222 TEA AND SILK FAEMING IN NEW ZEALAND. 



pects of pecuniary success, we shall now allude to what may 

 with truth be termed the philanthropic features of the proposed 

 enterprise, which ought, perhaps, to be surveyed with minds 

 rising for the moment above the mere metallic considerations of 

 ordinary business. When a commercial crisis — whether owing 

 to depressed commerce, infatuated overtrading, the recklessness 

 of bank directors, or war — bursts, numbers of delicately nurtured 

 and well-educated women and girls, wholly innocent of contri- 

 buting to the disaster, invariably suffer, and are either thrown 

 destitute or are forced to become the unwilling, and often 

 unwelcome, recipients of charity. Those of the reduced whose 

 natural abilities and acquirements are above the average may, 

 perhaps, become governesses, teachers in public schools or private 

 academies, journalists, or artistic professionals ; but the greater 

 number have usually to contemplate a dismal future of grinding 

 poverty, armed with no more effective weapon than the needle. 

 A few years ago the writer, having occasion to inspect a property 

 in the north-east, with a trim little mansion-house upon it, for a 

 probable purchaser, was conducted through the beautiful but 

 deserted chambers all uncarpeted, the furniture — including 

 several musical instruments, and the pictorial and tapestried 

 offspring of deft and industrious feminine fingers — lotted and 

 ticketed ready for the auctioneer's hammer the following week. 

 He had seen through every room, as he believed, from the attics 

 to the hall, and was about to retire, when the conductress, 

 habited in the drapery of woe, and apparently the only domestic 

 left, tapped at a door, and, turning round with eyes full of sym- 

 pathetic moisture, said, " The library, sir ; you haven't seen it 

 yet." Until that moment the visitor merely knew that the 

 owner of the little estate had been a sufferer by a gigantic 

 commercial fraud then occupying public attention, which had 

 ruined many hundreds, and brought not a few to untimely graves. 

 A whisper, and the opened door revealed some more of the 

 terrible reality, for there, bending over a small work-table at the 

 further end of the noble apartment, dressed in deepest mourning, 

 sat two beautiful girls — children almost — plying their needles 

 and mingling their curls and their tears. Slain by the knavery 

 of a syndicate of thieves, their father, succumbing to the crushing 

 blow of his losses, combined with torturing anxiety about his 

 forlorn daughters, had a few days before been laid to rest in his 

 iinal narrow bed, and those two helpless orphans were shortly to 

 go out into the cold unknown world and commence the struggle 

 for existence. 



This reminiscence illustrates one of the philanthropic objects 

 the proposed enterprise might accomplish. During the opera- 

 tions of a chasericultural company in New Zealand numerous 

 openings would undoubtedly occur in the more delicate manipu- 



