The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 10

10. (See page 23.)

10. (See page 23.)

Society——Whatever may have been the defects of that Wakefield System of Colonisation on which New Zealand was settled the System did at least do this—it drew over a much higher class of emigrants to the Colony than any which had ever left the Mother Country since the Puritan towns of Massachusetts and the Cavalier Settlements of Virginia were founded; and selected its free and assisted-passage emigrants so carefully that almost every mechanic and labourer carried to New Zealand has been a "picked" man. Petres, Staffords, Pierpoints, Molesworths, Cliffords, Dillons, Tancreds, Tollemaefies, Congreves, Welds, Wortleys, Vavasours, Cholmondeleys, scions of many an old English family, have settled in New Zealand. Retired professional men turned agriculturists, 'vieux moustache' of the Line or Indian service, grown cunning in wool; enterprising younger sons who have had the good sense to abandon Regent Street and the life of the clubs; quiet rural families, with broods of sons and daughters, most of them living on and creating their little estates; with a considerable sprinkling of black coats, scarlet coats, government officials, and the mercantile classes, constitute half the present pioneering population of the country. No stranger, I think, would now visit the Colony without being agreeably surprised at the high, if homely, tone of society, and forcibly struck with the steady, industrious character of all orders of the young community. Indeed, for friendliness of feeling, pleasantness of intercourse, intellectual and moral endowments, I should say that the social circles of New Zealand would be found quite equal to those which the emigrant family might have left in England, Crime, too, we must recollect, is all but non-existent; while the republican licence so offensive to the Englishman in Yankee Land, and that "convict taint" which still reveals itself through a large portion of Australia are alike unknown. Hursthouse's New Zealand, the " Britain of the South"