Industrious, moral, strong, it is far too soon to complain of this race because it has not in half a century produced a genius from amongst its scanty numbers.  Its mission has not been to do that, but to lay the foundations of a true civilization in two wild and lonely, though beautiful, islands.  This has been a work calling for solid rather than brilliant qualities—­for a people morally and physically sound and wholesome, and gifted with “grit” and concentration.  There is such a thing as collective ability.  The men who will carve statues, paint pictures, and write books will come, no doubt, in good time.  The business of the pioneer generations has been to turn a bloodstained or silent wilderness into a busy and interesting, a happy, if not yet a splendid, state.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books about New Zealand are numerous enough.  A critic need not be fastidious to regret that most of them are not better written, useful and interesting as they are in the mass.  Every sort of information about the country is to be got from them, but not always with pleasure or ease.  To get it you must do a good deal of the curst hard reading which comes from easy writing.  And even then, for the most part, it is left to your own imaginative power to see—­

  “The beauty, and the wonder, and the power,
  The shapes of things, their colours, lights, and shades,
  Changes, surprises.”

The undoubted and agreeable exceptions, too, require in you some knowledge of the Islands, if they are to be enjoyed.  How is that knowledge to be obtained?  A hard-headed student with a hearty appetite for facts might, of course, start with F.J.  Moss’s careful and accurate school history and the latest Government Year Book in his hand, and would soon be well on his way.  Those who like easier paths to knowledge may try Edward Wakefield’s “New Zealand After Fifty Years,” or Gisborne’s “Colony of New Zealand.”  When one comes to periods, districts, or special subjects, the choice is much wider.

To begin at the beginning; “Tasman’s Log” is little but dry bones; of Cook and Crozet I have written elsewhere.  Of the writers who tell of Alsatian days, none is worth naming in the same breath with Maning.  Personally I like Polack and Savage the best of them, despite the lumbering pretentiousness and doubtful veracity of the former.  Earle and Major Cruise are more truthful than readable—­conditions which are exactly reversed in the case of Rutherford.  If, as is said, Lord Brougham helped to write Rutherford’s narrative, he did his work very well; but after the exposure of its “facts” by Archdeacon W.L.  Williams, it can only be read as the yarn of a runaway sailor, who had reasons for not telling the whole truth, and a capacity and knowledge of local colour which would have made him a capital romance-writer, had he been an educated man.  As a picture of the times, Rutherford’s story in the “Library of Entertaining Knowledge” will always, however, be worth reading.