town land can be sold, or let with a privilege of purchase, and then the actual merchant will then become the proprietor, instead of having to buy or rent his land on exorbitant terms from some absentee owner, who has pre-occupied the best positions for business.
To pass on to the higher and more important branches of your plan: the provision for education and religion. The example of the China bishopric is a warning how long good plans may be delayed if you wait till the Endowment Fund be complete. The American system seems to be the best. Have a bishop, at all events. It is not at all certain that you will get a better man for 1000l. than for 100l. a-year. Such matters are no question of money. Let him get his money as he can for a time—whether as warden of the college or as a parish priest—till the growth of endowments and the increase of duties lead naturally to a subdivision of labour. A colonial bishop in a new colony cannot at first be fully occupied with the duties of his office. If he confines himself to them, he may grow an idle man, without knowing why. But in the practical working, as well as superintending institutions not strictly within his own duties, he will find the means of keeping up that habitual energy which his own office will require before many years are past. If you can find a bishop of all work, he ought to be the first clergyman to land in New Zealand. Your plan would seem to infer the necessity of the bishop being the Ω of the clerical body. I hope that you will find it possible to make him the Α.
The same principle applies to the college. Begin it at once—if you can find a man who can reflect what Oxford was when Alfred's students read almost illegible MSS. by the light of paper lanterns. We are still far from Tennyson's ' perpetual afternoon of literature, dreamy, armchairy, dressing-gowny.' The academic life of a colony is to work when you must, and to read when you can. It is a practical example of Horace's wager with his bailiff, which could do most in clearing land or extirpating error. Every year that you delay the beginning, it will become more difficult to begin at all. A full-grown college cannot be exported at once, for if you cannot expect to bring forth at once Minerva's body, much less her wisdom. Mark out a good extent of land, and put up a wooden building; people are very tolerant, and will call it 'The College;' and why should they not, when even an infirmary for sick horses may enjoy that name? By degrees the plan would be developed under active and judicious management; teachers and pupils will flow in; subscriptions and legacies will increase; and the only fear will be, that the corporate body will become too rich, and that wealth will lead to luxury, and luxury to laziness, and laziness to contempt.
Beyond the first striking a key-note, I would advise you to hurry nothing. Send out a few very fit men, and wait patiently until you can obtain others. The mere name of a college, with a good but insufficient body, is far better than a full staff of incapables. In the former case, every kind of right principle may be established from the first, and gradually developed in practice as assistance is obtained; but in the latter, when good men are found at length, they will have to work up against a host of evil habits and false principles, which will have been bequeathed to them by their predecessors. The public will have formed their own idea of a collegiate institution from the corrupt model which they have seen in operation, and will look upon its errors with that kind of prescriptive dotage with which college cherishes its privilege of ignorance. The new comers, like the Dauphin's fresh oysters, will be better in reality, but they will be less relished than the stale.
This danger of hurry has led me to remonstrate against the limitation of time proposed by the New Zealand Company. On no account consent to any such restriction. It will be a continual stimulus goading you on to something premature, as the company itself has been hurried on by its own purchasers into selling land before it was surveyed, and even before it was bought. Remember Lord Eldon's maxim, ' Sat cito, si sat bene; ' and though you travel now by steam instead of the 'heavy Salisbury,' remember that such luxurious locomotion has not yet found its place in New Zealand.
Now, then, I suppose you to begin with the map of the Great Southern plain stretched before you. You have seen Captain Thomas's report, and perhaps the
