The story of New Zealand is very much the story of Australia, except that the New Zealand white settlers did, for a while, suffer much anxiety in their protracted warfare with the coloured race that they found there. It was not until 1861 that the Maoris took up arms in any force against the whites who were gradually driving them out of their ancient territories. Had they known how to combine and act together, and to take advantage of the concealment of the bush, they might have been really dangerous to the white man's rule. But jealousies between the tribes prevented their combination, and a Quixotic pride in braving death and danger seems to have caused them to deem it the act of a coward to creep upon the enemy undetected. They chose rather to dash themselves upon {241} the defence in frontal attacks which cost them very heavy losses. Even so the war dragged on, in a series of intermittent fighting, for ten long years, and in the terms of peace which ended it the Maoris secured for themselves better conditions than before. Their bravery and fine qualities had made an impression, and they received a liberal recognition of their rights. They have proved themselves good friends and citizens of the Empire in the years since. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- {240} [Illustration: A SCENE IN NEW ZEALAND: MT. PEMBROKE.] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Sidenote: New Zealand] The products of New Zealand are very similar to those of Australia. On the whole its climate is more agreeable, because cooler, to the European. As a stock-raising country it has the advantage of not being subject to the same risk of droughts. Assuredly the white race thrives there and produces grand specimens of humanity. Even New Zealand has perhaps not yet begun to play its full part in this Greatest Story, but it has relatively little or none of the vast empty space of the great Australian country. We may know, more or less, the role that New Zealand is to play. Of Australia's share in the drama of the future it is scarcely possible to make even a conjecture. Thus then, in broad and simple lines, I have tried to sketch the manner in which the white man, and the Anglo-Saxon more than all other white men, has been shouldering the world's burden. That is a political sketch, showing the movements of some of the societies of men and some of the changes in the boundaries of States. But during the last hundred years of our Greatest Story the principal events have been five, of which three only have been of this political character. There is the unification of Italy into a nation, that is the earliest. There is the consolidation of the German States into the national unity of Germany, that is the second. There is the assumption of his burden by {242} the white man, and especially of the Anglo-Saxon, all the world over--that is the third.