The resin may be found in tree-forks high above the ground.  Climbing to these by ropes, men have taken thence lumps weighing as much as a hundredweight.  But most and the best resin is found in the earth, and for the last generation the soil of the North has been probed and turned over in search of it, until whole tracts look as though they had been rooted up by droves of wild swine.  In many of these tracts not a pine is standing now.  How and when the forests disappeared, whether by fire or otherwise, and how soil so peculiarly sterile could have nourished the finest of trees, are matters always in dispute.  There is little but the resin to show the locality of many of the vanished forests.  Where they once were the earth is hungry, white, and barren, though dressed in deceptive green by stunted fern and manuka.  In the swamps and ravines, where they may thrust down their steel-pointed flexible spears as much as eight feet, the roaming diggers use that weapon to explore the field.  In the hard open country they have to fall back upon the spade.  Unlike the gold-seeker, the gum-digger can hope for no great and sudden stroke of fortune.  He will be lucky if hard work brings him on the average L1 a week.  But without anything to pay for house-room, fuel, or water, he can live on twelve and sixpence while earning his pound, and can at least fancy that he is his own master.  Some 7,000 whites and Maoris are engaged in finding the 8,000 tons or thereabouts of resin, which is the quantity which in a fairly good year England and America will buy at an average price of L60 a ton.  About 1,500 of the hunters for gum are Istrians and Dalmatians—­good diggers, but bad colonists; for years of work do not attach them to the country, and almost always they take their savings home to the fringing islands and warm bays of the Adriatic.

Chapter XIX

THE PROVINCES AND THE PUBLIC WORKS POLICY

“Members the Treasurer pressing to mob;
Provinces urging the annual job;
Districts whose motto is cash or commotion;
Counties with thirsts which would drink up an ocean;
These be the horse-leech’s children which cry,
‘Wanted, Expenditure!’ I must supply.”

                      —­The Premier’s Puzzle.

Sir George Grey had been curtly recalled in the early part of 1868.  His friends may fairly claim that at the time of his departure the Colony was at peace, and that he left it bearing with him the general esteem of the colonists.  True, his second term of office had been in some ways the antithesis of his first.  He had failed to prevent war, and had made mistakes.  But from amid a chaos of confusion and recrimination, four things stand out clearly:  (1) he came upon the scene too late; (2) he worked earnestly for peace for two years; (3) the part that he personally took in the war was strikingly successful; (4) he was scurvily treated by the Colonial Office.