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Chapter XVII: Conclusion
Finis coronat opus

And now the battle is over. “The tumult and the shouting dies” I have been ordered off the estate, not by any mortgagee, but by my medical adviser. He warned me that, should I persist in hard work, the angels would soon claim the pleasure of my company: proximity to medical assistance would be preferable.

Have all my struggles and my toil and my burial in the wilderness yielded a sufficient result? Has the great endeavour been worth while?

Certainly I have made countless blades of grass grow where none grew before, and caused the wilderness to blossom as the turnip.

I must confess that many a time and oft my heart has sunk within me, but I have battled on. Probably it was obstinacy that held me to the task, but my claim is that I have added another proof to the theory that “Fortune favours the bold.”

My friends' prophecies have not been fulfilled.

The Official Assignee has never had a chance. It is my great pride and really my greatest achievement that throughout my life I have always paid twenty shillings in the pound, and that on the due date. Never have I asked for time, much less for a reduction in my obligations. I have not taken advantage of “Final adjustment” or “Rehabilitation” or in any way made a profit out of the losses of my creditors. Indeed I have discharged page 296 all family obligations and, like England in the World War, have rendered help to all friends needing it and accepted it from none.

Nor have the two doctors had a better chance. Never have I reached the stage of talking to my dogs, much less of talking to myself.

My salvation has depended mainly upon always having too much work on hand to allow time for grousing. Unemployment is a thing I simply cannot understand. There are such mountains of work on every hand. My difficulty has ever been to find time to carry out more than a small portion of what I would like to do.

And yet in many ways I am satisfied with what I have accomplished. Never have I inherited sixpence from anyone — indeed I was thirty-one years of age before I had finished the discharge of debts, in the incurring of which I had had no part. Still what I have earned since then has constructed roads, buildings, fences, drains, paddocks, and other assets, on a very large scale. It is true that only a small portion of all this has been done with my own two hands, but the remainder has been effected with the proceeds of my endeavours in other directions. I shall leave the earth richer than I found it.

And not only that, but I have survived being thoroughly well savaged. I am one of those poor man-hunted and god-for-saken taxpayers who have to admit a hostile government as an equal partner in all their ventures for the benefit of those who have never denied themselves anything, and, at the end of an inglorious career of dependence on the enterprise of others, are rewarded by a pension for their achievements. I rejoice that I have not trodden the safe and easy road well worn with the traffic of the many, but have chosen the steep and stony, oft-times dangerous, and always lonely road which leads to the heights.

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In actual experience of life one gets accustomed to kicks and buffeting from an unappreciative world, but once in a while one receives acknowledgment and encouragement — as in an article appearing in the Waikato Times on 3rd February, 1923, shortly after a visit by a representative of the paper accompanied by a leading Waikato farmer. I quote: “To go out and single-handedly fight a barren wilderness, and to bring it to a state of prolific productivity, requires a heart and a will far stouter than that to face a foe on the field of battle. Yet such a fight has been waged for the past fourteen years away back in the pumice waste beyond Rotorua by a man who, if honours were allotted on merit of pluck, self-sacrifice and perseverance should at this moment be wearing a peer's coronet…. He had faith in this barren plain and a rare optimism that an unsympathetic government has done its best to kill. Yet despite all obstacles he has won through.”

That is a wonderful tribute. And I really think I can claim to have created a great estate out of the nothingness. When I am dead and buried Broadlands will be recognized as a great achievement and the example and model upon which the vast areas in the great central plateau of the North Island have been brought to productivity. In my case the good that I have done cannot be interred with my bones but will live long after me.

Has this result been attained on economic lines? It is true, I must confess, that I have not made working profits commensurate to the capital outlay and to the quantity and quality of the labour expended upon it. But when I have watched my teams turning over two wide furrows of good brown earth rendering fruitful land, which from the dawn of time until that day had yielded nothing for the use of man, I have felt that I have dc served well of my country. When I have ridden my boundary hills and looked down upon the green fields of Broadlands glistening like bright emeralds in the midst of the everlasting page 298 wilderness I have experienced a profound satisfaction. And my gratification is complete when I reflect that my enterprise and final perseverance in it, has proved the value of at least five million acres formerly despised and in effect has added a new Province to our little Dominion — another, an upper, a greater Waikato. I have not come out of the great adventure “on my head” but firmly on my feet. And on the area which I took up when it was reported to be incapable of feeding a grasshopper to the acre there are today twenty houses and a school; six hundred and fifty cows are being milked — and this number will shortly be increased to eight hundred and fifty. The amount paid to Broadlands settlers for butterfat last season was no less than £7,400. Besides the cows there are more than an equal number of dry stock. And twenty-eight thousand acres have been planted with trees which arc now producing a wonderful crop of timber. To ultimate triumph there is one condition and one only — that English women will consent to bear children to enter into the great inheritance which awaits them. “Man is the measure of all things.” Of what use are extended cultivations if there are not enough stout and trusty Englishmen to occupy them? A dwindling population needs no wide domains.

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