and small shop-keepers, and are the same inscrutable, industrious, insanitary race of gamblers and opium-smokers in New Zealand as elsewhere.  At one time they were twice as numerous.  Then a poll-tax of L10 was levied on all new-comers.  Still, a few score came in every year, paying the tax, or having it paid for them; and about as many went home to China, usually with L200 or more about them.  In 1895 the tax was raised to L50, and this seems likely to bring the end quickly.  Despised, disliked, dwindling, the Chinese are bound soon to disappear from the colony.

Of the 740,000 whites, more than half have been born in the country, and many are the children, and a few even the grandchildren, of New Zealand-born parents.  An insular race is therefore in process of forming.  What are its characteristics?  As the Scotch would say—­what like is it?  Does it give any signs of qualities, physical or mental, tending to distinguish it from Britons, Australians, or North Americans?  The answer is not easy.  Nothing is more tempting, and at the same time more risky, than to thus generalize and speculate too soon.  As was said at the outset, New Zealand has taken an almost perverse delight in upsetting expectations.  Nevertheless, certain points are worth noting which may, at any rate, help readers to draw conclusions of their own.

The New Zealanders are a British race in a sense in which the inhabitants of the British Islands scarcely are.  That is to say, they consist of English, Scotch, and Irish, living together, meeting daily, intermarrying, and having children whose blood with each generation becomes more completely blended and mingled.  The Celtic element is larger than in England or in the Scottish lowlands.  As against this there is a certain, though small, infusion of Scandinavian and German blood; very little indeed of any other foreign race.  The Scotch muster strongest in the south and the Irish in the mining districts.  In proportion to their numbers the Scotch are more prominent than other races in politics, commerce, finance, sheep farming, and the work of education.  Among the seventy European members of the New Zealand House of Representatives there is seldom more than one Smith, Brown, or Jones, and hardly ever a single Robinson; but the usual number of McKenzies is three.  The Irish do not crowd into the towns, or attempt to capture the municipal machinery, as in America, nor are they a source of political unrest or corruption.  Their Church’s antagonism to the National Education system has excluded many able Catholics from public life.  The Scandinavians and Germans very seldom figure there.  Some 1,700 Jews live in the towns, and seem more numerous and prominent in the north than in the south.  They belong to the middle class; many are wealthy.  These are often charitable and public-spirited, and active in municipal rather than in parliamentary life.

[Illustration:  MAORIS CONVEYING GUESTS IN A CANOE