His policy, _minus_ the essential part relating to land settlement, was accepted and actively carried out. Millions were borrowed, hundreds of miles of railways and roads were made, immigrants were imported by the State or poured in of their own accord. Moreover, the price of wool had risen, and wheat, too, sometimes yielded enormous profits. Farmers were known who bought open land on the downs or plains of the South Island at £2 an acre, and within twelve months thereafter made a net profit of £5 an acre from their first wheat crop. Labour-saving machinery from the United States came in to embolden the growers of cereals; the export of wheat rose to millions of bushels; and the droning hum of the steam threshing-machine and the whir of the reaper-and-binder began to be heard in a thousand fields from northern Canterbury to Southland. In the north McLean steadfastly kept the peace, and the Colony bade fair to become rich by leaps and bounds. The modern community has perhaps yet to be found which can bear sudden prosperity coolly. New Zealand in the seventies certainly did not. Good prices and the rapid opening up of the country raised the value of land. Acute men quickly bought fertile or well-situated blocks and sold them at an attractive profit. So men less acute began to buy pieces less fertile and not so well situated. Pastoral tenants pushed on the process of turning their leaseholds into freeholds. So rapid did the buying become that it grew to be a feverish rush of men all anxious to secure some land before it had all gone. Of course much of this buying was speculative, and much was done with borrowed money. The fever was hottest in Canterbury, where the Wakefield system of free selection without limit as to area or condition as to occupation, and with the fixed price of £2 an acre, interposed less than no check at all to the speculators. Hundreds of thousands of acres were bought each year. The revenue of the Provincial Council rose to half a million; the country road-boards hardly knew how to spend their money. Speculation, extravagance, reaction--such were the fruits the last years of Wakefield's system bore there. Not that the fault was Gibbon Wakefield's. It rests with the men who could not see that his system, like every other devised for a special purpose, wanted to be gradually changed along with the gradual change of surrounding circumstances.