I have to report the arrival of the "Canterbury" after a passage of 121 days; all well on board. I regret to say that considerable dissatisfaction appears to be felt by many of the passengers who have come out in this vessel and in the "Midlothian," and loud and general complaints that the agents of page 217the Association had given them altogether too favourable an impression both of the country and of the amount of public works which they would find completed. I do not mention these things as implying any suspicion on my part that there is ground for such accusations; on the contrary, I feel sure that the Association have merely communicated to intending colonists the substance of the information which they themselves have received, leaving the colonists to draw their own conclusions. But I am very anxious to impress upon you the necessity of extreme caution in dealing with such persons, indeed of pointing out to them rather the dark than the bright side of colonisation; above all, of abstaining as far as possible from conjectural estimates as to what will or will not be done by the time they arrive in the colony. I observe, in illustration of what I have said, that, in my dispatch of the 18th January last, I stated as distinctly as possible that only half a mile of the Christchurch road was then open, and that unless further remittances arrived by the ships then due I could not continue working at it for more than a fortnight longer. That dispatch had arrived and the substance of it had been made public before the last three vessels sailed, and yet I am told over and over again, that the impression conveyed by the Association to its purchasers up to the last moment, was that the road would be finished before their arrival. Probably, as I have said, this mistake was owing to their own faults, but if the Committee consider the extremely bad consequences which mistakes of this kind produce, they will, I am sure, agree with me as to the urgent necessity of guarding most carefully against them. Having said this much, I must add that I think those who have expressed dissatisfaction and disappointment are persons eminently unfitted for a colonist's life. They are altogether destitute of energy and resource, and have really never studied the subject so as to make themselves reasonably acquainted with the inevitable difficulties of a colonist's start in his new life. Many have never even taken the trouble to ascertain the general features of the country, and expected the page 218Plains to resemble an English park, with hill and dale, wood and water, blended in precisely the proportions most favourable to picturesqueness and utility. Some are very indignant because they were misled as to the price of provisions, as if the officers of the Association could possibly, unless gifted with prophetic inspiration, know what prices would prevail at the Antipodes at any given future time. The only complaint which appears to me to have a shadow of foundation is that people have been encouraged to buy too much land. I know how difficult it must be to avoid such encouragement without running the risk of sacrificing a scheme which depends on a large and sustained sale of land, and also that intending colonists have pretty nearly the same means of ascertaining the economical results of their purchases which the Association has; still, as we do volunteer to give advice, our first obligation is to take care that no false impression of the actual facts should be conveyed through our means to anybody. Now, undoubtedly the impression that agriculture can be made a permanently profitable occupation by a gentleman in this country is false. A man, therefore, who is not a manual labourer, and who has not some independent source of income, which enables him to dispense with the profit of the capital expended by him in land, would be better off if he had not bought land. On the other hand, a person with small capital can invest it here, not in land at first, but in innumerable other ways, so as to derive from it eight or ten times the profit which it would produce in England. By degrees the land will be bought by men, especially working men, who have made money either by wages or investments; but the only persons who, in my opinion, ought to be advised to buy land at first, are those who can afford to do without the interest of its price for the present, or at least to be content with a small and problematical return in the shape of rent, looking to the future for a sure and large increase in the value of their property. I have often laid these views before the Committee, and every day's experience convinces me more and more of their truth. page 219Our scheme (looking at the matter in a merely economical point of view), cannot prosper if based on the foundation of unprofitable investments. It is far better to have a small sale to men who know what they are doing when they buy, than a very large one to men who repent after coming out that they have bought our land. Among the colonists who have hitherto arrived there is certainly too large a proportion of the latter class, and I should not be doing my duty if I did not warn the Committee against doing any thing to swell its numbers.