education, intermarriage, and common habits of life will tend to level them into a homogeneous class. Dressed in tweed suits, wide-awake hats, and gaiters, riding good horses or driving in powerful motors, and with their alert, bony faces browned and reddened by sun and wind, they will look and will be a healthy, self-confident, intelligent race. Despite overmuch tea and tobacco, their nerves will seldom be highly strung; the blessed sunshine and the air of the sea and the mountains will save them from that. Moreover, colonial cookery will be better than it has been, and diet more varied. Nor will our farmers trouble the doctors much or poison themselves with patent drugs. Owning anything from half a square mile to six or seven square miles of land, they will be immensely proud of their stake in the country and cheerfully convinced of their value as the backbone of the community. They will not be a vicious lot; early marriage and life in the open air will prevent that. Nor will drunkenness be fashionable, though there will be gambling and probably far too much horse-racing. Varying in size from three or four hundred to four or five thousand acres, their properties, with stock and improvements, may be worth anything from five or six thousand to seventy or eighty thousand pounds, but amongst themselves the smaller and larger owners will meet on terms of easy equality. They will gradually form an educated rural gentry with which the wealthier townspeople will be very proud and eager to mix. A few of them, whose land is rich, may lease it out in small allotments, and try to become squires on a modified English pattern. But most of them will work their land themselves, living on it, riding over it daily, directing their men, and, if need be, lending a hand themselves. That will be their salvation, bringing them as it will into daily contact with practical things and working humanity. Conservative, of course, they will be, and in theory opposed to Socialism, yet assenting from time to time to Socialistic measures when persuaded of their immediate usefulness. Thus they will keep a keen eye on the State railways, steamships, and Department of Agriculture, and develop the machinery of these in their own interests. A few of the richer of them from time to time may find that life in Europe so pleases them--or their wives--that they will sell out and cut adrift from the colony; but there will be no class of absentee owners--growling, heavily taxed, and unpopular. Our working gentlemen will stick to the country, and will be hotly, sometimes boisterously, patriotic, however much they may at moments abuse governments and labour laws. Most of them will be freeholders. Allied with them will be State pastoral tenants--holding smaller runs than now--to be found in the mountains, on the pumice plateau, or where the clay is hungry. Socially these tenants will be indistinguishable from the freeholders.