204 TEA AND SILK FARMING IN NEW ZEALAND. 



from lack of material. Under such circumstances it will be 

 evident that no farmer, engaged in the production of silk alone, 

 could afford to keep a staff of skilled labourers about him unem- 

 ployed during probably nine out of every twelve months. They 

 must either be profitably engaged at some kindred industry ; 

 allowed to revel in unproductive idleness during two-thirds of 

 the year, and so become a burden to their master and a nuisance 

 to the district ; or be discharged until the following silk season 

 came round. 



In old countries with settled and considerable populations a 

 similar objection could not be urged, as employers of labour 

 there, in almost every sphere of human industry, can nearly 

 always arrange to procure a supply of hands in proportion to 

 the orders they have undertaken to fulfil. But at the Antipodes, 

 where a skilled staff must be collected from distant countries, 

 and carefully organised at the expenditure of both tact, time, 

 and money, the discharge of assistants so assembled, except for 

 gross offences, would be, to speak in the mildest way, injudicious. 

 This, then, is the great difficulty to be confronted and overcome 

 by every one proposing to commence silk culture in New 

 Zealand. Continuously and remuneratively to occupy the time 

 of such a staff is the head and front of the problem to be solved, 

 as it would indeed be the weak point of this enterprise were it 

 limited to sericiculture alone. It may be said again, it has 

 often already been alleged by superficial and ignorant persons, 

 that silk culture is so trifling, so simple, so artless, so homely 

 an employment that it requires no expensive plant or costly 

 labour, but might be managed in an adjoining outhouse by the 

 female members of every colonial family, that it might be made 

 a cottage industry, that it might be conducted by any nursery- 

 man, and that it might be tagged on to any ordinary farm. Half 

 a century ago the same style of remark was made with equal 

 reason regarding the spinning of yarn and the weaving of cloth, 

 and yet it soon became evident that private fingers, however 

 nimble and willing, were no match against public organisation, 

 capital, and machinery : so it must be with sericiculture. Bear- 

 ing silkworms will very likely soon be practised in an amateur 

 way by our fair sisters in the backyards of their enviable New 

 Zealand homes — and the sooner the better ; every cottage may 

 by and by have its mulberry patch, each nurseryman there may 

 soon find it eminently profitable to strike mulberry cuttings by 

 tens of thousands, and every farmer may discover ere long that 

 thirty tons of mulberry leaves per acre, as their brethren not 

 unfrequently get in California, yield a very handsome profit — 

 yet none of these efforts can surely be dignified by the name of 

 sericiculture. Nor will such individual essays, however laudable 

 and persevering, culminate in the speedy establishment of the 



