, small or of substantial size. To say that the best of these equals the best of the English provincial papers is not, I fear, true. The islands contain no daily newspaper which a journalist can honestly call equal to the Manchester Guardian or the Birmingham Post; but many of the papers are good, and some of them are extraordinarily good for towns the largest of which contains, with its suburbs, but 90,000 people. No one journal towers above the others. If I were asked to choose a morning, an evening, and a weekly paper, I should perhaps name the Otago Daily Times, the Wellington Evening Post, and the Christchurch Weekly Press; but the Auckland Weekly News has the best illustrations, and I could understand a good judge making a different selection. The most characteristic of the papers are illustrated weekly editions of the chief dailies. These good though not original products of island journalism are pretty close imitations of their Victorian prototype, The Australasian. The influence of the Press is considerable, though not perhaps as great as might be looked for from the numbers and success of the newspapers. Moreover, and this is really curious, they influence the public less in the politics of the colony than in several other fields.
In a book on New Zealand published ten years ago, I wrote in my haste the words, “There is no Colonial literature.” What I meant to express, and doubtless ought to have said, is that there is no body of writing by New Zealanders at once substantial and distinguished enough to be considered a literature. I did not mean to suggest that, amongst the considerable mass of published matter for which my countrymen are responsible, there is nothing of good literary quality. It would not have been true to say this ten years ago, and it would be still less true to say it now. Amongst the large body of conscientious work published in the colony itself during the last quarter of a century there is some very good writing indeed. A certain amount of it deserves to be better known outside our borders than it is. Putting manner aside for the moment, and dealing only with matter, it is, I think, true to say that any thorough student of New Zealand as it is to-day, or has been since 1880, must for authentic information mainly go to works published in the colony itself. I have some right to speak, for I have been reading about New Zealand for forty years, and all my reading has not been desultory. Slight as is this book, for instance, and partly based as it is on personal recollection and knowledge gleaned orally, still I could not have written it without very careful study of many colonial writings. In scanning my list of later authorities consulted, I am surprised to find what very few exceptions there are to the rule that they are printed at the other end of the world. To begin with, the weekly newspapers of the Dominion are mines of information to any one who knows how to work them. So are the Blue-books, and that bible of the student of nature and tradition in our islands, the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute. Then there is the Journal of the Polynesian Society; after which comes a long list of official publications. First among them rank Kirk’s Forest Flora and Mr. Percy Smith’s Eruption of Tarawera. The best general sketch of Maori manners, customs, and beliefs, is that of Edward Tregear; far the best book on Maori art is A. Hamilton’s. Quite lately Mr. M’Nab, the present Minister of Lands, has made a very valuable contribution to the early chronicles of South New Zealand, in his Muri-huku, for which generations of students will be grateful. Mr. Carrick’s gossip—also about our South—and Mr. Ross’s mountaineering articles must not be passed over. Furthermore, there is an illustrated manual of our plants by Laing and Blackwell, which is something more than a manual, for it is full of reading which is enjoyable merely as reading. And there is a manual of our animal life in which the work of Hutton, Drummond, and Potts is blended with excellent results. Dr. Cockayne’s botanic articles, Mr. Shand’s papers on the Chathams, and Mr. Buick’s local Histories of Marlborough and Manawatu deserve also to be noted. Much of Mr. James Cowan’s writing for the Government Tourist Department is well above the average of that class of work.
Society in the towns is made up of a mingling of what in England would be called the middle and upper-middle classes. In some circles the latter preponderate, in others the former. New Zealanders occasionally boast that in their country class distinctions are unknown; but though this is true politically—for there are no privileged classes and no lower orders—the line is drawn in matters social, and sometimes in odd and amusing ways. The townsfolk inside the line are financiers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, manufacturers, clergymen, newspaper owners, the higher officials, and the larger sort of agents and contractors. Here and there, rari nantes, are to be encountered men who paint or write, or are musicians, or professors, or teachers of colleges or secondary schools. Most of the older and some of the younger are British-born, but the differences between them and the native-born are not very apparent, though shades of difference can be detected. Money, birth, official position, and ability are passports there, much as in other countries; though it is only fair to say that money is not all-powerful, and that ability, if not brilliant, has a slightly better chance than in older societies. On the surface the urban middle class in the colony differs but little from people of the same sort in the larger provincial cities of the mother country. Indeed the likeness is remarkable, albeit in the colony there is no aristocracy, no smart set, no Army, Navy, or dominant Church; while underneath there is no multitude of hungry and hard-driven poor for the rich to shrink from or regard as dangerous. Yet, except for the comparative absence of frock-coats and tall silk hats, and for the somewhat easier and less suspicious manner, the middle class remain a British middle class still. It is, then, pleasant to think that, if they retain English prejudices, they have also the traditional virtues of the English official and man of business.
To a social student, however, the most interesting and, on the whole, most cheering aspect of town life is supplied by the work-people. They are worth watching as they go to their shops and factories between eight and nine in the morning, or when, after five in the afternoon, they pour into the streets with their work done and something of the day yet left to call their own. The clean, well-ventilated work-rooms are worth a visit certainly. But it is the men and women, youths and girls themselves who, to any one acquainted with factory hands in the Old World, seem the best worth attention. Everywhere you note a decent average of health, strength, and contentment. The men do not look stunted or deadened, the women pinched or sallow, the children weedy or underfed. Most of them seem bright and self-confident, with colour in their faces and plenty of flesh on their frames, uniting something of English solidity with a good deal of American alertness. Seventy thousand hands—the number employed in our factories and workshops—may seem few enough. But forty years ago they could not muster seven thousand, and the proportional increase during the last twelve years has been very rapid. To what extent their healthy and comfortable condition is due to the much-discussed labour laws of New Zealand is a moot point which need not be discussed here. What is certain is that for many years past the artisans and labourers of the colony have increased in numbers, while earning higher wages and working shorter hours than formerly. At the same time the employers as a body have prospered as they never prospered before, and this prosperity shows as yet no sign of abatement. That what is called the labour problem has been solved in New Zealand no sensible man would pretend. But at least the more wasteful and ruinous forms of industrial conflicts have for many years been few and (with two exceptions) very brief, a blessing none too common in civilised communities. As a testimony to the condition of the New Zealand worker I can hardly do better than quote the opinion of the well-known English labour leader, Mr. Keir Hardie. Whatever my readers may think of his opinions—and some of them may not be among his warm admirers—they will admit that he is precisely the last man in the Empire likely to give an overflattering picture of the lot of the labourer anywhere. His business is to voice the grievances of his class, not to conceal or suppress them. Now, Mr. Hardie, after a tour round the Empire, deliberately picks out New Zealand as the most desirable country for a British emigrant workman. The standard of comfort there appears to him to be higher than elsewhere, and he recognises that the public conscience is sensitive to the fair claims of labour.
