This valuable book of reference, with its interesting illustrations, has won a high place among works of the kind. The colony, our most distant possession, is too fortunate to figure largely in the annals and controversies of the newspaper world, and it is well that Englishmen are reminded annually of a land " firstly a pastoral, secondly an agricultural country." The statistics in which the Handbook abounds are well-arranged, and it is easy to lean from them kow the colony prospers. The old-fashioned test of happiness is the consumption of alcoholic liquors, and this has risen in New Zealand from seven to eight gallons a head in three years. The exports from 1895 to 1899 show a general improvement. The production of gold, £1,000,000 in 1898, far exceeded all previous records by jumping to £1,500,000 in 1899. The revenue boomed, and the Government found itself at the end of the financial year 1899-1900 with a handsome balance of £605,000. The revenue is raised almost entirely from the protective tariff, stamp duties, and so forth, although the railways contributed £1,621,000 in 1899. Direct: taxation is represented by £421,000, land and income taxes, out of a revenue of £6,195,000. Of the expenditure £1,749,000 went in the service of the public debt, £1,039,000 for railways. 'The third item importance is Public Instruction £472,000. The seven years' rule of "Ring" Seddon, with his socialistic, protective Policy, his women's suffrage, state regulation of labour and old age pensions of £18 per year, has proved no bar to development. Tt is instructive to note that, while the Radicals have: now held office for nine years, the average reign of their predecessors was fourteen months. The population of the islands at the beginning of 1899 was nearly 800,000, of whom 40,000 were Maoris. 'The death rate during the last ten years has varied from 9.1 to 10.4, floures which support the New Zealanders' claim to the firest climate in the world. Every. year ahoué a thousand persons from the United kingdom, and slightly more from settle in the country.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.