Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/33

 Rh often, bloody feasts, feared to land on New Zealand's inhospitable coasts. It was then, in truth, a clime where men ate each other, and it was one of the most contentious places on the globe. From ghostly Te Reinga to the "Sea of the Greenstone," from treacherous Poverty Bay to the iron-sanded coasts of Taranaki, there was almost constant warfare among the natives. In later times they battled against their white invaders, and little more than forty years have passed since Maori and pakeha last clashed together in war.

New Zealand is no longer shunned. The influences of Christianity and civilization, first exerted on the Maoris by Marsden in 1814, and later by a host of other missionaries, have tamed the savage breast and forever stayed the hostile arm. The colony that the British Parliament once adjudged as too dangerous to be even the site of a convict settlement, and over which England delayed proclaiming her sovereignty until after seventy years of virtual possession, is now pointed to as a model in social achievement. To-day New Zealand is the home of more than a million white people, and every year it is the goal of thousands of immigrants.

On their arrival these immigrants find conditions remarkably different from those encountered by their predecessors of twenty-five years ago. No longer does the existence of great estates, of dog-in-the-manger land-lordism, compel them to become laborers, as that celebrated colonizer of New Zealand, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, would have had the plebeian poor among