that certain aspects of the New Zealand character show some signs of a likeness to the Greek. The sunny, mountainous islands themselves are Greek in contour and atmosphere. You may see there the outlines of the Cretan coast and the colouring of Corfu. And the people, subdivided by sea-straits and mountain ranges, have the local life, keen local jealousies, particularist politics, and restless hypercritical interest in public affairs which history associates with the Greek democracies. With their hundreds of newspapers and elective local councils, their adult suffrage, their extraordinary proportion of actual voters—more than one-third of the total population—they make a nearer approach to being a nation of politicians than any other community I know of. The darker complexion, quicker speech, livelier manner, sociable disposition, and argumentative turn, already differentiates them from the English. Greek, too, is their love of light and amusement. The description given by Antoninus to Ulysses of the chosen sports of the Phæacians would apply with little change to the Antipodean islanders, for athletics, boating, music, and dancing are among their favourite diversions. Music, indeed, is the one art from which a resident in their islands need not be divorced.
At present New Zealand sport does not differ much from English. Apart from some wild-cattle shooting and from the rather adventurous pastime of hunting wild pigs on foot with dogs, there is little recreation in the islands which is not a fairly faithful copy of something in the Mother Country. The pioneer colonists found themselves in a land without large native game, for the pigs aforesaid—the poaka of the Maori—were descendants of the tame importations turned loose by kind-hearted navigators like Captain Cook. Nor had the Maori invented any athletic sport attractive to white men, for the one great game of the Maori was war. All the colonists could do, therefore, was to naturalize British amusements. There were no freshwater fish worth mentioning, so they imported the
