IT is well to remember that State aid has done much, through assisted passages and conditional grants of land, to encourage immigration to New Zealand. This encouragement has, on occasion, extended to foreigners, as in the Bohemian settle­ment of Puhoi (1863), and the Scandinavian settlements of Dannevirke and Norse wood (1872). But no activity of either public or private organisations can obscure the simple fact that it takes settlers to make settlements.

Place-names and dates and schemes have his­toric interest, yet behind them, everywhere and always, are people. They take the journeys, they occupy the new footholds, they make the clearings in the forest, they tend the flocks and herds, they sow and reap and grind the corn, they plant the gardens and orchards, they dig the mines, they man the workshops and factories, they construct the roads and ports, they develop the fine arts and the recreations, they build and serve the schools and churches. Without their zeal all would be failure and futility.

Take the most obvious task of home-making, the erection of dwellings. What a revealing pro­cession these make! Following the raupo whare came the tent and calico house, the hurriedly con­trived shelter of nikau or sods, the less temporary structure of cob (clay held together with chopped-up tussock), the hut of hand-hewn slabs, until the wonder of weather-board or the imported ‘ house-in-frame’ of the comparatively well-to-do pro­phesied an era of securer comfort.

Furniture had a similar progress; for decades the packing-case, its roughness unashamedly covered with any handy fabric, did various duties; and much cooking was done outside in the three-legged camp-oven, before the advent of the colonial-oven enabled it to be done within.