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the first importance to the small holder, and makes all the difference between success and failure.

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Up to a certain point the small holder may depend on local demand, and he may get a fair market in the nearest town. But there is this drawback to the local or any other market he may secure, he is always losing it, on account of his being unable to provide a continuous supply; once lost, it is not always easy to regain a footing when he wants it. This inability to keep up a continuous supply, either of vegetables, of poultry, of eggs, butter or milk, is the common weakness of all small producers and it can only be met by organisation and co-operation. There are two ways open. (1) The small holders and poultry and egg breeders of the district may co-operate together by employing a common agent to collect, pack, and market the produce, each receiving the profits of the sale of their produce pro rata, less a fixed percentage for expenses. (2) But as local jealousy usually defeats co-operative effort in England (would that we could imitate the splendid co-operation which in every department of agriculture is so conspicuously successful in Denmark!) perhaps the shortest road to the end would be best secured by an external association or an individual who would enter into separate contracts with all the small producers of the neighbourhood; who buys at his own risk and collects at his own expense, and makes what he can at his own markets. The small holders would lose to the extent of this man's profits but probably gain by his superior organisation. In this case, too, the score or so of new laid eggs of the individual small holder would speedily become the thousand or so of the district. Collection could be made two or three times a week to ensure perfect freshness; and the whole could

be shipped off to market from the rural depôt in quantities sufficient to pay for carriage and to attract and hold the wholesale dealer. The area of collection would be extended until continuity of supply was practically guaranteed. Thus the small holders would get good prices for even their smallest products: they would be marketed in as favourable a way as the largest farmer's produce; and the collecting agency would be self-supporting and create another agricultural occupation of a profitable character.

Failing this or, better still perhaps, supplementary to it, we must have an Agricultural Parcels Post conducted by the State. It must be organised by the State because railway competition would make short work of any private enterprise. Its plan would be, in effect, to collect from door to door and deliver from door to door. I say in effect, because in actual practice it would follow on the lines of the letter post; the products of each small holder would be deposited at the village depôt just as the letters of each villager are now placed in the village letter-box. But while the collection would be at the depôt, the delivery would be at the door of the consumer. The motortruck, the motor-train, the light railway, and the existing railway system would all be utilised by the Agricultural Parcels Post.

At first it would be found necessary perhaps to place an upward limit (say, of a hundredweight) on each agricultural parcel. This limit would not tend to impair the usefulness of the Agricultural Post, for its chief purpose would be to deal with comparatively small quantities of produce -to deal cheaply, speedily, and completely with the carriage of that produce from the hands of its producer to those of its consumer, who

might be a wholesale or retail dealer or the private individual who is the ultimate consumer. Such a post, if cheap (and it must be cheap), if speedy (and it must be speedy), and if complete and final in its operation (and it must be absolutely complete, permitting no break in the bridge it forms between producer and sumer) would render the necessarily small products of the small producer at once profitable because it would make them at once marketable.

These, then, are the salient points of the rural exodus, aud these the remedial measures I would first suggest. Although they have proved

eminently successful elsewhere, we have not as yet given them a trial. So long as we pay the foreigner £30,000,000, a year for butter and eggs and vegetables largely produced by the methods here described, so long will it stand to our discredit that those methods are not given a fair and ample trial in this country. Moreover, the matter has a political as well as an economic importance. For in producing for ourselves what we now buy from the foreigner we should at the same time be repeopling our depopulated rural districts, and bringing an exiled peasantry happily and permanently back to the land.

ARTHUR MONTEFIORE BRICE.

MR. SEDDON'S CONSTITUENCY.

THE West Coast, which in New Zealand invariably means the west coast of the South Island, has always had a distinct character of its own. There you still see all the best, and all the worst features of colonial life. It is generally nearer than any other part of the colony to the primitive type of colonialism, where everyone must rub shoulders with everyone else, and where one constantly asks one's self whether the utter absence of all the refinements of life is or is not compensated for by the extreme kindheartedness of the inhabitants, which may be said to be locally proverbial. The West Coast, in fact, is still by far the least known and most backward district of New Zealand. Very few, even among New Zealanders, really know much about its remoter mountain valleys. It can only be approached by long and expensive coach journeys, by very small, and often abominably overcrowded steamers along a coast which seems always stormy, or, if you are strong enough, over one of the inaccessible mountain passes of the Southern Alps. But when once there, you think you are never going to get away again, so far does Westland stretch, shut in and shut off from everywhere by the purple, snowcrowned wall of the Southern Alps on one side, and by the long roll of the restless Pacific breakers on the other.

So isolated is the life, so cut off from all the rest of New Zealand, so slow as yet are the means of communication (for it takes far longer to get across Westland than to go from

John O'Groats to Land's End) that it is safe to say no one more gently nurtured than a miner or a farmer lives there, if he can possibly help it. The few folk of a different stamp condemned by their avocations to live down there either vegetate or find relief in the one compensation for such banishment, the limitless amount of exploring, botanising, and geologising to be done in its scarcely penetrated bush, with an infinite variety of ferns, its unscaled mountains, and unexplored glaciers. "It is the compensation," said a doctor whose practice kept him in one of the small coast towns, where, even in New Zealand, "nobody ever goes." Cut off from almost all society, he devotes his spare time to exploring, for which he has an immense field; he has a hut on one of the beautiful mountain lakes, which hardly any one ever sees so remote is it from all inhabited parts, and he possesses a collection of glacier, Alpine, and bush photographs, of which anyone might well be proud, being most of them unique, and taken where no one ever had courage to drag a camera before.

The very mountain pass by which last year the writer entered Westland had never before been trodden by female foot, and only some fourteen men had ever struggled over the colossal boulders, the unbridged rivers and creeks, or traversed the exquisite loveliness of the virgin bush through which lay the way over the untamed Southern Alps into the unknown West Coast valleys.

After hours of climbing over rocks and wading through snow, we stood

at last, a party of six (including two Alpine guides), over seven thousand feet above the not far distant sea; behind us rose the desolately grand, wind-swept spurs of the Mount Cook range, now hidden in a thick mist and fine rain; before us the sun, breaking golden through a rift in the storm-driven clouds, shone over the wild, trackless West Coast valleys, their slopes covered with an infinite wealth of foliage and fern and huge forest trees, traversed by clear, swiftrushing streams, hemmed in by unclimbed mountain heights, and unknown glaciers,-a view superb in its solitary magnificence. Not living creature was there,-only the wild native birds that live among the mountains. And this was unknown New Zealand.

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Soon the snow became less thick, and then disappeared, except under the shelter of a rock. There were no more tufts of edelweiss, but instead the snow-white, yellow-centred mountain lilies blossomed in sunny nooks, while snow-grass and great white mountain daisies grew thick upon the slopes. Moraine gave place to densely thick sub-Alpine scrub, and by degrees the scrub became "bush," ever more and more luxuriantly beautiful, the damp, dark, perennially green bush, with its own scent of decaying leaves and moist earth.

Two long days from early morning till evening brought our party to a flat of half cleared bush-land, with tall tropical-looking cabbage trees, and a waste of swamp delivered over to the sword-like green leaves and russet flowers of the flax-plant. Here, for the first time in our journey, we came upon a road, a real road possible to drive along, not the almost invisible blazed bush-tracks along which we had scrambled and climbed by means of ice-axes, and which are impossible for any but a practised bushman to

follow. Some hours of boggy track through the bush, over river-bed and flax swamp, brought us eventually to a homestead, the only house for many miles round, an eight or nine-roomed building, wooden (of course), twostoried, and painted white, with

scrap of garden of intermixed flowers and vegetables, and a wide strip planted with carrots and potatoes, the whole set in a large, grassy clearing. The family, who had been informed, as we thought, of our probable arrival some days before, had not yet received the letter. Their only warning had been the barking of all their numerous dogs. One and all they came out to welcome us, fifteen of them, down to a baby in arms and several more trotting about. There were tall, strong-looking men, of a type never seen in England, not even in the country, hard-worked looking women, healthy, but prematurely lined and aged when compared with town-bred women who have time and opportunity to take care of their appearance, and strapping girls and children, the latter barefooted, bloomingly, aggressively robust, and without exaggeration nearly half as big again as English children of their ages.

They are very elastic, these backcountry houses; however many they may take in, they seem always able to find room for a few more. Therefore the unexpected arrival of six drenched, muddy, and ravenously hungry people did not appear to disarrange the household. There were, of course, no servants to be considered. Eight or

nine rooms, for a family of fifteen, with six strangers suddenly quartered on them, may make an English householder stare; but an eight-roomed house in Westland is palatial, and a man, his wife, and five bouncing children will find a two-roomed hut quite sufficient for themselves, and

for a visitor whenever fortune favours them with one.

Unknown New Zealand is no place for helpless folk. The fine gentleman and the fine lady had better keep away from it. There is little that you do not have to do for yourself, even now. To begin with, you must build your own house. In a place such as we were in carpenters could hardly be procured, and most people have to be content with shanties knocked up for themselves out of corrugated iron, wood cut in the bush, and perhaps tree-fern trunks.

It was a typical New Zealand back country homestead where we found ourselves. There were dogs and cats galore; cocks and hens swarmed around the back door; ducks and geese were evidently not far off; in the ample stockyard and farm-buildings across the paddock were plenty of stalwart cows, calves, and horses; about the river-bed were more horses, to catch which was a good day's expedition whenever they were wanted.

Life in such a place is a little world in itself. There are no events more exciting than the occasional visit of a party of exploring travellers like ourselves, or of some river-bound surveyors who have run short of supplies, or it may be the arrival every two or three months of the little steamer which brings the stores from higher up the coast.

In such a household no one must be too particular. It being a good hundred miles from a baker, all the bread must be baked in the house, in camp-ovens; and the cooking is also done in camp-ovens or over the enormous wood fires generally burning in the great open fire-places, for the climate, though never very cold, is damp and the rainfall enormous. There is nothing but wood to burn

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in this and many parts of Westland, but there is abundance of that. cooking done in these ovens may be as good as the best. Given a competent hand, meat is never sweeter, bread never lighter than when cooked in a camp-oven; given an incompetent hand, the results are disastrous. Butter and sometimes cheese are made on the farm; all meat is home-killed, all hams and bacon home-cured, all vegetables, and such fruit as there is, home-grown. Even the horses are shod on the premises, and sometimes the soap is made there also.

Life of course does not go like clockwork as in an English household; but there is also an agreeable freedom about it that you do not find in England. However you may approach a place like this, you can hardly take any luggage, except such few things as will go in a parcel, or a rucksack, that can be carried on your back, or strapped on to a saddle or the handles of a bicycle. Not that this matters much, since no one possesses or perhaps has even seen any clothes that would be thought presentable in London; and what an English person would consider the first necessaries of life are often lacking in the accommodation houses which do duty for hotels, and in the private houses of the settlers. They have hardly heard of a bathroom; as for hot water, they would never think of anyone wanting it; whenever you wish to use a toothbrush you

must cruise around in the backregions to find a cup or a glass; if you want your boots cleaned, you may by exploring the same quarters find some blacking and brushes. The utmost insistence and diplomacy will hardly ensure you a room to yourself; it never occurs to anyone that it would make any difference to your comfort. But rough as everything is, everyone is kindness itself; and what

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