New Zealand as a Home.

An old-established country must necessarily afford more attractions to the moneyed and leisure classes than any new country can. Men of luxurious tastes and those engaged in scientific, literary, or artistic pursuits naturally flock to centres where luxury can be enjoyed, and where science, literature, and art abound. To such as these a Colony offers fewer attractions as a place of permanent residence. The number of those, however, who can give free scope to the pursuit of pleasure, science, literature or art is necessarily a very small proportion of the total population. Commercial men, again, have their locale fixed by circumstances. But there is a large class who have a fixed though moderate income with a growing family, many of whom, finding their income insufficiently elastic in England, go to the Continent, where they can live in a style they would not care to live in in England, and where education for their children is cheap. Such as these might well turn their attention to New Zealand as a place of residence preferable to Europe. There they would find a society congenial to their English ideas, there they would find excellent and cheap schools, and there their sons and daughters would have a much better chance of finding an outlet for their energy. When people like these think of the Colony—if, indeed, they ever think of it at all—they picture it probably as it was forty years ago, when gentlemen wore blue shirts and wide awakes, drove bullocks, and lived on damper and mutton, and when ladies did their own housework and wore antediluvian garments. All is now changed. Fifty years of work and progress have converted the plains into smiling homesteads, and built up towns which have all the modern conveniences and social life of English provincial towns. Let us go in imagination to Christchurch, which I know best, and take a bird's-eye view from the top of the beautiful spire of its cathedral. It is now half-past eight to-morrow morning—a clear, bright, sunny autumnal morning, the most enjoyable season of the year, when slight frosts at night are succeeded by still, warm, sunny days, making the already bronzed leaves of the English oak, sycamore, lime and birch linger on the trees, protesting against nature's mandate for a season of rest. The thoroughfares are full of healthy, well-dressed children on their way to the various schools, where they get at the Board schools a free education of at least as good a standard of excellence as the English Board schools provide. Older boys and girls are going to the various High Schools and Colleges. 'Busses, trains, and trams, loaded with men going to page 433 business, pass at our feet. The well-made streets show shop windows which would not do discredit to any provincial town in England. Warehouses, business premises, halls, theatres, churches, clubhouses and public buildings pass under review.

Here and there a long chimney tells of a factory. In and out winds the beautiful River Avon, the fine willows on the banks, raised from a branch brought from St. Helena, still clad in their summer shroud of green. There is Hagley Park, with its noted museum, and Christ's College close by. Beyond stretch the suburbs with their comfortable houses and lovely gardens. Pause a moment before some of these gardens and note how exquisite are the autumn roses, all heavy with the morning dew; how gorgeous the chrysanthemums and dahlias; how lovely the geraniums and the masses of many-tinted blooms, scattered so profusely in all directions. Look at the smooth well-kept tennis lawns, the neatly gravelled walks, the shining river with its moored boat waiting quietly for its daily occupants. Then turn and look away over there through the trees—look right across the vast Canterbury plains, where, in days of old, the Maori coursed the moa, but which is now one of the richest agricultural districts in the world. This is where the celebrated Canterbury frozen mutton comes from, and the rivers which traverse this large plain are teeming with the finest trout. Let your eye travel further still, till it falls on one of the grandest sights in nature—the' majestic Southern Alps, which even now are wrapt in a white and glistening mantle of snow. Tell me, is not this a fair scene? Is it not as sweet and fresh as any in the dear old land you all love so well? Could you not well imagine you were looking at an English landscape under an Italian sky! Yes! England's life is reproduced under a bluer sky and in a finer climate, and you would be quite at home at once. This is what the Canterbury pilgrims have done!

Behold their work, revere their names,
Green pictures set in golden frames,
Around the city of the stream
Fulfil the pilgrims' brightest dream:
With them a fairer England grew
'Neath speckless skies of sunny blue.

T. Bracken.—Musings in Maoriland.

But we will descend from our lofty point of vantage and walk into the public library close by and look through the various daily papers and periodicals kept in the free reading-room. You will see under the head of "Cablegrams," in the morning paper, yesterday's page 434 European news, and quite possibly you will read a few unfavourable comments on the very paper I am reading to you now. You will find an intelligent criticism offered upon the political and social topics of the Old and New World. Turn over the files; you will find records of cricket, tennis, boating, golf, cycling, horse-racing, polo, coursing, bowls, football, hunting, shooting and fishing enough to convince you that the pastimes of the Old World are reproduced. And so, as you turn over the pages of the papers, you will meet with evidence after evidence proving that the people of the Colony are, in every sense, sons and daughters of Britain.

I often hear people in England, Londoners especially, when talking of English life, say: "Oh! here we are in the very midst of the very best the world can produce. Whether it be literature, or art, or scientific pursuits, or music, or refined society, or whatever form of enjoyment we seek, we can get it." This is, of course, very true, and may apply to the men of means and to the comparatively few artists and scientific men; but what share in this select society has the man with a limited income and a family to support?—Very, very little. The fact is, that the great majority of such people lead the most humdrum and isolated lives imaginable, and get very much less enjoyment, even scientific enjoyment, than they would get in a British Colony. A friend of mine possessing a small income, large family, and bronchial tubes which make it necessary for him to spend most of the winter within the four walls of his house in London, said to me the other day, in reply to a query of mine as to why he did not transfer his bronchial tubes and his family to New Zealand: "Why, London is the centre of all that makes life worth living." "Very true," I replied, "but not for you." When I pressed my friend, who always poses as a great lover of art and music, to tell me how much art and music he had enjoyed during the last six months, he replied: " Let me see! Ah well! I have been to the Royal Academy Exhibition, and I have been to a music-hall to hear ' Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.'" That is, I believe, a fair sample of the way very many with artistic tastes, real or imaginary, are prevented by the want of means, by the accident of climate, or by their surroundings from taking advantage of the many good things this country provides.