the waters of the bay by the homely and slow process of boiling in an ordinary pot over an ordinary fire, but flour and oatmeal could not be so easily manufactured. One colonial, writing to a friend in the Home Country, made the doleful statement, "There is but one barrel of meal in the place, and it is sold to people in trouble or for children at fourpence per pound." We would expect to find that man breaking out into loud and harsh grumbling, or expressing himself in tones of abject despair. But no, for with glorious contentment he immediately adds, "But we are all very happy!" Things, however, assumed a serious aspect, and not a few were allowing the conviction to take hold of their minds that a terrible mistake had been made. Even then the voices of the unemployed, crying for work or for bread, were heard, and the Provincial Government were repeatedly under the necessity of placing men on relief works. One gentleman, who was a resident of Dunedin at that time, avers that more than once the office of the Superintendent, Captain Cargill, was besieged by numbers of the wage-earning portion of the population; and a copy of the little newspaper of the day contains a paragraph calling for a meeting of the labouring classes to take into consideration a proposal that had been made to charter a schooner to convey them to some other settlement, where they might have a better prospect of obtaining an honest livelihood. But these occasions were exceptional, and are not indicative of the then normal state of affairs. Of course, cases of need arising from sickness or accident or death now and then occurred, but these were readily met by the kind of tacit brotherhood and the neighbourliness that then characterised the community.
Anomalous as the statement sounds, grim want, in the true meaning of the word, did not appear in Otago until the discovery of the goldfields. By that discovery in 1861 life in the province, and especially in its capital city, Dunedin, was entirely changed. Ship-loads of immigrants of all sorts arrived in rapid succession from the Home Country and from the Australasian colonies. Within the space of one year the population of the province leapt from 12,000 to 30,000; and as a large proportion of the new-comers settled in Dunedin, instances of poverty soon became so marked as to attract attention. As might be expected, some of the new
