Page:The empire and the century.djvu/515

 Their nearest, indeed their only, neighbour is Australia. Next in point of accessibility come the lovely islets of Polynesia. After these North America and the Far East of Asia are the easiest countries to be reached. Yet it is not to these that the New Zealand mind turns. The colouring of India and Java and the art of Japan are not what it longs for. The one ambition of every holiday-making man, woman, and child is a trip 'Home.' The New Zealand born wish to see the old country; the emigrants from it wish to see it again. Expense and distance do not prevent some hundreds of them from finding their way to London every year. To listen to some of them, when, after an absence of twenty, thirty, or forty years they look round once more on the great city is an experience sometimes not without a touch of romance or pathos.

To return to the question of material well-being, a glance at the figures giving the details of the Colony's wealth reveals an interesting and unusual position. Hardly anywhere else can be found a community so collectively wealthy, but whose members are individually of such modest means. How few are wealthy in a large way I have already pointed out. Yet, after making full allowance for debts, the net private wealth of the white New Zealanders is estimated at about two hundred and seventy million pounds. To this may fairly be added some millions representing the value of the native lands.

The public estate and assets of the Government are also large, but against these has to be set the very considerable debt to foreign creditors. The best-known proof of the Colony's wealth and productive energy is the volume of the external commerce. This has now attained to an annual total of a little over twenty-eight million pounds, of which some nineteen million pounds is trade with the Mother Country. The growth, too, of this trade with the United Kingdom is satisfactory. Between the years 1896 and 1904 it increased by seven millions sterling. Most of the remaining commerce is with Australia, India, and other parts of the Empire. All of it,