made one whit more adapted for settlement, have simply been despoiled of all that made the land valuable to the State. Some few individuals have been enriched, but the country has been impoverished to an extent that would appal the heavily-taxed farmer, and general consumer, could he be only made properly cognizant of the fact. In some parts where public roads had been made, or telegraph-lines constructed through bush country, I have seen millions of magnificent logs, each of them containing hundreds of square feet of sound, merchantable timber, burnt like so much stubble, or tumbled together pell-mell to rot, to breed putridity, to become a loathsome eyesore, to raise one's gorge, at the reckless, sinful waste of God's good gifts to man.
I saw several such roads in the North Island. Had a portable saw-mill—or, for the matter of that, where one could go ten could go—had portable saw-mills accompanied the road party, enough timber might have been cut to go far toward defraying every penny of the expense of forming the highway. 'Tis true the road might have taken longer time to make, the initial expense might have been greater; but in no country that I am acquainted with would the returns from sawn timber have been so absolutely ignored and contemptuously rejected as an item of reimbursement as in New Zealand and, shall I say it, in Australia too.
Or take the average settler, pioneering in a bush district. All the timber he fells is indiscriminately burned. That is so! Is it not? It is un-
