COUNTRY LIFE
When all is said, however, it is not the cities which interest most
the ordinary visitors to New Zealand. They may have a charm which it
is no exaggeration to call loveliness, as Auckland has; or be finely
seated on hill-sides overlooking noble harbours, as Wellington and
Dunedin are. They may have sweetly redeeming features, like the river
banks, public and private gardens, and the vistas of hills and distant
mountains seen in flat Christchurch. They may be pleasant altogether
both in themselves and their landscape, as Nelson is. But after all
they are towns, and modern towns, whose best qualities are that they
are wholesome and that their raw newness is passing away. It is to the
country and the country life that travellers naturally turn for escape
into something with a spice of novelty and maybe a touch of romance.
Nor need they be disappointed. Country life in the islands varies with
the locality and the year. It is not always bright, any more than is
the New Zealand sky. It is not always prosperous, any more than
you can claim that the seasons are always favourable. But, on the
whole, I do not hesitate to say, that to a healthy capable farmer or
rural worker the colony offers the most inviting life in the world.
In the first place, the life is cheerful and healthy; in the next
place, the work, though laborious at times, need not be killing; and
then the solitude, that deadly accompaniment of early colonial life,
has now ceased to be continuous except in a few scattered outposts.
Moreover--and this is important--there is money in it. The incompetent
or inexperienced farmer may, of course, lose his capital, just as a
drunken or stupid labourer may fail to save out of his wages. But year
in, year out, the farmer who knows his business and sticks to it can
and does make money, improve his property, and see his position grow
safer and his anxieties less. Good farmers can make profits quite apart
from the very considerable increment which comes to the value of land
as population spreads. Whatever may be said of this rise in price as
a matter of public policy, it fills the pockets of individuals in a
manner highly satisfactory to many of the present generation.
[Illustration: NELSON]
One of the most cheerful features in New Zealand country life, perhaps,
is the extent to which those who own the land are taking root in the
soil. Far the greater part of the settled country is in the hands of
men and families who live on the land, and may go on living there as
long as they please; no one can oust them. They are either freeholders,
or tenants of the State or public bodies. Such tenants hold their lands
on terms so easy that their position as working farmers is as good as
or better than that of freeholders. As prospective sellers of land they
may not be so well placed; but that is another story. Anyway, rural New
Zealand is becoming filled with capable independent farmers, with farms
of all sizes from the estate of four thousand or five thousand acres to
the peasant holding of fifty or one hundred. Colonists still think in
large areas when they define the degrees of land-holding and ownership.
[Illustration: ON THE BEACH AT NGUNGURU]
And here a New Zealander, endeavouring to make a general sketch that
may place realities clearly before the English eye, is confronted
with the difficulty, almost impossibility, of helping the European
to conceive a thinly peopled territory. Suppose, for a moment, what
the British Islands would be like if they were populated on the New
Zealand scale--that is to say, if they held about a million souls, of
whom fifty thousand were brown and the rest white. The brown would
be English-speaking and half civilised, and the whites just workaday
Britons of the middle and labouring classes, better fed, a little
taller and rather more tanned by sun and wind. That at first sight
does not seem to imply any revolutionary change. But imagine yourself
standing on the deck of a steamer running up the English Channel past
the coast as it would look if nineteen-twentieths of the British
population, and all traces of them and the historic past of their
country, had been swept away. The cliff edges of Cornwall and hills
of Devon would be covered with thick forest, and perhaps a few people
might cluster round single piers in sheltered inlets like Falmouth
and Plymouth. The Chalk Downs of Wiltshire and Hampshire would be held
by a score or two of sheep-farmers, tenants of the Crown, running
their flocks over enormous areas of scanty grass. Fertile strips like
the vale of Blackmore would be occupied by independent farmers with
from three hundred to two thousand acres of grass and crops round
their homesteads. Southampton would be the largest town in the British
Islands, a flourishing and busy seaport, containing with its suburbs
not less than 90,000 people. Its inhabitants would proudly point to
the railway system, of which they were the terminus, and by which they
were connected with Liverpool, the second city of the United Kingdom,
holding with Birkenhead about 70,000 souls. Journeying from Southampton
to Liverpool on a single line of rails, the traveller would note a
comfortable race of small farmers established in the valley of the
Thames, and would hear of similar conditions about the Wye and the
Severn. But he would be struck by the almost empty look of the wide
pastoral stretches in Berkshire and Oxfordshire, and would find axemen
struggling with Nature in the forest of Arden, where dense thickets
would still cover the whole of Warwickshire and spread over into the
neighbouring counties. Arrived at Liverpool after a twelve hours’
journey, he might wish to visit Dublin or Glasgow, the only two other
considerable towns in the British Islands; the one about as large as
York now is, the other the size of Northampton. He would be informed
by the Government tourist agent in Liverpool that his easiest way to
Glasgow would be by sea to a landing-place in the Solway Firth, where
he would find the southern terminus of the Scotch railways. He would
discover that England and Scotland were not yet linked by rail, though
that great step in progress was confidently looked for within a few
months.
[Illustration: AT THE FOOT OF LAKE TE-ANAU]
By all this I do not mean to suggest that there are no spots in
New Zealand where the modern side of rural English life is already
closely reproduced. On an earlier page I have said that there are. Our
country life differs widely as you pass from district to district,
and is marked by as much variety as is almost everything else in the
islands. On the east coast of the South Island, between Southland
and the Kaikouras, mixed farming is scientifically carried on with
no small expenditure of skill and capital. The same can be said of
certain districts on the west coast of the Wellington Province, and in
the province of Hawkes Bay, within a moderate distance of the town of
Napier. Elsewhere, with certain exceptions, farming is of a rougher
and more primitive-looking sort than anything seen in the mother
country, though it does not follow that a comparatively rough, unkempt
appearance denotes lack of skill or agricultural knowledge. It may
mean, and usually does mean, that the land is in the earlier stages of
settlement, and that the holders have not yet had time to think much
of appearances. Then outside the class of small or middle-sized farms
come the large holdings of the islands, which are like nothing at all
in the United Kingdom. They are of two kinds, freehold and Crown
lands held under pastoral licences. Generally speaking, the freeholds
are much the more valuable, have much more arable land, and will, in
days to come, carry many more people. The pastoral Crown tenants have,
by the pressure of land laws and the demands of settlement, been more
and more restricted to the wilder and more barren areas of the islands.
They still hold more than ten million acres; but this country chiefly
lies in the mountainous interior, covering steep faces where the plough
will never go, and narrow terraces and cold, stony valleys where the
snow lies deep in winter.
On these sheep stations life changes more slowly than elsewhere. If you
wish to form an idea of what pastoral life “up-country” was forty years
ago, you can still do so by spending a month or two at one of these
mountain homesteads. There you may possibly have the owner and the
owner’s family for society, but are rather more likely to be yourself
furnishing a solitary manager with not unwelcome company. Round about
the homestead you will still see the traditional features of colonial
station life, the long wool-shed with high-pitched roof of shingles
or corrugated iron, and the sheep-yards which, to the eye of the new
chum, seem such an unmeaning labyrinth. Not far off will stand the
men’s huts, a little larger than of yore, and more likely nowadays to
be frame cottages than to be slab whares with the sleeping-bunks and
low, wide chimneys of days gone by. In out-of-the-way spots the station
store may still occasionally be found, with its atmosphere made
odorous by hob-nailed boots, moleskin trousers, brown sugar, flannel
shirts, tea, tar, and black tobacco. For the Truck Act does not apply
to sheep stations, and there are still places far enough away from a
township to make the station store a convenience to the men.
[Illustration: THE WAIKATO AT NGARUAWAHIA]
At such places the homestead is still probably nothing more than a
modest cottage, roomy, but built of wood, and owing any attractiveness
it has to its broad verandah, perhaps festooned with creepers, and
to the garden and orchard which are now seldom absent. In the last
generation the harder and coarser specimens of the pioneers often
affected to hold gardens and garden-stuffs cheap, and to despise
planting and adornment of any kind, summing them up as “fancy work.”
This was not always mere stinginess or brute indifference to everything
that did not directly pay, though it sometimes was. There can be no
doubt that absentee owners or mortgagee companies were often mean
enough in these things. But the spirit that grudged every hour of
labour bestowed on anything except the raising of wool, mutton, or
corn, was often the outcome of nothing worse than absorption in a
ceaseless and unsparing battle with Nature and the fluctuations of
markets. The first generation of settlers had to wrestle hard to keep
their foothold; and, naturally, the men who usually survived through
bad times were those who concentrated themselves most intensely on
the struggle for success and existence. But time mellows everything.
The struggle for life has still to be sustained in New Zealand. It
is easier than of yore, however; and the continued prosperity of the
last twelve or thirteen years has enabled settlers to bestow thought
and money on the lighter and pleasanter side. Homesteads are brighter
places than they were: they may not be artistic, but even the most
remote are nearly always comfortable. More than comfort the working
settler does not ask for.
Then in estimating how far New Zealand country life may be enjoyable
and satisfying we must remember that it is mainly a life out of
doors. On farms and stations of all sorts and sizes the men spend
many hours daily in the open, sometimes near the homestead, sometimes
miles away from it. To them, therefore, climate is of more importance
than room-space, and sunshine than furniture. If we except a handful
of mountaineers, the country worker in New Zealand is either never
snowbound at all, or, at the worst, is hampered by a snowstorm once
a year. Many showery days there are, and now and again the bursts of
wind and rain are wild enough to force ploughmen to quit work, or
shepherds to seek cover; but apart from a few tempests there is nothing
to keep country-folk indoors. It is never either too hot or too cold
for out-door work, while for at least one day in three in an average
year it is a positive pleasure to breathe the air and live under the
pleasant skies.
The contrast between the station of the back-ranges and the country
place of the wealthy freeholder is the contrast between the first
generation of colonial life and the third. The lord of 40,000 acres
may be a rural settler or a rich man with interests in town as well as
country. In either case his house is something far more costly than
the old wooden bungalow. It is defended by plantations and approached
by a curving carriage drive. When the proprietor arrives at his
front door he is as likely to step out of a motor-car as to dismount
from horseback. Within, you may find an airy billiard-room; without,
smooth-shaven tennis lawns, and perhaps a bowling-green. The family
and their guests wear evening dress at dinner, where the wine will
be expensive and may even be good. In the smoking-room, cigars have
displaced the briar-root pipes of our fathers. The stables are higher
and more spacious than were the dwellings of the men of the early
days. Neat grooms and trained gardeners are seen in the place of the
“rouse-abouts” of yore. Dip and wool-shed are discreetly hidden from
view; and a conservatory rises where meat once hung on the gallows.
For a colony whose days are not threescore years and ten, ours has made
some creditable headway in gardening. The good and bad points of our
climate alike encourage us to cultivate the art. The combination of
an ample rainfall with lavish sunshine helps the gardener’s skill. On
the other hand, the winds--those gales from north-west and south-west,
varied by the teasing persistency of the steadier north-easter,
plague of spring afternoons--make the planting of hedgerows and
shelter clumps an inevitable self-defence. So while, on the one hand,
the colonist hews and burns and drains away the natural vegetation
of forest and swamp, on the other, in the character of planter and
gardener, he does something to make amends. The colours of England and
New Zealand glow side by side in the flowers round his grass plots,
while Australia and North America furnish sombre break-winds, and
contribute some oddities of foliage and a share of colour. In seaside
gardens the Norfolk Island pine takes the place held by the cedar of
Lebanon on English lawns. The mimosa and jackarandah of Australia
persist in flowering in the frosty days of our early spring. On the
verandahs, jessamine and Virginia creeper intertwine with the clematis
and passion-flower of the bush. The palm-lily--insulted with the
nickname of cabbage-tree--is hardy enough to flourish anywhere despite
its semi-tropical look; but the nikau, our true palm, requires shelter
from bitter or violent winds. The toé-toé (a reed with golden plumes),
the glossy native flax (a lily with leaves like the blade of a classic
Roman sword), and two shrubs, the matipo and karaka, are less timid, so
more serviceable. The crimson parrot’s-beak and veronicas--white, pink,
and purple--are easily and commonly grown; and though the manuka does
not rival the English whitethorn in popularity, the pohutu-kawa, most
striking of flowering trees, surpasses the ruddy may and pink chestnut
of the old country. Some English garden-charms cannot be transplanted.
The thick sward and living green of soft lawns, the moss and mellowing
lichens that steal slowly over bark and walls, the quaintness that
belongs to old-fashioned landscape gardening, the venerable aspect of
aged trees,--these cannot be looked for in gardens the eldest of which
scarcely count half a century. But a climate in which arum lilies run
wild in the hedgerows, and in which bougainvilleas, camellias, azaleas,
oleanders, and even (in the north) the stephanotis, bloom in the open
air, gives to skill great opportunities. Then the lover of ferns--and
they have many lovers in New Zealand--has there a whole realm to call
his own. Not that every fern will grow in every garden. Among distinct
varieties numbering scores, there are many that naturally cling to the
peace and moisture of deep gullies and overshadowing jungle. There,
indeed, is found a wealth of them--ferns with trunks as thick as trees,
and ferns with fronds as fine as hair or as delicate as lace; and there
are filmy ferns, and such as cling to and twine round their greater
brethren, and pendant ferns that droop from crevices and drape the
faces of cliffs. To these add ferns that climb aloft as parasites on
branches and among foliage, or that creep upon the ground, after the
manner of lycopodium, or coat fallen forest trees like mosses. The
tree-ferns are large enough to be hewn down with axes, and to spread
their fronds as wide as the state umbrellas of Asiatic kings. Thirty
feet is no uncommon span for the shade they cast, and their height
has been known to reach fifty feet. They are to other ferns as the
wandering albatross is to lesser sea-birds. The black-trunked
are the tallest, while the silver-fronded, whose wings seem as though
frosted on the underside, are the most beautiful. In places they stand
together in dense groves. Attempt to penetrate these and you find a
dusky entanglement where your feet sink into tinder and dead, brown
litter. But look down upon a grove from above, and your eyes view a
canopy of green intricacies, a waving covering of soft, wing-like
fronds, and fresh, curving plumes.
[Illustration: TREE FERNS]
The change in country life now going on so rapidly has not meant merely
more comfort for the employer: the position of the men also has altered
for the better. While the land-owner’s house and surroundings show a
measure of refinement, and even something that may at the other end
of the earth pass for luxury, the station hands are far better cared
for than was the case a generation or two ago. The interior of the
“men’s huts” no longer reminds you of the foc’sle of a merchantship.
Seek out the men’s quarters on one of the better managed estates, and
it may easily happen that you will now find a substantial, well-built
cottage with a broad verandah round two sides. Inside you are shown a
commodious dining-room, and a reading-room supplied with newspapers and
even books. To each man is assigned a separate bedroom, clean and airy,
and a big bathroom is supplemented by decent lavatory arrangements.
The food was always abundant--in the roughest days the estate owners
never grudged their men plenty of “tucker.” But it is now much more
varied and better cooked, and therefore wholesome. To some extent this
improvement in the country labourer’s lot is due to legal enactment and
government inspection. But it is only fair to say that in some of the
most notable instances it comes from spontaneous action by employers
themselves. New Zealand has developed a public conscience during the
last twenty years in matters relating to the treatment of labour, and
by this development the country employers have been touched as much as
any section of the community. They were never an unkindly race, and it
may now be fairly claimed that they compare favourably with any similar
class of employers within the Empire.
At the other end of the rural scale to the establishment of the great
land-owner we see the home of the bush settler--the pioneer of to-day.
Perhaps the Crown has leased a block of virgin forest to him; perhaps
he is one of the tenants of a Maori tribe, holding on a twenty-one
or forty-two years’ lease; perhaps he has contrived to pick up a
freehold in the rough. At any rate he and his mate are on the ground
armed with saw and axe for their long attack upon Nature; and as you
note the muscles of their bared arms, and the swell of the chests
expanding under their light singlets, you are quite ready to believe
that Nature will come out of the contest in a damaged condition. It is
their business to hack and grub, hew and burn, blacken and deface. The
sooner they can set the fire running through tracts of fern or piles
of felled bush the sooner will they be able to scatter broadcast the
contents of certain bags of grass seed now carefully stowed away in
their shanty under cover of tarpaulins. Sworn enemies are they of tall
bracken and stately pines. To their eyes nothing can equal in beauty
a landscape of black, fire-scorched stumps and charred logs--if only
on the soil between these they may behold the green shoots of young
grass thrusting ten million blades upward. What matter the ugliness and
wreckage of the first stages of settlement, if, after many years, a
tidy farm and smiling homestead are to be the outcome? In the meantime,
while under-scrubbing and bush-felling are going on, the axemen build
for themselves a slab hut with shingled roof. The furniture probably
exemplifies the great art of “doing without.” The legs of their table
are posts driven into the clay floor: to other posts are nailed the
sacking on which their blankets are spread. A couple of sea chests
hold their clothes and odds and ends. A sheepskin or two do duty for
rugs. Tallow candles, or maybe kerosene, furnish light. A very few
well-thumbed books, and a pack or two of more than well-thumbed cards,
provide amusement. Not that there are many hours in the week for
amusement. When cooking is done, washing and mending have to be taken
in hand. Flannel and blue dungaree require washing after a while, and
even garments of canvas and moleskin must be repaired sooner or later.
A camp oven, a frying-pan, and a big teapot form the front rank of
their cooking utensils, and fuel, at least, is abundant. Baking-powder
helps them to make bread. Bush pork, wild birds, and fish may vary a
diet in which mutton and sardines figure monotonously. After a while
a few vegetables are grown behind the hut, and the settlers find time
to milk a cow. Soon afterwards, perhaps, occurs the chief event of
pioneer life--the coming of a wife on to the scene. With her arrival
is the beginning of a civilised life indoors, though her earlier years
as a housekeeper may be an era of odd shifts and desperate expedients.
A bush household is lucky if it is near enough to a metalled road to
enable stores to be brought within fairly easy reach. More probably
such necessaries as flour, groceries, tools, and grass seed--anything,
in short, from a grindstone to a bag of sugar--have to be brought by
pack-horse along a bush-track where road-metal is an unattainable
luxury, and which may not unfairly be described as a succession of
mud-holes divided by logs. Along such a thoroughfare many a rain-soaked
pioneer has guided in days past the mud-plastered pack-horse which
has carried the first beginnings of his fortunes. For what sustains
the average settler through the early struggles of pioneering in the
wilderness is chiefly the example of those who have done the same
thing before, have lived as hard a life or harder, and have emerged as
substantial farmers and leading settlers, respected throughout their
district. Success has crowned the achievement so many thousand times
in the past that the back-country settler of to-day, as he fells his
bush and toils along his muddy track, may well be sustained by hope
and by visions of macadamised coach roads running past well-grassed,
well-stocked sheep or dairy farms in days to come.
[Illustration: A MAORI VILLAGE]
Predominant as the white man is in New Zealand, the brown man is too
interesting and important to be forgotten even in a rough and hasty
sketch. The Maori do not dwell in towns: they are an element of our
country life. They now number no more than a twentieth of our people;
but whereas a generation ago they were regarded as a doomed race,
whose end, perhaps, was not very far distant, their disappearance
is now regarded as by no means certain. I doubt, indeed, whether it
is even probable. Until the end of the nineteenth century official
returns appeared to show that the race was steadily and indeed rapidly
diminishing. More recent and more accurate figures, however, seem
to prove either that the Maori have regained vitality, or that past
estimates of their numbers were too low. I am inclined to think that
the explanation is found in both these reasons. In past decades our
Census officers never claimed to be able to reckon the strength of the
Maori with absolute accuracy, chiefly because the Natives would give
them little or no help in their work. It is not quite so difficult
now as formerly to enumerate the members of the tribes. Furthermore,
there is reason to hope that the health of the race is improving and
that its spirit is reviving. The first shock with our civilisation and
our overwhelming strength is over. The Maori, beaten in war with us,
were not disgraced: though their defeat disheartened them, it did not
lead their conquerors to despise them. Again, though they have been
deprived of some of their land, and have sold a great part of the rest,
the tribes are still great landlords. They hold the fee-simple of
nearly seven million acres of land, much of it fertile. This is a large
estate for about fifty thousand men, women, and children. Moreover,
it is a valuable estate. I daresay its selling price might be rated
at a higher figure than the value of the whole of New Zealand when we
annexed it. Some of this great property is leased to white tenants;
most of it is still retained by the native tribes. So long as they can
continue to hold land on a considerable scale they will always have
a chance, and may be sure of respectful treatment. At the worst they
have had, and still have, three powerful allies. The Government of the
colony may sometimes have erred against them, but in the main it has
stood between them and the baser and greedier sort of whites. Maori
children are educated free of cost. Most of them can now at least read
and write English. Quite as useful is the work of the Department of
Public Health. If I am not mistaken, it has been the main cause of the
lowered Maori death-rate of the last ten years. Then the clergy of
more than one Church have always been the Maori’s friends. Weak--too
weak--as their hands have been, their voices have been raised again and
again on the native’s behalf. Thirdly, the leaders of the temperance
movement--one of the most powerful influences in our public life--have
done all they can to save the Maori of the interior from the curse
of drink. Allies, then, have been fighting for the Maori. Moreover,
they are citizens with a vote at the polls and a voice in Parliament.
Were one political party disposed to bully the natives, the other
might be tempted to befriend them. But the better sort of white has no
desire to bully. He may not admit that the brown man is socially his
equal; but there is neither hatred nor loathing between the races.
[Illustration: A PATAKA]
In a word, the outlook for the Maori, though still doubtful, is by no
means desperate. They will own land; they will collect substantial
rents from white tenants; they will be educated; they will retain the
franchise. At last they are beginning to learn the laws of sanitation
and the uses of ventilation and hospitals. The doctors of the Health
Department have persuaded them to pull down hundreds of dirty old huts,
are caring for their infants, and are awaking a wholesome distrust of
the trickeries of those mischievous conjuror-quacks, the _tohungas_.
Some of these good physicians--Dr. Pomaré, for instance--are themselves
Maori. More of his stamp are wanted; also more Maori lawyers like
Mr. Apirana Ngata, M.P. Much will turn upon the ability of the race
to master co-operative farming. That there is hope of this is shown
by the success of the Ngatiporou tribesmen, who in recent years
have cleared and sown sixty thousand acres of land, and now own
eighty-three thousand sheep, more than three thousand cattle, and more
than eight thousand pigs. Only let the sanitary lesson be learned and
the industrial problem solved, and the qualities of the Maori may be
trusted to do the rest. Their muscular strength and courage, their
courtesy and vein of humour, their poetic power and artistic sense,
are gifts that make it desirable that the race should survive and win a
permanent place among civilised men.
* * * * *
Watching the tendencies of New Zealand life and laws to-day, one
is tempted to look ahead and think of what country life in the
islands may become in a generation or so, soon after the colony has
celebrated its hundredth anniversary. It should be a pleasant life,
even pleasanter than that of our own time; for more gaps will have
been filled up and more angles rubbed off. Limiting laws and graduated
taxes will have made an end of the great estates: a land-owner with
more than £120,000 of real property will probably be unknown. Many
land-owners will be richer than that, but it will be because a part
of their money is invested in personalty. But in peacefully making an
end of _latifundia_ the law-makers will not have succeeded--even if
that were their design--in handing over the land to peasants: there
will be no sweeping revolution. Much of the soil will still be held
by large and substantial farmers,--eight or ten thousand in number,
perhaps,--educated men married to wives of some culture and refinement.
The process of subdivision will have swelled the numbers and increased
the influence of land-holders. The unpopularity which attached
itself to the enormous estates will pass away with them. Some of the
farming gentlemen of the future will be descendants of members of the
English upper and upper-middle classes. Others will be the grandsons
of hard-headed Scotch shepherds, English rural labourers, small
tenants, or successful men of commerce. Whatever their origin, however,
education, intermarriage, and common habits of life will tend to level
them into a homogeneous class. Dressed in tweed suits, wide-awake hats,
and gaiters, riding good horses or driving in powerful motors, and with
their alert, bony faces browned and reddened by sun and wind, they will
look and will be a healthy, self-confident, intelligent race. Despite
overmuch tea and tobacco, their nerves will seldom be highly strung;
the blessed sunshine and the air of the sea and the mountains will
save them from that. Moreover, colonial cookery will be better than
it has been, and diet more varied. Nor will our farmers trouble the
doctors much or poison themselves with patent drugs. Owning anything
from half a square mile to six or seven square miles of land, they
will be immensely proud of their stake in the country and cheerfully
convinced of their value as the backbone of the community. They will
not be a vicious lot; early marriage and life in the open air will
prevent that. Nor will drunkenness be fashionable, though there will be
gambling and probably far too much horse-racing. Varying in size from
three or four hundred to four or five thousand acres, their properties,
with stock and improvements, may be worth anything from five or six
thousand to seventy or eighty thousand pounds, but amongst themselves
the smaller and larger owners will meet on terms of easy equality. They
will gradually form an educated rural gentry with which the wealthier
townspeople will be very proud and eager to mix. A few of them, whose
land is rich, may lease it out in small allotments, and try to become
squires on a modified English pattern. But most of them will work their
land themselves, living on it, riding over it daily, directing their
men, and, if need be, lending a hand themselves. That will be their
salvation, bringing them as it will into daily contact with practical
things and working humanity. Conservative, of course, they will be,
and in theory opposed to Socialism, yet assenting from time to time
to Socialistic measures when persuaded of their immediate usefulness.
Thus they will keep a keen eye on the State railways, steamships, and
Department of Agriculture, and develop the machinery of these in their
own interests. A few of the richer of them from time to time may find
that life in Europe so pleases them--or their wives--that they will
sell out and cut adrift from the colony; but there will be no class of
absentee owners--growling, heavily taxed, and unpopular. Our working
gentlemen will stick to the country, and will be hotly, sometimes
boisterously, patriotic, however much they may at moments abuse
governments and labour laws. Most of them will be freeholders. Allied
with them will be State pastoral tenants--holding smaller runs than
now--to be found in the mountains, on the pumice plateau, or where the
clay is hungry. Socially these tenants will be indistinguishable from
the freeholders.
Solitude will be a thing of the past; for roads will be excellent,
motors common, and every homestead will have its telephone. And just as
kerosene lamps and wax candles superseded the tallow dips of the early
settlers, so in turn will electric light reign, not here and there
merely, but almost everywhere. Their main recreations will be shooting,
fishing, motor-driving, riding, and sailing; for games--save polo--and
pure athletics will be left to boys and to men placed lower in the
social scale. They will read books, but are scarcely likely to care
much about art, classing painting and music rather with such things as
wood-carving and embroidery--as women’s work, something for men to look
at rather than produce. But they will be gardeners, and their wives
will pay the arts a certain homage. The furniture of their houses may
seem scanty in European eyes, but will not lack a simple elegance. In
their gardens, however, those of them who have money to spare will
spend more freely, and on brightening these with colour and sheltering
them with soft masses of foliage no mean amount of taste and skill
will be lavished. These gardens will be the scenes of much of the most
enjoyable social intercourse to be had in the country. Perhaps--who
knows?--some painter, happy in a share of Watteau’s light grace or
Fragonard’s eye for decorative effect in foliage, may find in the New
Zealand garden festivals, with their music, converse, and games, and
their framework of beauty, subjects worthy of art.
[Illustration: COROMANDEL]
Socially and financially beneath these country gentlemen, though
politically their equals, and in intelligence often not inferior to
them, will come the more numerous, rougher and poorer races of small
farmers and country labourers. Here will be seen harder lives and
a heavier physique--men whose thews and sinews will make Imperial
recruiting officers sigh wistfully. Holding anything from twenty or
thirty up to two or three hundred acres, the small farmers will have
their times of stress and anxiety, when they will be hard put to it
to weather a bad season combined with low prices. But their practical
skill, strength, and industry, and their ability, at a pinch, to do
without all but bare necessaries, will usually pull them through.
Moreover, they too will be educated, and no mere race of dull-witted
boors. At the worst they will always be able to take to wage-earning
for a time, and the smaller of them will commonly pass part of each
year in working for others. Sometimes their sons will be labourers,
and members of trade unions, and this close contact with organised
labour and Socialism will have curious political results. As a class
they will be much courted by politicians, and will distrust the rich,
especially the rich of the towns. Their main and growing grievance will
be the difficulty of putting their sons on the land. For themselves
they will be able to live cheaply, and in good years save money; for
customs tariffs will be more and more modified to suit them. Some of
their children will migrate to the towns; others will become managers,
overseers, shepherds, drovers. They will have their share of sport, and
from among them will come most of the best athletes of the country,
professional and other. Nowhere will be seen a cringing tenantry,
hat-touching peasantry, or underfed farm labourers. The country
labourers, thoroughly organised, well paid, and active, will yet be not
altogether ill-humoured in politics; for, by comparison with the lot of
their class in other parts of the world, theirs will be a life of hope,
comfort, and confidence.