I.—Introduction. Peculiar Advantages of the Colony.

The decade in question is marked by rapid progress in all directions—and the results are well worth the study of political economists, deserving the attentive consideration of capitalists, merchants, and indeed, of all classes; for which unusual facilities exist, in the careful and elaborate statistics published annually by the colonial Government. There must indeed at all times be peculiar interest and sympathy felt in the welfare of New Zealand, inasmuch as it is the most essentially British of all our colonics. Setting aside our tropical possessions—with which no comparison can be instituted—New Zealand has been free from the convict element which affected the settlement of Australia; without difference of race, of language, and of law, as in Canada and the Cape of Good Hope; free also from the taint of slavery which page 4 existed at the Cape, and to which may be traced the difficulties that even now beset our relations with those offshoots from that colony—the Dutch republics in South Africa.

The settlers in New Zealand comprise all classes in the United Kingdom—English, Irish, and Scotch—from the sons and connexions of the peerage and landed gentry, to the agricultural labourer; and from the sons of merchants and manufacturers, to artisans of every kind and degree. It would be difficult therefore to conceive a population more exactly the counterpart of that in the mother country.

Situated between the thirty-fourth and forty-seventh degrees of south latitude, the climate of New Zealand is throughout temperate, and embraces as great a variety as can be found between the north of England and the south of France; it is free from droughts such as occur in Australia and at the Cape, and from frost which retards Canada during four months in each year; while the configuration of the land is singularly adapted for colonisation. Roughly speaking it may be described as a strip of land nearly 1,000 miles long, by 200 miles broad—with a coast line of about 3,000 miles, indented by harbours and creeks—comprising 100,000 square miles, or about 20,000 square miles less than the United Kingdom—abundantly watered by rivers—and intersected by roads, with a system of trunk railways approaching completion; so that a vast and rapidly increasing area of most productive soil has been opened up for settlement and rendered accessible on all sides.

In addition to the gold mines which have been worked during the last twenty years, the geological explorations have disclosed coal fields, iron, and other valuable minerals, on which there will hereafter no doubt be built up an industry, ultimately perhaps to rival our own, even though our productiveness may not yet have reached its highest development. At all events, the advantages just mentioned must secure for New Zealand a destiny such as cannot be surpassed by any of the sister colonies, and this notwithstanding her greater distance from Europe, and comparative isolation. But I have to do with what has been accomplished in New Zealand rather than with her future. It is, however, necessary that I should briefly recapitulate the position of the colony at the commencement of the decade.