Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/256

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Our New Zealand Cousins.

beginnings have been made. I know one lover of his kind who has for years been making experimental plantings of the most likely trees in New South Wales. My brother, in his parish, has set an example which is happily being followed largely by his people. In South Australia, in Victoria—even in the sometime laggard New South Wales—some little is being done to stay ruthless waste; to improve forest administration and introduce new supplies of fresh kinds of timber. Near Wanganui I saw plantations, 'tis true, and the Government must be credited with good intentions in giving grants of land as a guerdon for tree-planting; and, yet, how much more might be done. Oh! surely if waste be sinful—as I believe it to be—might not preachers and teachers deviate occasionally from their sickening platitudes, to preach practical lessons of thrift and economy in such directions as I have been endeavouring to indicate? Surely it would be worthy of a patriot or statesman—yea even of a three-hundred pound a year hireling—to devote a little time to the elucidation of such economic problems as are contained in wise and prudent forest administration.

Or—let us look at the matter in yet one more light before we leave the subject. Here is a country so bountifully endowed with natural advantages, that at Gisborne, at Warepa, at Auckland, at Christchurch, out of a score of places, I have seen trees whose one year's growth has been twelve feet in height. We find in possession a savage, cannibal, tattooed race, who, if they wanted