NEW ZEALAND’S FUTURE.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 8, Issue 405, 23 August 1866, Page 3

NEW ZEALAND’S FUTURE.

(Prom the Melbourne Argus.) Will Victoria be the foremost of Australian Colonies in the future ? Hitherto we have not permitted ourselves to doubt it; but then it is only quite lately that events in New Zealand have been calling attention to the extraordinary resources and prospects of that country. Long-secluded, petty, and almost unnoticed, the settlements in those islands have suddenly sprung into a prominence and importance which recall the rapid progress of our own early days. Communities are quickly built up in these regions of the far south, which were a hemisphere of mystery to the old world a few short years ago. The turn of New Zealand is fast coming; within four or five years she has doubled her inhabitants. Population is multiplying, not only on the auriferous hill-sides and terraces of Otago and Westland, but in the province of Auckland, furthest removed from the gold-fields. Her bound into importance has been so sudden that those great islands have not been even named yet. Countries as large as England and Scotland are only distinguished as the North and South Islands—the native appellations, unlike native ones in general, being r iu this instance too clumsy and long-winded for everyday use; while as for the common term New Zealand, it cannot, of course, serve for the future, and as inappropriate and obsurd, its withdrawal was long since determined on. If their present extraordinary advance be sustained, those islands will be seen well on the path to that magnificent destiny which, from their geographical position and great natural opportunities, was predicted for them by the thoughtful in England long before the first of our settlements was formed on these shores. Perhaps it is in climate that New Zealand has the most striking advantage over the Australian continent. Being very mountainous, surrounded by the ocean, and far from any other land, there are no desert winds, and the moisture is perennial, and at all seasons reliable. The country js about the size of Great Britain, but the shape being much more elongated, there are greater varieties of temperature ; for while the sugar cane, it is suspected, would grow in the peninsula of the extreme north, antartic breezes give to the south the winter of Britain. As a whole, however, the climate has been compared, not unjustly, to that of Britain, in its vicissitudes at all seasons, and its influence on the soil and the human constitution. There is no country therefore better adapted for the transplantation of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic races, with the certainty of a successful perpetuation of the original type. It isentirely because of the difference of climate between New Zealand and the archipelagos of the Pacific that the Maoris are so much more energetic, industrious, and masculine, than their soft kinsman of the Sandwich and Society Islands. And the earth, like the air, seems fashioned for the development of a great nation. Noble harbors indent the coasts; great and deep rivers, hundreds of yards wide, hundreds of miles long, traverse the plains. The mountains are as high as those of Switzerland, the forests are as majestic as in the tropics. And over so many degrees of latitude almost all useful plants, except those exclusively of the torrid zone, can find congenial growth—all cereals, from the hardy oat and rye which need, the cold, to rice and maize which love the sun—all fruits and vegetables and their products, except perhaps wine, for which the restlessness of the atmosphere may not be well suited—all minerals, from gold, the most artificially valuable, to iron and coal, the most useful, are found. Then the constant verdure affords unlimited scope for grazing, aud the adjacent seas yield abundance of fish. Just now the South Island has the largest population because of the goldfields, but in more permanent advantages the North is vastly superior. It has not its neighbor’s severe winters, the mountain masses do not engross so much of its surface, the extent of fertile land is far greater, and the navigable rivers have longer courses. The North Island must be the principal seat of agriculture aud of in • ternal aud external trade. The two islands are rising into importance so fast, and their chief seats of population are so very distant from each other, that their formation into two colonies cannot be long postponed.