THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1888.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9179, 8 October 1888, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1888.

To anyone "who has observed the development of New Zealand over a long course of years, there is nothing more striking than the contrast between the present and the previous sentiments of the people as to the sources of prosperity and progress. Indeed, in this respect the present epoch stands apart from anything preceding it, at least for the last twenty years. Whether it be for good or ill, the day of heroic remedies for depression, and of royal roads to wealth has passed away, and as if with one consent the people of this colony, from the highest to the lowest, and throughout every class, appear to have settled down to the conviction that the way to wealth is by honest plodding labour and by that alone ; and the comparative suddenness, and absolute completeness with which this conviction has seized the whole minds of the community, constitute one of the most remarkable phases of social feeling that the history of the colony has produced. Indeed, perhaps it is not at this phase of feeling in itself we should wonder, but rather that we should have been following will-o'-the-wisp through one slough after another, forsaking the solid ground of the colony's own natural resources, and hoping by leaps and bounds to come on solid footing, though all the time it has been the farther in the deeper. There have been a variety of causes contributing to this feeling of unrest and craving after the sudden and sensational. No doubt the native troubles, amid which our colonisation was cradled, had a part in it; for besides the unsettling effect of the whole adult population, at least in this part of the colony, having been called out to military service, and so separated from the methodical ways of their ordinary life, the ephemeral stimulus of army contracts, and irregularly inflated and intermittent prices for various kinds of produce, infused a discontented and speculative element into the lives of the people; while without in the least disparaging the benefits arising from goldiields, and the stimulus which they give to progress, there is not a doubt that New Zealand, in common with all the Australasian colonies, owes largely the disinclination towards plodding labour hitherto to the lottery of gold-finding and the feverishness of the mining stock exchange. But all this only prepared the public mind for being carried wholly away by the wildly extravagant expectations engendered by the heroic policy of public works, and by inflated and fanciful values given to property by the expenditure of the borrowed millions ; and so it came to pass that New Zealand, which perhaps of all countries on the earth has had least reason to resort to unnatural stimulants, and to turn away from its own inherent and teeming resources, has been blowing bubbles, and seeing visions and dreaming dreams, and looking to extraneous sources for prosperity to come to it in " leaps and bounds," while the wealth of its resources lying around our feet has been, ignored and neglected. Indeed there has been hardly an industry pursued, hardly a property of any kind held, but has been valued mainly for the prospect of the coming around of some greater fool than the holder. It is a happy day for New Zealand when this speculative feeling has been sickened unto death, and when land is being valued for the value of the produce it will grow, and property for the legitimate profits it will bring, and enterprise for its actual returns, and none of them for the probabilities or chances of other people with more gold than common sense turning up to contribute of their folly to make the fortunes of those who are living by their wits. There is no one, taking cognisance of the prevalent sentiments of the public, that can fail to be struck by the singular reaction that has taken place from the specula-

tive mania of the past; and the strong and universal current of feeling running in the direction of looking to the inherent resources of the colony, and to their natural development as the sources of future prosperity. Butter and cheese and fruit and frozen mutton and wool and corn are the words that we conjure by now ; and even our goldfields are fast falling from the realm of speculation, and are being regarded as spheres where steady plodding work, and capital seeking for legitimate returns for skill and labour, are henceforth to find only their fair reward. It may be dull and prosaic this, but it is very sound, and the unanimity and seeming contentedness with which the whole people have turned from the visionary to the practical is beyond any doubt a very hopeful augury of future prosperity. Perhaps the most noteworthy illustration of this is in the extraordinary run on land for bona tide settlement which lias been taking place. Land for speculative purposes, and at fancy prices, is a drug in the market, but within the six months ended on the 30th of September, almost a quarter of a million of acres of public land have been taken up, in almost every case apparently for bona tide occupation and practical use. Under the system of perpetual lease, which from its conditions is the form that ensures cultivation' as its object, there have been twice as many selectors, and over twice as many acres selected as in the preceding half year, while that period had itself exceeded by far any previous similar period in the history of the colony for the amount of land taken up for actual settlement and cultivation. The acreage of land bought from the Crown for cash has been three times the amount purchased in the previous half-year, remarkable as that halfyear was for settlement on the land, so that altogether the attention turned to rural settlement strikingly illustrates that change of the New Zealand mind from the visionary to the practical to which we have referred. And it is a fortunate coincidence that just while this change has been taking place, it in encouraged by the fact that all tho principal staple and general products of the colony have been rising in value. Our cables in another column tell us to-day that New Zealand frozen mutton is selling wholesale in London at fivepence farthing per pound, a price which if it only continues, and the continued extension of the trade at home and the better diffusion of the article, surely lead us to expect that it will—would have the inevitable, effect of greatly extending the output of the product from our shores— it being well known that the demand at home at a fair paying price is exactly the measure of the extension of the production of frozen carcases from nocks that are practically exhaustless. To the satisfactory price of wool we have made many references : and as for cereals, for which we have been so often threatened with no markets by our commercial Cassandras, we learn that the Union Steamship Company are putting on special steamers in addition to their fleet, being otherwise unable to bear away to Australia the grain that is offering for freight; while it is very well known that the total freightage capacity of the Direct steamers for England has been already secured for mutton and wool and every kind of produce for many months to come. And what are we to say of the future that is coming to the butter and cheese of New Zealand ? Mr. -Meadows, who comes to us an expert and authority on the trade in these articles, assures us that we have advantages second to no country in the world, and probably superior to all, in the production of those commodities, from our succulent grasses under a clime where no winter feed or artificial cover is required ; and he has even said that London does not know any finer butter than we have provided to us in Auckland. With such a market waiting to welcome from us, and give remunerative prices for, more butter and cheese than all our farmers can produce perhaps for a generation to come —a market requiring a hundred and twenty thousand tons of butter, and eighty-six thousand tons of cheese ayear from over sea, and a market that is practically and easily within our reach—we have a mine of wealth awaiting the steady plodding hand of industry, infinitely better for us morally, socially, and materially, than anything that any "'boom'' or speculative enterprise can bring. Indeed, we are seemingly but beginning to discover that, through the advances ot science in freezing and chilling, England is, as it were, at our doors ; and that, so far as affecting even the mos fragile and perishable products of out farms, our pastures, our dairies, out orchards, our orangeries, or our vineyards, the isolation of New Zealand in these far-away seas is a thing of the days gone by.