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The educational institutions of Auckland might well be cited as proofs of the rapid progress made by modern colonial communities. Within the memory of the people still living there was no such place as Auckland, and the whole of the district was the territory of uncivilized natives, yet to-day it has a University College, secondary and primary schools, and full participation in the colony's liberal system of free and secular education. Exceptional practical enterprise has been required to develop the colony's cities to their present dimensions, to subdue the wilderness, to make roads and build bridges and houses, but the work of educating the young has not been neglected, and a large amount of attention has been devoted to the cultivation of the arts and the higher branches of learning. At the outset the conditions of colonisation were less favourable to this in the north than they were in the south of New Zealand. The University Colleges of Canterbury and Otago were founded largely under the influence of men who had been taught to look upon higher education as one of the chief advantages of life. But as early colonists, these men, though they had many real difficulties to deal with, were free to reclaim in peace the fertile open lands of their settlements. On the other hand, the Aucklanders had, while carrying on a deadly struggle with the warlike Maoris, to carve farms for themselves, from the dense forests, with infinite labour. Yet in a little more than thirty years after the first house was built on the site of Auckland, and in spite of the fierce work of nation making against such odds, there was founded in the young city a college which compares favourably, in regard to its syllabus and the status of its professors, with some of the historic schools of England, and at which students may win degrees of world wide rank and value, at less expenditure of money than is required in some countries for an education which does not equal that given at the colony's free primary schools. In view of all the circumstances, the facts set forth in this section with regard to primary, secondary, and university education in the city and province of Auckland, are of the very greatest interest and significance in their relation to modern British colonisation.