Neither in Canterbury nor Otago were the plough and the spade found to be the instruments of speediest advance. They were soon eclipsed by the stockwhip, the shears, the sheep-dog, and the wire-fence. Long before the foundation of New Zealand, Macarthur had taught the Australians to acclimatize the merino sheep. Squatters and shepherds from New South Wales and Tasmania were quick to discover that the South Island of New Zealand was a well-nigh ideal land for pastoral enterprise, with a climate where the fleece of a well-bred merino sheep would yield 4 lbs. of wool as against 21/2 lbs. in New South Wales. Coming to Canterbury, Otago, and Nelson, they taught the new settlers to look to wool and meat, rather than to oats and wheat, for profit and progress. The Australian _coo-ee_, the Australian buck-jumping horse, the Australian stockwhip and wide-awake hat came into New Zealand pastoral life, together with much cunning in dodging land-laws, and a sovereign contempt for small areas. In a few years the whole of the east and centre of the island, except a few insignificant cultivated patches, was leased in great "runs" of from 10,000 to 100,000 acres to grazing tenants. The Australian term "squatter" was applied to and accepted good-humouredly by these. Socially and politically, however, they were the magnates of the colony; sometimes financially also, but not always. For the price of sheep and wool could go down by leaps and bounds, as well as up; the progeny of the ewes bought for 30s. each in 1862 might have to go at 5s. each in 1868, and greasy wool might fluctuate in value as much as 6d. a lb. Two or three bad years would deliver over the poor squatter as bond-slave to some bank, mortgage company or merchant, to whom he had been paying at least 10 per cent. interest, _plus_ 21/2 per cent. commission exacted twice a year, on advances. In the end, maybe, his mortgagee stepped in; he and his children saw their homestead, with its garden and clumps of planted eucalypts, willows, and poplars--an oasis in the grassy wilderness--no more. Sometimes a new squatter reigned in his stead, sometimes for years the mortgagee left the place in charge of a shepherd--a new and dreary form of absentee ownership. Meanwhile, in the earlier years the squatters were merry monarchs, reigning as supreme in the Provincial Councils as in the jockey clubs. They made very wise and excessively severe laws to safeguard their stock from infection, and other laws, by no means so wise, to safeguard their runs from selection, laws which undoubtedly hampered agricultural progress. The peasant cultivator, or "cockatoo" (another Australian word), followed slowly in the sheep farmer's wake. As late as 1857 there were not fifty thousand acres of land under tillage in the South Island. Even wheat at 10s. a bushel did not tempt much capital into agriculture, though such were the prices of cereals that in 1855 growers talked dismally of the low price of oats--4s. 6d. a bushel.