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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 61

A Retrospect

A Retrospect.

This is unavoidable. We must briefly look back over the lines traversed already in order to realize our position at the present day, and mark the directions in which the surest progress can be made. Within the memory of men who are still page 38 able to work, New Zealand produced and exported whalebone, timber, oil, kauri-gum, flax, greenstone, preserved human heads, and a very small quantity of gold. This was the catalogue of exports: the value of the total was insignificant, and the permanence of the supply was considered as precarious for the whalebone and oil steadily decreased in quantity; the timber was irregularly prepared; the true use and value of the kauri-gum had not been recognized; the flax involved hand-preparation, which prohibited a large quantity being obtained; while the greenstone and heads were but "curios" of savage lands wherewith to amuse the people at Home. This was our position less than fifty years ago. Fifty years hence we may be the richest and strongest of the Australasian Colonies—truly a bold prediction! but one believed in by many cool-headed though, perhaps, sanguine men. So rapid has been our progress as a people that individuals are sometimes tempted to ask, "Is there any use in ever climbing up the climbing wave?" The colony is enriched, but are We, as individuals, any better off? Fortunately for the sake of advancing knowledge and growth, these people cannot very well help themselves in being forced forward with the mass; they have only the choice of becoming inert altogether, or of putting forth the necessary additional strain to keep pace with their fellows. Still, although the aim of our statesmen is to make the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it is possible for them to fall into the error of over-forcing—of making a perfect workshop without establishing the necessary business connection to support it—of creating an insatiable hunger for employment, which grows in proportion to the supply with which it is fed. But the surest preventive of great ill-fortune befalling us in this respect lies in the multifarious nature of our industries, and the absence of any one predominating interest among the Islands of New Zealand. As is only too well known to those who were in the colony from 1840 to 1865, our progress during that period was very slow. Wool, gold, borrowed money, and a lavish war expenditure kept us in a state of activity; but farming languished, especially in the North Island, and the people who had settled under the land-grant system were in a terribly impoverished condition. There cannot be a doubt that the enormous quantities of capital produced from the gold-mines of the colony gave it the required page 39 impetus to fairly start it upon its road to prosperity; and that without the universally-marketable commodity of gold New Zealand would still be a distant colony, of interest to the geographer and ethnologist, and, perhaps, still affording an asylum to the world-weary man; but it would not have been the great and glorious country of to-day, with its illimitable vistas of the possible opening widely before it. Deeply, then, as we are indebted to the wealth of our gold-mines, they cannot be regarded as forming our true wealth for the future; they will doubtless be a factor in making up the sum of wealth; but the true and permanent wealth will not lie in them, but in the various other industries, which in the aggregate will produce a teeming population of almost every industrial pursuit known to mankind. What those pursuits and industries are and will be, and how they may be promoted and developed, it will be our object to define.