Introduction.

The hope of reward sweetens labour, but the material reward offered for the successful essay will not be so valuable as the benefit that must result to all those who make themselves sufficiently acquainted with the subject in hand to enable them to write reasonably and at length upon it. I launch this essay believing that the best reward will be found in reducing into a comprehensive form the knowledge acquired in preparing for it. There is no need to detail the various sources of information which have been drawn from in order to describe the industries now existent and which may be expected to shortly exist in these wondrous islands of the Southern Seas; which, in one generation, have risen from almost primeval savagedom to power and civilization. The power of development is the strongest power a people or nation can possess, and the potentialities of New Zealand in this respect is the theme on which I write.