The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Long White Cloud, by William Pember Reeves

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Title: The Long White Cloud

Author: William Pember Reeves

Release Date: May 22, 2004 [eBook #12411]

Language: English

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THE LONG WHITE CLOUD

AO TEA ROA

By William Pember Reeves

Agent-General In London for New Zealand

1899

[Illustration: Frontispiece.

TE REINGA WATERFALL, GISBORNE

Photo by W.F. CRAWFORD.]

Preface

I believe that there is amongst the people of the Mother Country a
minority, now ceasing to be small, which takes a quickening interest
in the Colonies. It no longer consists merely of would-be investors,
or emigrants who want to inquire into the resources, industries, and
finances of one or other of the self-governing parts of the Empire.
Many of its members never expect to see a colony. But they have come
to recognise that those new-comers into the circle of civilized
communities, the daughter nations of Britain, are not unworthy of
English study and English pride. They have begun to suspect that
the story of their struggles into existence and prosperity may be
stirring, romantic, and interesting, and that some of their political
institutions and experiments may be instructive, though others may
seem less safe than curious. Some of those who think thus complain
that it is not always easy to find an account of a colony which shall
be neither an official advertisement, the sketch of a globe-trotting
impressionist, nor yet an article manufactured to order by some honest
but untravelled maker of books. They ask--or at least some of them, to
my knowledge, ask--for a history in which the picturesque side of the
story shall not be ignored, writ