east, and reaped with the sickle. The poisonous fumes of industrial smoke had not yet drifted across the country, and agricultural machinery was still unthought of. Can we doubt that Canterbury can carry as dense a population as England did in the year of Waterloo?
Then it may be that Christchurch may become one of the great manufacturing and commercial cities of these Southern Seas. She possesses all the requirements for such a destiny—a temperate climate, with a greater average of recorded sunshine than falls to the lot of most cities; abundant water supply for purposes of power, and a pure artesian supply for drinking and domestic use; an unlimited extent of level country, lines of communication north and south, presently to be connected with the West Coast; a harbour safe in all weathers, and capable of extension to fit it to cope with the greater requirements of the future. Moreover, there lies behind the city a great agricultural and pastoral district, rich in raw material for the factory and workshop, and with the completion of the Midland Railway there may be opened up new fields of enterprise of which we can only guess. Who can tell what mineral resources may still be hidden in that region of great mountains and forest?
It may be that the installation of the Lake Coleridge water-power works will prove to have been the precursor of a new era of prosperity for the province, of a magnitude we as yet hardly appreciate. My Canterbury readers will recollect that the Government engineers who were responsible for the undertaking told us that if more power were required, it would be feasible to divert the Wilberforce and Harper Rivers into Lake Coleridge. Together, these two rivers probably bring down more than half the water which flaws under the Rakaia railway bridge. The lake is a magnificent natural reservoir, mountain fringed, and at an elevation of over 1,600 feet. It needs little imagination to guess what might be done
