—seem long enough in the eyes of some English onlookers to have shown results, not better, perhaps, but on a larger scale. At the moment of writing the whites in the islands number considerably less than a million—just 864,000, in fact—and as the coloured inhabitants are scarcely 46,000, the population is under nine to the square mile. Thirty-six million acres of land are now in occupation by whites, and turned to some sort of productive use; but that leaves rather more than thirty million acres still to be accounted for. As only one-sixth of the country's surface need finally be quite useless to the grazier, it might be thought that the acres aforesaid should have attracted a greater stream of settlers happy to make their homes in what a comparison of death-rates shows to be precisely the healthiest spot on earth.
The explanatory reasons of their steady rather than sensational pace at which the Colony has grown are briefly these:
The first is found in the resisting power of the native race, and in the humane policy which has required that the soil of the island should be acquired only tract by tract, by slow bargaining and peaceful purchase. Next, as a retarding influence, must be counted the loneliness and distance of position. Again, now that the power of the Maori tribes has been broken, and all their possessions, save some five million reserved acres, have passed to the Crown and private owners, the physical configuration of the islands still confronts the settlers with many obstacles. Their surface is broken, often mountainous; it is seamed and divided by ravines, and, to an extraordinary degree, by the beds of streams and mountain torrents of all sizes. Huge swamps demand patient and costly draining. Half the country was originally of a peculiarly dense and difficult forest. The soil towards the northern end is often a stiff clay, which yields good results only after much painful tilling. Nature has fitted New Zealand healthy and fertile, successful rather than for rapid occupation.
