Generally, however, the manufacturing of the Colony is for home use. It is probable that the yearly output of the factories will be shown by next year's census to be about twenty million sterling. They turn out good work, honest, unadulterated stuff, and employ some seventy thousand hands, whose pay is higher than English rates, though not so high as American.
The encouragement of these local industries is one of the chief colonial articles of faith. They are protected against dumping, and the competition of cheap labour and giant, old-established industrialism by Customs duties of from 10 to 25 per cent. Over and above this it is considered good form to buy home-made goods rather than imported. The average New Zealander thinks and asserts that his own manufacturers have a first claim, and British imports a second. If he patronizes German or American goods, he does not draw any unnecessary attention to the practice. This preference for British over foreign goods—which has always been something more than mere profession, and which has lately been emphasized by statute—is nothing extraordinary. The open ports of England are the Colony's one great market; and for many years England's treatment of her Colonies has been kindly and just—in one respect even more than just.
When we try to forecast the future of the New Zealanders, and estimate the possible development in them of national ambitions and foreign policy, we are at once brought up sharply by the dominating geographical fact of their extraordinary isolation. It is inevitable that their characteristics as a community in all that pertains to dealings with their fellow-men will be modified by this striking peculiarity. Australia, as already stated, is their nearest neighbour, and at present it takes them more than four days of steaming to reach an Australian port.
A voyage to the South Sea Islands consumes a week, and to cross the Valparaiso, the nearest large harbour in South America, involves a passage of twenty days,
