The first European to find it was a Dutch sea-captain who was looking
for something else, and who thought it a part of South America, from
which it is sundered by five thousand miles of ocean. It takes its
name from a province of Holland to which it does not bear the remotest
likeness, and is usually regarded as the antipodes of England, but is
not. Taken possession of by an English navigator, whose action, at
first adopted, was afterwards reversed by his country's rulers, it was
only annexed at length by the English Government which did not want
it, to keep it from the French who did. The Colony's capital bears the
name of a famous British commander, whose sole connection with the
country was a flat refusal to aid in adding it to the Empire. Those
who settled it meant it to be a theatre for the Wakefield Land
System. The spirit of the land laws, however, which its settlers have
gradually developed is a complete negation of Wakefield's principle.
Some of the chief New Zealand settlements were founded by Church
associations; but the Colony's education system has long been purely
secular. From the first those who governed the Islands laboured
earnestly to preserve and benefit the native race, and on the whole
the treatment extended to them has been just and often generous--yet
the wars with them were long, obstinate, and mischievous beyond
the common. The pioneer colonists looked upon New Zealand as an
agricultural country, but its main industries have turned out to be
grazing and mining. From the character of its original settlers it was
expected to be the most conservative of the colonies; it is just now
ranked as the most democratic. Not only by its founders, but for many
years afterwards, Irish were avowedly or tacitly excluded from the
immigrants sent to it. Now, however, at least one person in eight in
the Colony is of that race.

It would be easy to expand this list into an essay on the vanity