ing from it the £1 at first applied to Church of England purposes.

What we did then was simply to give the Church of England a good start. It has acquired, through the original land-fund, considerable permanent endowments in the soil of the Colony; and what is still more important, the powerful influence of the first body of settlers, all having been Churchmen, will for a long time to come give that Church, socially speaking, the preponderating weight in the country. Dissenters there are, and Dissenting Chapels; but if the Church of England, with the advantages it has thus had, cannot hold its own, I can only say, so much the worse for the Church of England. It does not deserve what it cannot retain.

On the general plan which I have described, the Canterbury Colony was founded, and carried on till the Association was dissolved a few years ago. You will observe that I have spoken of what "we" did: for in the very early days of the Association I became, much against my will, its Chairman. The Association, like all such bodies, had its serious troubles and perplexities. But I cannot but rejoice now that I have been so connected with this great enterprise. Among lesser matters of satisfaction, one of my small passports to immortality is that the harbour-town of the settlement has been named Lyttelton. This naming of places after living men has sometimes ludicrous results. Thus I was once surprised at being informed, from the Antipodes, that "Lyttelton is calm, but indignant;" and I was lately alarmed as well as surprised by learning from the same quarter, that "the body politic of Lyttelton is in a very unsound state of health."

Mr. Godley went out at the beginning of our operations as our first agent in establishing the Colony. Substantially he was its first Governor, and while there exercised a most beneficial and almost unlimited influence over the people. The transfer to the Colony of the functions of the Association was executed on the spot with great ability by Mr. Henry Sewell, subsequently Prime Minister of New Zealand; and the first Superintendent of Canterbury, or Governor regularly appointed under the New Zealand Constitution Act, was a man of singular powers and attainments, Mr. Fitzgerald, at present in England, and performing the duties of Emigration Agent for the Colony.

The vision of the founders of Canterbury was that we might establish a Colony, which, from its very beginning, should contain and represent what is good and essential in the character and in the institutions of England. I cannot trace its history, nor its present condition, in detail but on the whole, not pretending that there has been no failure or shortcoming in the conduct of so large an enterprise, I will venture to affirm that the above end has been substantially attained, especially in the most important point, the backbone of the whole matter, the character of the people. To this I am enabled to quote two very signal testimonies. I have lately seen two letters, one from the Bishop of New Zealand, saying that in his belief a more honourable community than that of Canterbury does not exist; the other from the Governor of New Zealand, saying that while in ancient times it was too often our practice to colonize by sending out slices of England with the plums left out, Canterbury is a slice of England with the plums left in.

There have been those who said that the scheme was a delusion, and that the admitted excellence of the character of those who embarked in it was only a proof that the delusion was a successful one, though the victims of it did not like to acknowledge it. Well, if so, it is strange that not one of them should have complained, or left his adopted land, which is almost literally the case. The fox who had cut off his tail did not succeed in persuading the rest that it was not cut off, or that it was a good thing that it should be cut off. Both in words, and more conclusively in deeds, the Canterbury people have recognized and sanctioned the soundness of the original principles of the plan. When the Association was dissolved, their Legislature declared emphatically their gratitude to its members, and their satisfaction with its work. In its secular features, they have substantially adhered to the scheme. Many members of the Association had incurred, in their private character, great pecuniary liabilities in carrying on the design. The Colonists, on becoming possessed of the public lands and buildings formerly vested in the Association, took on themselves the whole of those liabilities without questioning a single item of which they were composed, added to them 5 per cent. from the date of their being incurred, and then paid them off by Provincial securities called Debentures, bearing 6 per cent. interest. This is what I referred to when I said I was a New Zealand fundholder. I am also a landowner there to a small extent, from transactions of the same kind; and one of my sons has a considerable estate there, which was most kindly given to him by one of my relations who was among the first land-purchasers.

This estate is very valuable now, and will be still more so hereafter; and I may mention, in illustration both of the prosperity of the Colony and of its similarity to England, that one quarter of an acre of it, being townland, in the town of Christchurch, was lately exchanged by the agent for 100 acres of rural land, to be selected by the agent himself. The estate will be a good livelihood against the time that the owner thereof has grown up and it is possible that at some future day he may be seen, in loose clothing and with a tanned face, on the Canterbury plains, meditating on scabby sheep, and in a state of wool-gathering wealth exceeding that of any of his family.

Of the material prosperity of the Colony I will only say a word or two. Of course in all new countries there is much roughness and hardness to be undergone; and gentlemen and ladies should especially be warned to expect what has hitherto proved quite inevitable, that they must often learn to be their own servants: From causes like these a few, and but a few, have been disappointed and left the Colony. But I believe hardly a single settler from the first has been compelled by distress or ruin to do so a fact, perhaps, not to be paralleled in Colonial history. And one striking fact may be stated, concerning the proportion between the public revenue and the population of the Colony. The revenue of Great Britain and Ireland, I suppose, is in the gross somewhere near £70,000,000, on a population of about 28,000,000, or about £2: 10s. per head. In new Colonies the proportion is greater; but I believe no Colony has yet approached what has been attained in Canterbury. There the population, I think, is about

7000, and the annual public revenue £100,000, being upwards of £14 per head.*

The town of Christchurch, which I have just mentioned, is the capital of the province, centrally situated

*NOTE added some time after the Lecture was delivered.—[It should be observed, however, that the greater part of this was not, properly speaking, income, as it arose from sales of the waste or public lands of this Colony; which, as it is needless to point out, is not income but capital, and will eventually come to an end, as the whole land of the Province passes into private hands. But allowing for this, the above statement remains substantially true; and we must remember that we are comparing the Colony with other Colonies to which this same remark in qualification must be applied.

The disposal of this revenue, moreover, is always, to a great extent, such as is proper for resources partaking so largely of the nature of capital. Much of it goes to the expense of Immigration -the importation of labour. This is a main want, as has been said, of every new country; but, as the country grows older, the need of this artificial stimulus to population diminishes, and ult:mately ceases. The expenditure, therefore, is terminable, as part of the revenue is to which it corresponds.

Another great article of expenditure is that of Public Works ; which, when on a large scale, when the cost is great and mainly in the first construction, and when the works are to be permanent and largely reproductive, are legitimately chargeable on the capital stock of the community. The chief instance of this at Canterbury is the railway from Port Lyttelton direct by a tunnel through the hills to Christchurch and the plains—a work, of course, of the first magnitude and importance, and destined, we may hope, to overcome the only great obstacle that has existed to the development of the Colony: namely, the obstruction caused, by the hills I have mentioned, to easy communication between the port and the plains. It has just been contracted for at a sum of near a quarter of a million. I may also mention a grant which was recently made, of £10,000, towards the erection of churches and other places of worship, out of the Provincial surplus revenue-a grant such as is not commonly made in these