murdered at least six men before they were hunted down.  Three were hung; the fourth, who saved his neck by turning Queen’s evidence, was not lynched.  No one ever has been lynched in New Zealand.  For the rest the ordinary police-constable was always able to deal with the sharpers, drunkards, and petty thieves who are among the camp-followers of every army of gold-seekers.  So quietly were officials submitted to that sometimes, when a police-magistrate failed to appear in a goldfields’ court through some accident of road or river, his clerk would calmly hear cases and impose fines, or a police-sergeant remand the accused without authority and without resistance.  In the staid Westland of to-day it is so impossible to find offenders enough to make a show of filling the Hokitika prison that the Premier, who sits for Hokitika, is upbraided in Parliament for sinful extravagance in not closing the establishment.

No sooner had the cream been skimmed off the southern goldfields than yields of almost equal value were reported from the north.  The Thames and Coromandel fields in the east of the Auckland province differed from those in the South Island.  They were from the outset not alluvial but quartz mines.  So rich, however, were some of the Thames mines that the excitement they caused was as great as that roused by the alluvial patches of Otago and Westland.  The opening up of the Northern fields was retarded throughout the sixties by Maori wars, and the demands of peaceful but hard-fisted Maori landlords.  L1 a miner had to be paid to these latter for the right to prospect their country.  They delayed the opening of the now famous Ohinemuri field until 1875.  When on March 3rd of that year the Goldfields’ Warden declared Ohinemuri open, the declaration was made to an excited crowd of hundreds of prospectors, who pushed jostling and fighting round the Warden’s table for their licenses, and then galloped off on horseback across country in a wild race to be first to “peg out” claims.  Years before this, however, the shores of the Hauraki Gulf had been systematically worked, and in 1871 the gold export from Auckland had risen to more than L1,100,000.

New Zealand still remains a gold-producing colony, albeit the days of the solitary adventurer working in the wash-dirt of his claim with pick, shovel, and cradle are pretty nearly over.  The nomadic digger who called no man master is a steady-going wage-earner now.  Coal-mines and quartz-reefs are the mainstays of Westland.  Company management, trade unions, conciliation cases, and laws against Sunday labour have succeeded the rough, free-and-easy days of glittering possibilities for everybody.  Even the alluvial fields are now systematically worked by hydraulic sluicing companies.  They are no longer poor men’s diggings.  In Otago steam-dredges successfully search the river bottoms.  In quartz-mining the capitalist has always been the organizing and controlling power.  The application of cyanide and other scientific improvements has revived this branch of mining within the last four years, and, despite the bursting of the usual number of bubbles, there is good reason to suppose that the L54,000,000 which is so far the approximate yield of gold from the Colony will during the next decade be swelled by many millions.