should be lettered "Cash and customers taken in here ?" Do we not know that in many a retail trade a man, honest as he may be, if he would live by his trade, is virtually obliged to do things which he knows to be wrong-things which a public smitten with the mania for cheapness, lure him, nay, compel him to do?

Deliberately to go into, or to continue in, a business that keeps thousands poor and makes some dishonest, surely cannot be either a prudent or a commendable step. Would not many who keep shop, or who are about to keep shop, and angle for stray customers in troubled waters, do better to close windows, elude the tax-gatherer, and clear off to a young country like New Zealand while they have the few hundreds left wherewith to escape?

TENANT FARMERS.-Small tenant farmers with large families, have very powerful reasons for emigrating, and are admirably fitted for New Zealand emigration.

Many a hard-working industrious man of this class, except that he has got enough to eat, is little better off in England than one of his day-labourers. What with rent, tithe, tax, and game-laws, the small farmer's share of the annual produce of his hired acres, is a very meagre share. He, of all men, is the man who eats his bread by the sweat of his brow; all but "adscriptus glebæ" he toils through life at the muck cart as his father did before him, and for what?-to get the rent for audit day. If his sons are lucky, they may look forward to doing the same-if unlucky, they will take country service, or the serjeant's gratuity and march to glory at a shilling a day; and his daughter may become the squire's menial and wed the groom, or the poor milliner girl with her pleasant path of city life. He farms his landlord's acres, and his landlord farms him, and the latter has the best estate. The sum which a hundred-acre tenant-farmer pays in one year for rent, tithe and tax, would buy and stock him a New Zealand freehold of 200 acres. In New Zealand he would be Landlord; his little capital would at once place him in the position of an independent yeoman, farming his own estate; and with common industry, with half the anxious toil and trouble of his old-world life, every member of his family, in a few years' time, might be married, settled, and provided for in a

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manner which would have been a mere idle thing to have dreamt of while he was a mere toiling tenant-farmer in Kent, Norfolk, Perthshire, Tipperary, or Tyrone.

THE COUNTER AND THE DESK.-As to the host of young men, the "waste surplus" of our lower middle-class families, whose chief solicitude is the ways and means of earning honest bread, what can we say? Is it not notorious that young fellows of this class, fairly educated, active, honourable, and intelligent as they may be, really seem to be of less value and consideration to society in England, than new mangles, patent ploughs, or prize pigs? Tastes differ, and it is well they do. But rather than be thus appraised, rather than grow up here cumberer of the earth with no better chance than that of finding myself some day behind the counter, with a bonnet on, measuring tape and bobbin to mincing misses-or of becoming the snubbed clerk with the pale wife and the seedy children, nailed to the dingy desk for life for 607. a year, I would turn and breast the current; pull off my coat, take twelve months at some manly handicraft, and then, spite the dark warnings of Aunt Tabitha, spite the twaddle of my male friends in petticoats, I would secure cheap passage to Australia or New Zealand, and taking ten pounds, and my trade, common sense, common energy, common industry, for my arms, would trust to God and myself to achieve me a happy escape and a good deliverance from that grinding social serfdom, those effeminate chains, my born and certain lot in England.

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SPECIAL SETTLEMENTS. GROUP EMIGRATION.- Archbishop Whately, in his annotations on Lord Bacon's Essay on Plantations, says: “An ancient Greek colony was like what gardeners call a layer,' that is a portion of the parent tree, with stem, twigs and leaves, imbedded in fresh soil till it had taken root, and then severed. A modern colony is like a handful of twigs and leaves pulled off at random, and thrown into the earth to take their chance."

The great success of the Greek system of colonisation, and our experience of the successful planting of our early American

Colonies, or "Special Settlements" of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New England, by bodies of Catholics, Quakers, and Puritans, might well, I think, have been expected to shape the course and direct the economy of much of our emigration of modern days. But the emigration of the five millions of people who have left the mother country during the last forty years, has been emphatically an emigration not of "layers," but of "twigs and leaves;" and when Edward Gibbon Wakefield organised the New Zealand Company, and directed or promoted the planting of the Special Settlements of Wellington, Nelson, Canterbury, and Otago, he may be said to have revived a lost and splendid art. Owing to the early misgovernment of New Zealand, leading to ten years' insecurity of life and property, and owing to certain errors of judgment and faults of execution common to all "'prentice works," our first modern imitations of Greek colonisation have not, perhaps, been so brilliantly successful as some of the models from which they were drawn. But, making fair allowance for those exceptional evils and disturbing causes to which our Special Settlements in New Zealand were exposed, I venture to say that in the year 1861, whether viewed with respect to their material wealth or their moral position, they stand forward among the best instances of profitable emigration which the world has ever seen. Wellington and Nelson, and Canterbury, and Otago, were "layers" of the parent stem imbedded in virgin soil-not twigs and leaves plucked at random and thrown in the earth to take their chance; and I cannot but think that in our further colonisation of the broad wild lands of our young Britain of the South we should do well to imbed some second "layers"-layers which cut and tended by the hand of experience would exhibit few or none of those defects which crippled the early growth of the first, and which might produce us almost as much fruit in ten years as our Wellingtons and Nelsons have produced us in twenty.

It is worthy of remark that Wellington and Nelson, and Canterbury and Otago, were all planted on the principle of what we properly call "Systematic Colonisation;" but, to endow themselves with greater attractiveness, and with more of the elements of cohesion and combination, the two latter enlisted into their service the religious principle, under which

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*

SPECIAL SETTLEMENTS.

Canterbury became the model Church of England Settlement, and Otago the model Free Kirk Settlement. In our present days of enlightenment and liberality there may, at first sight, be something offensive in the idea of promoting the colonisation of a young country like New Zealand by dotting it over with little denominational, or sectarian communities, and having a Catholic Province, with its capital Wiseman, in one part, a Baptist Province, with its capital Spurgeon in another. And I confess that if we could lay down our "layers," plant our "Special Settlements," as well without the help of Cardinal Wiseman, Mr. Spurgeon, Dr. Cumming, or Bishop Wilberforce, as we could with their help, I for one would rather dispense with their help. But experience shows that we cannot do this: experience shows that the religious principle can be made a most powerful ally of Systematic Colonisation. We see, both in early days in America, and in modern days in New Zealand, that a community of faith has formed an admirable bond of union among the first settlers, and been a most powerful attraction to all who follow them; and we may rest assured that if we would lighten our labours in getting together and enlisting a good body of emigrants of the various classes and of the right stamp, wherewith to plant a further series of " Special Settlements" in New Zealand, we must make such Settlements "Denominational" Settlements, and display over them the various crosses and banners of Chapel and Church.

It appears to me that the time has come when half a

*It should be observed, however, that the objections which have been urged against “Sectarian or "Denominational Settlements" have been greatly exaggerated. However narrow and special a Settlement may be at first, it every year becomes more liberal and cosmopolitan. Dissenters would now find plenty of chapels in Canterbury, and would thrive there just as well as High Churchmen; and no good Catholic would now be roasted by the descendants of the Covenanters at Otago-not even, I think, by His Honour the Superintendent. The Special Settlement starts with a special original character; this gives it existence, and it retains this character long enough to give it root and growth, and to confer great social and material advantages on its first settlers. Nay, it may retain pleasant and profitable traces of its original character perhaps for generations, perhaps for ever. But, as population flows into the new land, and coloni sation plants village after village, town after town, the special, exclusive, denominational mark of the Settlement becomes every year fainter and fainter, and church and chapel soon rise side by side.

DENOMINATIONAL SETTLEMENTS.

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dozen "Special Settlements," say Catholic, Evangelical, Scotch Church, Wesleyan, Baptist, and Independent, might now be successfully planted in New Zealand. Twenty years experience of the country has shown that in great natural advantages of soil and climate it is substantially superior to any emigration field in the world; while many years' experience of Wellington and Nelson, and Canterbury and Otago show, despite the 'prentice faults of their organization, and despite the calamities from which some of them long suffered (calamities which could never occur again), that Systematic Colonisation and the planting of "Special Settlements" in New Zealand, has been an enterprise attended with a very large measure of success. In her liberal form of government, too, in her society and social institutions, New Zealand is as fine an emigration field, politically and socially, as she is physically; while it is worthy of remark, that in respect to population, civilisation, and industrial progress she is just in that ripe state, or that state of happy mean, which fits her to become a field for the further development of systematic colonisation, and for the planting of new Special Settlements. A Special Settlement planted in the backwoods of British Columbia, or in the deserts of Western Australia, would be, as it were, lost in the wilderness for years a Special Settlement planted in an old or populous emigration field like Canada or New South Wales could scarcely be planted in a good location, inasmuch as, there, the best locations and the best lands have long been taken up. But in New Zealand, a country as large as the United Kingdom, there are but some 80,000 colonists-anew to have planted a dozen thriving settlements-anew to have established society and social institutions-anew to have possessed themselves of three millions of head of live stock, to have raised a public revenue of £500,000, and to have partially opened up and subdued the country by road, bridge, and steamer-but not anew to have taken the cream of the country by monopolising ports and harbours, town and village sites, rivers and water privileges, plains and valleys, and all the finest agricultural, estate-creating lands.

In addition, too, to these various natural and artificial advantages which mark New Zealand as the fittest field for

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