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Title: From track to highway : a short history of New Zealand
Author: Mulgan, Alan
Published: Whitcombe & Tombs, Christchurch, N.Z.,1944
FROM TRACK TO HIGHWAY
FROM TRACK TO HIGHWAY
A Short History of New Zealand
ALAN MULGAN
WHITCOMBE & TOMBS LTD.
CHRISTCHURCH, AUCKLAND, WELLINGTON, DUNEDIN, INVERCARGILL LONDON, MELBOURNE, SYDNEY
FOREWORD
This book is written in the hope that it will be useful as a brief and clear outline of New Zealand history. The aim has been to tell a running story in such a way that the reader can see easily the main events and tendencies of our development. It might be called “ The Wood Without the Trees.” I have therefore given what I consider a minimum of political and statistical detail. I have tried to make this short survey a history of the people as well as of their rulers.
In writing it, I have had our American friends in mind. Some of them believe we pay taxes to King George, and do what he tells us. The book may help to correct this view, and as a record of our birth and growth may be of some value to those whom we have been glad to have in our country as protectors, guests, and friends. Above all I hope that what I have written will fire readers with a desire to know more about the history of this country, and, to that end, to read far beyond these pages.
Alan Mulgan
Wellington, 1944
CONTENTS
Chapter I
BIRTH page 9
Chapter II
CHILDHOOD 32
Chapter III
YOUTH 64
Chapter IV
MANHOOD 92
Index 126
Map of New Zealand 128
FROM TRACK TO HIGHWAY
CHAPTER I
BIRTH
The worn ship reels, but still unfurled
Our tattered ensign flouts the skies
And doomed to watch a prudent world
Of little men grown mean and wise,
The old sea laughs for joy to find
One purple folly left to her,
When glimmers down the riotous wind
The flag of the adventurer!
—ST. JOHN LUCAS
Once upon a time a delegation from Australia and a delegation from New Zealand, bound for a Pacific Conference, were travelling on the same liner, and after the manner of delegations, they chaffed each other. One of the Australians told a story about a New Zealander travelling in the United States. He was very full of New Zealand, and eager for audiences. At last an American stopped the flow of enthusiasm abruptly and disconcertingly. “ Say, where is this New Zealand you talk about ? ” “ Where is it ? ” replied the New Zealander. “ Why, here,” and he produced a map of the Pacific and pointed to a small patch of red in the south. New Zealanders know what that patch is apt to look like. The ignorant may well wonder if it isn’t an accidental smudge of the map-maker. The American studied this mark. “So that’s New Zealand,” he commented ; “ well, what happens when the tide comes in ? ” A member of the New Zealand delegation countered with this story : Australia, as we all know, or ought to, is a very large country, ever so much larger than New Zealand. In the interior are great open spaces and few people. Some
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of these outback folk lead very lonely lives. In the years following the first world war a man from the far interior appeared in a country town. “ Is the war over ? ” he asked the first person he met. “ Over ? Of course it’s over,” was the reply. “ Who won ?” asked the stranger. “We won, of course.” “ Well, I’m glad of that. I never did like those blinking Boers.”
The wildest joke must have some foundation, otherwise it would not be made. These two stories tell you a good deal about the countries concerned, neighbours, so far distant, but so often confused. The Englishman who asks a visitor from Auckland or Dunedin if he has ever come across a cousin who lives somewhere in Sydney, has need to study a large scale map intelligently. On some maps New Zealand has rather the appearance of another Tasmania, whereas the fact is that a thousand miles of unbroken and often stormy ocean roll between New Zealand and Australia. Geography is the indispensable primer and handmaid to history. If you want to understand the history of New
Zealand, begin with its geography. It will explain many things, from the long delay in discovery, annexation, and colonisation, to the interprovincial jealousy that still acts as a brake on national development. Australia is continental, vast, in part tropical, hot and dry, with one foot on the rim of Asia. New Zealand is insular, small, remote, long and narrow, sub-tropical in part but wholly within the temperate zone, a high ridge in the ocean, much of it alpine. It is a land of sunshine and rain and unfailing streams, and a home of the winds. Australia has immense plains, and of the few high mountains the highest is 7,318 feet; New Zealand is largely up on end, and there are seventeen peaks over 10,000 feet. An Australian has been known to gaze long in wonder at the green landscape of New Zealand, but to the Englishman the colouring is familiar. Of all the British Dominions New Zealand is the most English (or British if you like), and one reason for this is the similarity between the landscape and climate ot New Zealand and the Motherland.
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New Zealand’s geographical position hid it from the European explorers who burst into the Pacific, and it was not until 1642 that the first European (at any rate the first of whom we have record), Abel Tasman, a Dutchman, sighted these islands. Long before that, however, they had been colonised by Polynesians from islands to the north-
east. The main migration of the Maori took place about the fourteenth century. The fact that the Maori came all the way from Tahiti and the Cook Islands in double canoes, showed that he was adventurous in spirit and skilled in navigation. It is 1,600 miles from Rarotonga, in the Cook Group, and there is only one stopping place, the Kermadecs. Along the coasts and on the rivers and lakes of his new home the Maori had great use for the canoe ; it was as indispensable to him as a house. It is no wonder that when the European broke into his seclusion, the Maori proved himself an admirable forecastle hand, whaler, and surfboatman. The sea was in the blood of the original New Zealander, as it is in the New Zealander today.
This incessant canoe work was one of the things that kept the Maori fighting fit. Physically he-was a splendid specimen, strongly built, muscular, and capable of great exertion ; and conditions in New Zealand forced him to work hard. Life in Ao-tea-roa, as the Maori called New
Zealand, was much less easy than in the tropics. The magnificent forests of the country teemed with birds, but there were hardly any animals, and compared with many other lands, the plants yielded little food. There was plenty of fish in the sea, but they had to be caught. He brought with him the sweet potato, but he had no grain. Until the European came, the Maori lived in the Stone Age. Without metals, the work of felling and shaping trees for canoes and houses was long and laborious. The climate was cold enough to make a good deal of clothing necessary, and his women folk were busy weavers. His weapons of war were the club and the spear; he did not use the bow. He captured birds in snares or killed them with long spears. The making of weapons and gear, build-
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ing, hunting, cultivating, and fishing, kept him well occupied in peace, but war was a major industry. He would have agreed with Napoleon that war was a fine occupation.
The Maori system of society was tribal and communal, under the rule of chiefs and priests. Tribe warred on tribe. There were alliances between tribes, but no lasting political unions. There were streaks of chivalry in the elaborate code of war, but little mercy was shown the conquered, whose bodies often went straight to the ovens to refresh the victors. To the Maori the martial virtues were paramount, and he combined great skill and courage in hand-to-hand fighting with a capacity for military engineering quite exceptional in a primitive people. He was a poet and an orator as well as a warrior, and delighted in simile and disputation. His body of myth and legend was large and varied, and often he clothed it in words of beauty and power. The Maori had natural dignity, an aristocratic touch in his manners, and a sense of humour. There was no written language, so the Maori had to cultivate his memory, in order that his corpus of myth and legend, the history of his tribe and family, and his priestly lore, could be handed down accurately through the generations. He was subject to a rigid code of custom, religious, social, military, economic and hygienic, and the tohunga, or priest, was the guardian of deep and potent mysteries. An unwitting offence against the law of tapu (a form of the English used “ taboo ”), might cause a strong and healthy man to sit down and die in a few hours. “ Tapu ” was a spiritual, economic and social code, designed for the protection of Maori society. Thus the forests of the country
were “ tapu ” during certain periods of the year, so that the food supply might be conserved, and individual trees were similarly protected. In these respects the Maori was wiser than the short-sighted, improvident, European New Zealander.
These qualities in the Maori are important for our understanding of his relations with the Britons who
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colonised his land. The newcomers, of course, were repelled by his cruelty and cannibalism, but they respected his prowess as a soldier, and liked him for his personal dignity, friendliness, intelligence, and good humour. The Maori was sometimes a foe to be feared, but often a friend to be trusted. The Maori adapted himself easily to a good many European ways (too easily to some of the less desirable), and proved himself a good companion in peace and war. That he takes to Rugby football as a duck to water, and provides heroes of the national game, is one reason why the European likes him. Indeed it would be well for the European if he played the game more in the Maori’s carefree spirit, and not as if it were a religious exercise. Barriers of race and custom, grievous errors and misunderstandings, and a chain of wars, did not prevent the two peoples from developing a friendship, based on liking and respect, which perhaps has not been equalled in all the history of contact between Britons and aboriginal races.
Abel Tasman, sent out by the Dutch East India Company from the Dutch East Indies to find the continent that was believed to exist in the Southern Pacific, sighted the west coast of the South Island in December, 1642. Tasman spent less than a month in New Zealand waters, and never landed on its shores. He saw only the west coasts from somewhere near Okarito, to the extreme north, where he tried to land on the Three Kings. A clash with Maoris in Golden Bay, at the western approach to Cook Strait (for which he seems to have been blameless), cost him several of his men. After that he was within an ace of discovering Cook Strait, and if he had, the whole history of New Zealand might have been different. Tasman’s was one of the missed opportunities of history, but in judging him one must bear in mind what the merchant adventurers of those days expected of new lands. Tasman wrote of “ a beautiful land,” but he can have seen little or no evidence of New Zealand’s real wealth. Here was no rich land according to his ideas, with a friendly population ready to trade. Tasman could not know that behind the high mountains
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he saw there were the makings of a second England, and that from its farms hundreds of millions worth of produce would be shipped across the world. He would have been still more surprised to be told that in years to come, along the coast which he first sighted, travellers from many lands would pass to see the glories of forest, mountain, and glacier.
Tasman named his discovery Staten Island, because he thought it might prove to have a connection with the Staten Land at the southern end of South America. The name was changed to “ Nieu Zeeland,” after the province in the Netherlands, and New Zealand, or New Sea Land, it is. The Dutch did not know then how appropriate the name was for these remote and lonely islands.
The Dutch made no attempt to exploit their discovery, and the curtain hung in front of New Zealand for another century and a quarter. In 1769 Captain James Cook, greatest of English navigators, sent to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus and to explore in the South Pacific, arrived at New Zealand and proceeded to make a job of his rediscovery. Cook visited New Zealand five times between 1769 and J773, and his first visit lasted nearly six months. If we may imagine New Zealand a mansion, Tasman peeped through a window, but Cook walked through the outer rooms. He circumnavigated the islands, took pos-
session of them for George 111, discovered Cook Strait, and drew an astonishingly accurate map of the coastline. “He found New Zealand a line on the map,” says W. P. Reeves, “ and left it an archipelago.” He also made the acquaintance of the Maori. In this intercourse a number of Maoris were killed, and a boat’s crew of Cook’s consort on his second voyage, were killed and eaten. Cook was not blameless, but he was a just and humane man, and honestly tried, and with a good deal of success, to win the confidence and friendship of a suspicious and bewildered people. Cook was well served by his scientists, who were delighted to find themselves among such a wealth of new plants and birds. Accounts of his voyages were published in England, and
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attracted much attention. By the end of the eighteenth century a good deal was known about New Zealand in Britain, and this knowledge was a factor in the subsequent pressure put upon the British Government to annex the country.
That the British Government had to be pressed to take this action should be stressed. If Britain is presented to a New Zealander as a uniformly predatory Power, which has roamed round the world seeking what it may grab, there is an answer ready to his hand in the history of his own country. Cook took possession of New Zealand in 1769, but it was 1840 before British sovereignty was established, and that by a Government whose hand had been forced. In the interval Britain had more than once disclaimed
ownership of the islands. Before Cook was killed in the Pacific, Britain was on the way to losing her American colonies, and that loss made British Governments very unwilling to set more colonisation on foot. Besides, over a period of years wars with France fully absorbed their energies. When Britain founded New South Wales in 1788, it was to obtain a convict station. The French were also interested in New Zealand, and their first exploring expedition arrived only a couple of months after Cook ; but Britain had established a pre-emptive right, and France was defeated in the Napoleonic wars. Trade and settlement, however, do not always wait for a flag. New Zealand was made widely known by British and French explorers, and the world was growing smaller. The establishment of British settlements in Australia provided handy bases for business with New Zealand, and Svdney
soon developed a keen interest in the resources and excitements of the ungoverned land on the other side of the Tasman Sea. So traders began to visit New Zealand, and it was found to be a profitable hunting ground for whalers and sealers. The splendid forests yielded excellent spars for the ships. The fibre of the native flax provided good cordage. There were potatoes and fish to buy for food. There was even a trade-one of the most infamous in
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history—in dried tattooed Maori heads. The Maori, a keen trader once he discovered the superiority of metal over his stone-age implements (and that didn’t take him long), went the length of tattooing the faces of slaves and killing them to sell the heads.
For a time whalers and sealers were the most important of the pioneers. New Zealand waters were then rich in whales. At times that fine harbour the Bay of Islands sheltered quite a fleet of whaling ships, and Kororareka, as the present Russell was called, became the first New Zealand town. It was pleasant to anchor there after a strenuous cruise, to re-water and re-provision, and enjoy Maori hospitality. Many of these ships were American. Shore whaling stations followed, where men would dash out in open boats to the kill, and perhaps have to tow the carcase many miles back to the bay. It was a hard calling, and it may easily be believed life was often wild ashore. There was no government and no civilised society, and the pavement’s end was a long way off. These men, however, physically as tough as their oars, were magnificent boatmen, and they laid the foundation of New Zealand’s own sea trade. Many of the men took Maori wives, and lived in rough comfort. The home would be clean and neat inside, and there might be a garden. Johnny Jones, from Sydney, who established himself with a chain of whaling stations in the South Island a few years before annexation, settled English families on his land at Waikouaiti, endowed a mission station and school there, and had a trading store and produce from his farms ready for the founders of the Otago settlement when they arrived from Scotland in 1848. But harder still was the life of the sealers. Working the south coasts of the South Island and the lonely storm-swept islands to the southward, the sealing vessels put working parties ashore, while they went off for whales or on other business. When the ships would return was quite uncertain, and the sealing gangs ran the risk of being killed and eaten by the Maori, or half starved amid foul weather in spots where today, with all the amenities that civilisation
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could provide, it would be difficult to achieve reasonable comfort. Sometimes the ships would be away for months, and the sufferings of the marooned men must have been dreadful. Both seals and whales were worked out by unregulated hunting, but there has always been a certain amount of shore whaling on the New Zealand coast.
Into this “ No Man’s Land ” of the post-discovery period there was a steady trickle of white men: sealers and whalers, shipwrecked and deserting seamen, runaway convicts from the penal settlements of Australia, traders and adventurers. The situation of these men was apt to be dangerous. There was no European government and no central Maori authority ; each man had to make his own
arrangements with the tribe on the spot. To certain types, such as the reckless, rootless, and masterless, life in this new land, free from all restraints of civilisation, made a strong appeal. Some of the newcomers went to live with tribes. Their gamble might throw them into slavery, or they might be given an honoured position as advisors in the arts of peace and war. The most famous of these pakehaMaoris, as Maorified Englishmen were called, was F. E. Maning, a grandson of a vice-provost of Trinity College, Dublin. Maning came to New Zealand as a young man in 1833, settled at Hokianga, threw himself with all zest into Maori life, married a Maori, became a judge of the Native Land Court under British rule, and wrote the first classic of this country. Old New Zealand, one of the best of books about an aboriginal race. Maning, however, was a very exceptional man. To the ignorant and unimaginative, Maori custom, strange, complicated and uncompromising, could be a tragic snare. Even the best-intentioned man might err unwittingly and bring on himself the direst retribution. To the Maori, ignorance of the law was no excuse. Many of these Europeans were far from being well-intentioned. To some of the adventurers, traders and explorers of those days, there was no difference between a Maori chief and his followers—they were all “ niggers but to the Maori the person of a chief was sacred, and an
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affront to him was an insult to be wiped out in blood. When Europeans of position, who probably were goodliving men in their own society, saw nothing wrong in kidnapping Maoris, it may be imagined what the baser sort were like. As a result of this ignorance and cruelty there were some horrible tragedies. An early French exploring expedition had its leader and sixteen mtn killed under cover of friendship. Nearly seventy lives were lost when the ship Boyd was attacked by Maoris in Whangaroa harbour in 1809 ; the massacre of these unsuspecting folk is believed to have been caused by the treatment accorded a young chief who had shipped as a seaman in the ship. There were dark deeds up and down the coast, and the Maori was not always the provoked party. Violence bred violence, and reprisals sometimes involved parties who had nothing to do with the original dispute. The most infamous crime touching the two races had for its machine the brig Elizabeth, run by one Stewart. Te Rauparaha, the bloodthirsty lord of Cook Strait, a conqueror with a touch of military genius, hired Stewart to take him and a party to Akaroa, to kidnap a chief whose death alone would satisfy Te Rauparaha’s lust for vengeance. Stewart, pretending that he had come only for trade, tempted the chief and his wife and daughter on board, where they were confronted with their implacable enemy. Te Rauparaha’s men killed as many of their captives’ tribe as they could reach, and Stewart looked on while the raiders feasted on the slain, cooked in his ship’s coppers. The chief and his wife were taken in the brig to Kapiti and tortured and killed, and Stewart sailed for Sydney with a cargo of flax that was the price of his infamy. The Governor of New South Wales did his best to get him hanged, but the proceedings broke down.
That action was one of many attempts made by the New South Wales Government to exert authority in New Zealand. Sydney, only a fortnight’s sail from New Zealand, against London’s months, was Britain’s nearest outpost, and the natural base for commercial, political, and religious
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operations. Intercourse between New Zealand and Australia grew. Maoris came to Sydney. Both European and Maori looked to the Government in Sydney for protection. Governors of New South Wales regarded New Zealand as within their dominion, and one went so far as to issue trade
regulations and appoint magistrates. These steps were ineffective because there was no force on the spot. The geographical jurisdiction of the Government in Sydney remained inadequately defined. Indeed in 1817 the British Government expressly excluded New Zealand from His Majesty’s dominions, and in the following years this position was made plain to would-be settlers. Britain did not want another colony.
In this period of no government there were two other important intrusions diametrically opposed in kind. One was the coming of the missionaries ; the other the introduction of firearms. The missionaries—Church of England
first, then Wesleyans, then Roman Catholics—provided the brightest spot in the pre-colony history of New Zealand. They were a brave and devoted set of men and women, and they brought Christian civilisation into a country where European violence had been added to Maori
savagery. Samuel Marsden preached the first sermon in New Zealand at the Bay of Islands on Christmas Day, 1814. It was typical of the courage of the whole missionary body that Marsden, coming from Sydney, landed at Whangaroa, where the company of the Boyd had been massacred, and spent his first night near the scene, surrounded by men of the tribe concerned. Henry Williams, foremost of the early missionaries who made their home in New Zealand, had seen much fighting as a naval officer, and brought to his new task the virtues of his old profession. He was utterly without fear, indefatigable, and resourceful. Williams and other Protestant missionaries brought their wives and families with them, and settled in a land where there was no law and order. Women as well as men had to live in constant apprehension of attack, learn to understand the ways of a proud, suspicious and warlike native race, and
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witness the cannibalistic sequels to Maori victories. The missionaries’ record as peace-makers between Maori tribes and Maori and European is to their eternal credit. Again and again they averted war or succoured its victims, and without them the loss of European life at the hands of the Maori might have been heavy. They planted mission stations about New Zealand, and made long and arduous journeys on foot or in boats and schooners up and down windy and, over long stretches, unsheltered coasts. In Reeves’ words, “ they fought against war, discredited cannibalism, abolished slavery.” The progress of conversion among the Maoris was slow, but by the time the country became a colony Christianity had been widely adopted, and Maori spreaders of the Gospel had been added to the martyr-roll of the Church. The missionaries also saw to the education of the Maori and introduced him to European crafts and industries. Mission stations were enclaves of English grasses, fruit, flowers and trees. (Some of the importations were early in the long ineradicable line of the country’s noxious weeds.) Also, with the aid of a Cambridge scholar, they did New Zealand the great and permanent service of giving the Maori a written language. They systematised the spelling of Maori names, which was chaotic, and laid the foundations of scholarship in the Maori tongue.
If the missionaries erred in their handling of the Maoris, it was in company with the time. Ethnology is a later science. They were well aware of the more obvious dangers that threatened the Maori from European contacts ; it was this that made them oppose annexation and colonisation. But they could not know as much as later generations of the deeper perils resulting from the breaking down of the Maori’s social and economic system. The code of tapu was more vital to the Maori than they realised. The problem of the Maori is still that of a Stone-age people brought at one bound, as it were, in contact with nineteenth century western civilisation, which was an inextricable mixture of materialism and idealism. The many lasting friendships
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formed between missionary and Maori showed that the mana (as the Maori put it) of the Church’s agents was high. But the best proof of missionary success was the fact that though missionaries lived for years amid wars, some of which were between European and Maori, though they travelled the country to carry the Gospel tidings, frequently interposed themselves between combatants, and were at times insulted and plundered, fifty years passed after Marsden’s coming before a missionary life was taken by the Maori. And the missionaries did more than Christianise the Maori. The Protestant missionaries set a stamp of evangelical Puritan Christianity upon the European colony, which deepened and widened when immigration was organised. Missionary influence is felt in New Zealand society to this day. In his centennial survey. New Zealand Now, Oliver Duff bids us remember that “ New Zealand has always been Puritan. It was established in the fear of God.”
The introduction of firearms, coupled with the lust of conquest in certain chiefs, caused terrible carnage among the Maoris. In their natural state tribes fought on an equality in weapons. All combat was hand to hand. When a chief found that he had to face muskets without having any himself, possibly he modified his opinion about war. That was what happened. Through possession of guns, certain tribes acquired an overwhelming superiority, and used it ruthlessly. Hongi, a leader in the far north, carried war through the Auckland district to Rotorua (of course there wasn’t any Auckland then), and stronghold after stronghold fell to him. An even greater soldier, Te Rauparaha, of Cook Strait (where he was well placed for getting guns), whose shadow was to lie upon the infant settlement of Wellington for some years, made his name a terror from Manawatu to Akaroa in the South Island. The killing in battle was heavy, and there was little or no mercy for the conquered. Slavery was their best fate, and many of them went to the ovens. After storming a pa in Taranaki, a Waikato chief is credited with having killed two hundred
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and fifty captives with his own hand ; they were led up to him and he went on striking them down till he was tired. In later years the same chief was quite at home in frock coat and top hat at Government House functions in Auckland. Among the unarmed tribes there was a frantic rush for guns. All hands were set to scrape flax to barter for the vital weapons. At one time it took a ton of fibre, prepared by hand, and later half a ton, to buy one musket. The result was that cultivation was neglected, and famine and disease supplemented the toll of war. Tens of thousands of Maoris perished in this tragic twenty-year period, from 1818 to 1839, and the whole Maori population may not have been more than 120,000.
So in the thirties New Zealand was in a bad way, and crying out for some sort of firm and national government. The tribes were torn by war, or lived under its menace, and the whites, of whom there came to be about two thousand by the end of the decade, had no security of life and property. The state of the country was a scandal to the world. At Kororareka, where the well-worn phrase “ sink of iniquity ” seems to have been truly applicable, the respectable whites had to form themselves into a Vigilance Committee, which imposed penalties ranging from fines to tarring and feathering. When a British warship and a company of soldiers came over from Australia to deal with an attack by Maoris on a shipwrecked party, the extent of their reprisals shocked English opinion. It was time that some Power asserted itself in New Zealand, and there was fear that if Britain did not, France might. France was sending warships to look after French whalers in New Zealand waters.
But still the British Government hung back. In the twenties two unofficial British attempts at organised settlement had failed ; the more important of the two, so one imagines, because of the forbidding demeanour of the Maori. The missionaries seem to have done little to reform the European population; their business was with the Maori, and in his interest they opposed annexation and
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colonisation. They wanted to keep the Maori as free as possible from the corrupting influences of European civilisation, a Christian convert in an unspoiled society. But the missionaries joined other whites in asking for protection, and some of the Maoris made the same request. Official London misunderstood the nature of Maori politics. It thought of the Maori as an independent sovereign entity, in being or in the making, whereas the system was purely tribal. The Governor of New South Wales and the British Government between them thought of a truly British compromise. They appointed as British Resident, in the Bay of Islands, on the Indian political model, one James Busby, a Scot with experience of Australian life. Busby, however, was given no authority. Not only had he not one policeman by his side, but he was without legal standing. He was expected to uphold British interests by moral force, with the help of an occasional visit from a warship. This yes-my-darling-daughter policy failed. Busby did a conscientious best, but only a superman could have established British authority under such conditions. Busby gave the chiefs a flag, which you may see today on the ships of the Shaw Savill and Albion liners trading between New Zealand and England, and he was very helpful when the moment for annexation arrived. There is a monument to him at his restored Residency, but the house itself, now a national possession, is also a monument. Incidentally this relic at the Bay of Islands shows that the very early pioneers had better architectural taste than many of those who came later.
The fate of New Zealand was decided in London. A number of prominent Englishmen, one of them the Earl of Durham, who was to win immortality by his work for self-government in Canada, decided that New Zealand should be colonised, and on new lines. There was little if any self-interest in this movement, at any rate in its beginnings. The promoters were moved by the deplorable state of England after the Napoleonic Wars. Something should be done for those masses who had little prospect but misery
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in their own country. Why not use the new lands overseas ? New Zealand was considered a particularly suitable land to colonise. The genius of the movement was Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Unfortunately for the smooth passage of the plan, Wakefield had a past, and one that simply could not be overlooked. At the age of twenty Edward Gibbon Wakefield eloped with and married an heiress who was a ward in Chancery, but was forgiven by the Lord Chancellor. Six years after the death of his wife, who left him with two children, Wakefield, with his brother William, the future leader of the party that founded Wellington, committed the particularly cold-blooded crime of abducting by false pretences an heiress still at school, a girl whom he did not even know, and marrying her. The only thing that could be said in mitigation was that the marriage was only nominal. For this crime Wakefield went to gaol, and while there he studied colonisation and thought out those ideas that were to revolutionise the business. Wakefield declared that existing practice was all wrong. New lands should neither be used for convict stations nor parcelled out in huge blocks for a few men. What was the use of planting a man on a great area if he had not the labour to work it ? Wakefield pointed to schemes that had failed for this lack. Territories must be developed by a properly planned society of all the necessary elements, transplanted from Britain and carefully chosen. Land must be sold at a “ sufficient price,” not given away for a song, and a portion of the price used to send out free labourers. Land speculation would be checked, and endowments set aside for educational and religious purposes. Such colonial settlements must be given liberal powers of self-government. The extent to which Wakefield’s particular plans succeeded in practice need not concern us here. The point is that the originality of his ideas and the energy with which he advanced them, changed the face of British colonisation, and he lives in history as one of the most important figures in the development of the British Commonwealth. Wakefield’s record compelled him to work
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more or less behind the scenes, but he was particularly well fitted for this kind of activity. He had an exceptional flair for propaganda and manipulation.
The struggle was lengthy and bitter. Over a considerable period New Zealand affairs were frequently before the British Parliament. Perhaps no other British colony had so much publicity at its birth. In view of Britain’s reputation for Empire-building in certain quarters, there is something amusing in the manner in which the British Government was pushed into assuming responsibility for New Zealand. The Government’s reluctance was strong and based on principle. For a long while, then and after the colonisation of New Zealand, it was customary to think of the Colonial Office of the thirties as simply blind and stupid in this matter, but there was a good deal more to it than that. The permanent head of the Colonial Office, Sir James Stephen, was a high-minded able man with strong religious and philanthropic convictions. Both he and his ministerial chief. Lord Glenelg (who gave place to Lord Normanby during the fight), were officials of the Church Missionary Society, to which the Church of England missionaries in New Zealand belonged, and the Society was against annexation. Stephen had worked hard for the emancipation of the slaves, and drawn up the necessary legislation. He knew that to take over another country as a colony meant more worry and expenditure for Britain, and his knowledge of contacts between European and native races told him that the effect on the Maoris might be disastrous. Stephen show’ed the liberality of his mind by laying down two cardinal points in the establishment of a colony in New Zealand : first the protection of the aborigines, and second, the granting of self-government to the colonists. This, bear in mind, was in 1839. His chief declared in 1837 that “ Great Britain has no legal or moral right to establish a colony in New Zealand without the free consent of the natives, deliberately given, without compulsion and without fraud.” To give any individuals authority to establish a colony without such safeguards
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would be “ to make unrighteous use of our superior power.”
Thus the move of the New Zealand Association, as Wakefield’s organisation in London called itself, was directly met, but Wakefield loved a fight, and if he couldn’t get official sanction he was prepared to proceed without it. The battle begun by the Association was fought out in Parliament and Press, and there was hard hitting on both sides. Though eleven of the seventeen members of the Association’s committee were members of the House of Commons, the House threw out the Bill embodying the Association’s scheme, and the temper of the opposition may be gauged by the comment in The Times, which congratulated members on defeating an attempt to establish a monopoly “ conceived in the most sordid spirit, and only maintainable by the most peremptory despotism.” The one thing that all three parties agreed upon—Association, missionaries, and Colonial Office—was the welfare of the Maori. To meet the Government’s wishes the Association turned itself into a joint-stock company (thereby exposing itself still more to the charge of being out for profit), but Glenelg’s successor at the Colonial Office refused to be appeased. So the New Zealand Land Company (afterwards known as the New Zealand Company), decided to push on with its preparations. On sth May, 1839, the advance guard of the First Colony of New Zealand, as the first settlement was called, left London for New Zealand in the barque Tory. William Wakefield, now a colonel by reason of service with the British Legion in Spain, was in charge, and he took a capable staff. The Cofonial Office was asked for letters of introduction to the authorities in Australia, but it flatly refused, so the enterprise was set on foot without a shred of official sanction. Fast, well found and well manned, the Tory reached New Zealand in August. Wakefield chose Port Nicholson (Wellington) as the site for the first settlement. He carried instructions from the Company which enjoined him to deal with the natives most frankly ; to get the approval of all owners to pur-
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chases of land; to set forth boundaries clearly; to explain what cession of tribal lands would mean ; and to reserve one tenth of purchased land for the benefit of the natives. Unfortunately Wakefield, knowing that it had been arranged for colonists to follow him, was in a hurry. From the Maoris at Port Nicholson, who were very friendly, he made the first of his vast, dubious, and hasty purchases, which were to cause so much trouble later on. For territory that included the site of the future capital and its suburbs, Wakefield paid in goods to the value of about £365, but the Maori got his reserves, and these today are worth many times that amount. Leaving a European to prepare for the reception of the immigrants, Wakefield went off to buy land elsewhere. Altogether he bought, or believed he bought (he wasn’t quite sure about some of his titles) twenty million acres.
Meanwhile, actually before Wakefield had completed his purchase at Port Nicholson, the first of the Company’s ships had left England. That is to say, the Company did not wait to hear what had happened to the Tory. For all the directors knew to the contrary, the ship and her complement might have gone down on the way or come to a tragic end at their destination. The Company sent the colonists into the blue, across the width of the world, to a land without government, peopled by a warrior race addicted to cannibalism, without any assurance that there would be land, or even a peaceful life, for the adventurers when they arrived. It was one of those enterprises that are called splendidly daring when they succeed, and lunacy when they fail, but it may be said that if all the pioneers of Britain overseas had waited for certificates of safety before they moved, there would not be any Commonwealth today. What can and should be said for the directors of the New Zealand Company is that they did well the actual job of choosing and shipping emigrants. They were capable men of affairs, and they looked after all the details of this despatch of colony-makers, from careful selection of personnel to regulations governing life on shipboard and
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a warm farewell at the docks. The New Zealand Company raised the whole standard of emigration. The men and women who trusted themselves to the Company were drawn from various parts of the British Isles by energetic advertising of the attractions offered by this brave new world so far away. Men of high position supported the movement. London was placarded with inducements to working men to go to New Zealand. At first land was offered at a pound an acre ; for £lOl one could buy the right to take up a hundred acres of country and one acre of town land. Each subscriber drew by lot his priority of selection in New Zealand, and the size and form of the first town, with reserves for the Maoris, were planned. That there was as yet no guarantee that land could be obtained did not seem to matter much. There was speculation in sections, helped by the unfortunate lack of stipulation that a buyer must emigrate.
The enterprise attracted men and women of all classes. There were the gentry, who occupied the best cabins under the poop. There were young fellows out for adventure, some of them well educated, and older men who hoped to better their lot and their families’ in a land where society would not be clogged by the poverty and the deadweight of tradition and convention in the old world. The Company gave free passage to mechanics and craftsmen, agricultural labourers and domestic servants, and chose them so carefully that they enquired into the character, not only of the applicants, but of their sponsors. These men and women who left England (most of them for ever, and one may easily imagine what their feelings were), had little or no knowledge of the land they were going to, but the fact that they were prepared to undertake such an adventure indicated that they had unusual courage and enterprise. The ships they sailed in were 500 tons and upwards. The Aurora, the first to arrive, was 123 feet long to the butt of the bowsprit, and 30 feet in beam. This seems larger than the Mayflower, but such a ship, with 150 to 250 passengers and thirty of a crew, must have
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been exceedingly uncomfortable in bad weather. The Aurora, leaving Gravesend on 18th September, 1839, anchored in Port Nicholson on 22nd January, 1840. Ever since then this day has been kept as Wellington’s birthday, but in a sense it is the birthday of New Zealand. Be it noted that New Zealand was not then a British possession, but still “ No Man’s Land.”
But not for long. By this time the British Government had been compelled to act. Its hand had been forced, and not by Wakefield alone. An array of circumstances worked for annexation. Missionaries on the spot, better informed than the parent body in London, now accepted British intervention as inevitable. A threat came from France. There, based on the purchase of a large tract of land by a whaling captain, a company had been formed to colonise Banks Peninsula. So in July, 1839, the Secretary for the Colonies, Lord Normanby, moved, in his own words, by circumstances entirely beyond the Government’s control, and acting “ with extreme reluctance ” despatched Captain William Hobson, R.N., to New Zealand with authority to treat with the Maoris for the recognition of British
sovereignty over the whole or any part of the islands which they might be willing to place under Her Majesty’s dominion. Normanby’s instructions should be known to every New Zealander, and indeed to every Briton. The Government still regarded New Zealand as a sovereign independent State, and disclaimed every pretension to take the country without “ the free and intelligent consent of the natives expressed according to their established usage.” Captain Hobson was to proclaim immediately to the Queen’s subjects in New Zealand that the Government would not recognise as valid any title to land that was not a Crown grant. The Minister promised that though New Zealand was to become a dependency of New South Wales, the country would never be used as a convict station.
Hobson reached the Bay of Islands from Sydney in a warship, and landed at Kororareka on 30th January, 1840.
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In the church there he read his commissions, the validity of which depended on acceptance of British sovereignty. Working with Busby and Henry Williams, Hobson arranged to meet the chiefs of the district to discuss the question. A few days after the proclamations they met outside the British Residency at Waitangi, across the bay from Kororareka, and the British proposal was explained as fully as possible. There was a good deal of opposition at first, but this was overcome, and the chiefs put their marks to the document known as the Treaty of Waitangi. By this treaty they ceded sovereign rights to the Queen, and in return were guaranteed possession of their lands and other properties, Her Majesty to have exclusive right of pre-emption over such lands as the owners might wish to sell. This solemn agreement between equals has survived attacks in peace and the shock of war between the two peoples, and remains the charter of the Maori race. The Treaty of Waitangi has been described by Hobson’s biographer, Dr. G. H. Scholefield, as “ perhaps the brightest episode in the whole narrative of conflicts between civilised and uncivilised races.” The Treaty gave the Maori, says Dr. Scholefield, rights and privileges never before extended to a native race living in close proximity to a civilised. It fortified the Maori against the landgrabber. It gave respectability to the intermarriage of Maori and European, and provided a safeguard against pauperism. We may well believe that the chiefs did not understand the nature of sovereignty, but what else could Hobson have offered them ?
Following the agreement at Waitangi, Hobson and his agents collected other signatures in other parts of New Zealand, and British sovereignty was formerly proclaimed and implemented. Hobson was all the more eager to clinch the matter for the reason that the French were “ in the bay.” Not only were there French warships in New Zealand waters, but he knew that the expedition sent out by the French colonising company was being prepared and indeed might have set out. That enterprise had been
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undertaken with the support of the French Government, and Akaroa, for which the colonists were bound, was to be a base for the French Navy. But when the ship carrying the French settlers arrived at Akaroa on 15th August, 1840, they found that New Zealand was British. They made the best of the situation. The settlement became an outpost of French culture, but in prosperous Akaroa to-day, of what was French only names and graves remain.
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CHAPTER II
CHILDHOOD
“ When the Bishop of Auckland shall have consecrated this new burial ground the Maoris intend to remove into it the remains of our soldiers who now lie in unmarked graves in the neighbouring forest, and to erect a monument over them; so that, as an aged chief, formerly conspicuous among our enemies, said to me: ‘The brave warriors of both races, the white skin and the brown, now that all strife between them is forgotten, may sleep side by side until the end of the world.’”
—Despatch from the Governor to the Colonial Office, 1870. Quoted by James Cowan, The New Zealand Wars and the Pioneering; Period.
The first years of a human life are formative for health and character, and the rule applies to new States. In New Zealand’s years of infancy wise and unwise things were done that profoundly affected the colony’s future. Among the wise things were the peaceful annexation and the selection of colonists. The New Zealand Company quickly followed its Port Nicholson enterprise with settlements at New Plymouth (1841) and Nelson (1842). Both these towns to-day bear outward signs of their origin and have a spirit of their own. Their pioneers were chosen with the
same care as Wellington’s, and the presence of men of education and character put a stamp not only on local but on national effort. Paradoxically, however, it increased the difficulties of the Government, for Hobson and his successors found themselves criticised and opposed by men of weight. These difficulties bring us to the mistakes of New Zealand’s first years. One was the lack of support given to Hobson by the Colonial Office and the Government in Sydney; another, the permanent animosity between the Colonial Office and the New Zealand Company. If the
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Colonial Office had been as wise in the plans it made for the government of New Zealand after annexation as it was in the instructions it gave Hobson touching that step, the early history of New Zealand would have been much happier. Unfortunately Lord Normanby was resolved to do this enforced job of Empire extension as cheaply as possible. It has been said that Britain acquired an Empire in a fit of absence of mind. It acquired New Zealand in a fit of absence of pocket. For a while Hobson had to make do with a meagre staff, which was not even uniformly honest; and for the first ten months he was subordinated to the Government of New South Wales and dependent on it for money. Not unnaturally the authorities in Sydney economised at the expense of New Zealand. There was so little militarism about the founding of the colony that Hobson was not accompanied to New Zealand by even a corporal’s guard. He had with him a sergeant and three troopers of the New South Wales Mounted Police. Normanby had told him bluntly he could not have troops—this was in one of the many periods when the British Army was being cut to the bone—and when Hobson enquired what he was to do if he had to use force in the interests of peace and humanity, Normanby dodged the issue. Moreover the Colonial Office refused to recognise the Company. Two months after the signing of the Treaty, however, Hobson received from Sydney a hundred men of an infantry regiment, who began an association of the British Army with New Zealand that lasted without a break for thirty years. This detachment strengthened the Government’s feeble hands, but for some time the military
establishment was nothing like adequate for possible needs. The quarrel between the Colonial Office and the New Zealand Company was partly due to the Colonial Secretary’s refusal to recognise or work with Wakefield’s creation. Once the British Government had decided to intervene, the Colonial Office and the Company really had the same object in view, the orderly and good settlement of the country, but they could not agree to work together. In
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London Wakefield who, like many other geniuses, was stupid in some directions, attacked the British Government and Hobson with deplorable venom, and thereby made the task of the Company’s agents in New Zealand (one of them his brother William) the more difficult. In New Zealand the differences between the Colonial Office and Hobson on the one side, and the Company on the other, rent the struggling, scattered and imperilled society of the new colony.
The two main points of difference were the choice of a capital, and the acquisition of land. Hobson fixed his first capital on a spot a few miles from Kororareka and called it Russell, but the same year (1840) moved to the Waitemata harbour, where he founded Auckland (Kororareka, now called Russell, was never the capital). William Wakefield’s settlers at Port Nicholson were furious. They were much more numerous, they were an organised society, whereas Auckland was growing round the official establishment, and they were centrally situated. Why should they be governed from such a distance ? Unfortunately there was all too much justification for this particular objection. As we noted in the beginning, the geographical features of New Zealand have profoundly affected its development. Hobson was separated by hundreds of miles of rough unroaded land from the Cook Strait settlements, and his means of communication by sea were meagre. The first steamship did not appear on the New Zealand coast until 1846, and it was a warship. Regular steam communication between the provinces did not begin until 1865; In these first years Wellington (as the Port Nicholson settlement came to be called) was sometimes weeks and months without letters from the capital, and as late as the mid-fifties, when Parliamentary Government had been established, it was possible for Auckland news to reach Wellington by way of Sydney more quickly than by the direct route. Auckland returned Wellington’s intense dislike. The official mind distrusted the Company’s choice of Port Nicholson, and the unofficial world referred to the
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“ miserably chosen settlement.” Feeling between Wellington and Auckland has been observed by our generation, but compared to the gale force of early years, it has been a summer breeze.
The enmity hastened poor Hobson’s end. It was a disaster for New Zealand that this capable, honest and kindly man was stricken with paralysis shortly after the signing of the Treaty. He was incapacitated at a critical period, and though he recovered sufficiently to transact business and travel, he was never the same again. He died in September ,1842, crushed by worries and hounded by his enemies. Auckland and Wellington agreed on one thing, denunciation of their Governor, and both demanded his recall. Well before that time there were newspapers in New Zealand—an Englishman starts a newspaper almost as soon as he sets up a pub—and invective was their stock-in-trade. In a pioneering community politics engender venom. They are everybody’s concern, and there is so little else to absorb mental energy.
Hobson’s main worry, however, was not Wellington, but land titles. For years the disposal of land was the paramount problem in New Zealand, and the main cause of the Europeans’ clashes with Maoris. Hobson’s initial proclamation and the terms of the Treaty cut right across all land purchase. These were in three categories : the genuine purchases by Europeans before Hobson came ; the transactions of land speculators, chiefly from Sydney, who, apart from one large transaction that covered the whole of the South Island, had accounted for 26,000,000 acres by 1840 ; and the Company’s purchases. The Government’s action in taking over control of land titles, which involved rescission of all transactions, was necessary, but conditions made enforcement difficult and dangerous. The speculators were the least important factor in the tangle. What gave the Government the most trouble was the fact that the Company had bought great areas of land on a flimsy basis, and had settlers on the spot, clamouring for their sections and their titles. What exactly was in the minds of the
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chiefs who sold we shall never know. They may not have fully understood the transactions. They may have intended to repudiate the full extent of their surrender. Certain it is they had no right to part with the land in the way they did. Maori land was held in common by the tribe, the chief was the tribe’s trustee, and the consent of all the tribe was necessary to alienation. Maori claims to land were and are woven out of the stuff of tribal history. A tribe might be driven off its land and yet retain its rights after years of exile. When the Wellington Provincial Government bought the Rangitikei-Manawatu block in 1866, months were spent in getting the consent of members of the tribes concerned, and there were 1646 signatures to the deed. To-day, more than a hundred years after Waitangi, the Native Land Court employs seven judges, who also preside over Maori Land Boards. In 1840 all this machinery was yet to be devised. Commissioners were appointed to investigate the claims. Their processes were slow, but in the nature of things they could hardly have been as rapid as the case demanded. There were Maoris who were quick to take advantage of the Government’s action and repudiate sales. Maoris in the Wellington town settlement refused to part with their land. The Company impugned the Treaty of Waitangi. One representative described it as a device to placate ignorant savages. The Company contended that the Treaty applied only to land occupied by Maoris, and not to “waste” lands. This went to the root of the whole matter. Two conceptions of land use were in conflict, and all the moral right was not on the side of the Maori. It was the old problem of a relatively small aboriginal race living in a large territory and challenged by newcomers. There were only 120,000 Maoris (the largest official count) in New Zealand, and, according to European ideas, there was room for many times that number of people. The European said the Maori was using only a small portion of his land. By that he meant he was living on or cultivating only that part. But the Maori regarded all land as more or less useful, or valuable by association. He named every hill and
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river, and fished in the streams. Even the materially useless peaks in the middle of the North Island, were considered Maori property, and Europeans were warned off them. It is not surprising that the immigrant, wanting land and seeing so much of it, lying, as he considered, idle, did not sympathise with the Maori point of view. Many New Zealanders of later generations have failed to grasp this fundamental and in some results, fatal difference between Maori and European conceptions.
Tragedy was not long delayed. The Nelson settlement claimed land in Marlborough. Te Rauparaha, and his nephew Te Rangihaeata, the most irreconcilable of the Cook Strait chiefs, opposed the claim and obstructed the surveyors. Though the claim was down for official investigation, Nelson sent out an armed party to enforce its authority. They met the chiefs on the ground ; during the argument the accidental firing of a shot on the British side was taken as a signal for action ; the untrained British force fell back and Captain Wakefield and his party gave themselves up. One of Rangihaeata’s wives had been killed in the action, and as utu for the slain he and his followers fell on the white men and killed them. Twenty-two were killed that day, including Arthur Wakefield, leader of the Nelson colony and brother of Edward Gibbon and William. Arthur was the best of that family. Among the terror-stricken Europeans there were demands for punishment of the “ murderers,” but Captain Fitzßoy, who succeeded Hobson as Governor, told the chiefs concerned (after hearing their story) that as the white men had been in the wrong he would not avenge their deaths. The Colonial Office took the same view as Fitzßoy. “ The whites,” it said, “ needlessly violated the rules of the law of England, the maxims of prudence, and the principle of justice,” and later generations have endorsed this judgment. But even if Fitzßoy had had right on his side, he was without the military strength to enforce it. As it was, the Wellington settlement prepared to defend itself against an attack by Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata, which might have
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come but for the influence upon the tribes of the missionary Octavius Hadfield (later Bishop of Wellington) and the ex-Taranaki chief Wiremu Kingi, of whom New Zealand was to hear much more in later years.
If in dealing with a race of warriors among whom taking vengeance is not only a custom but a duty, you submit passively to defeat, your prestige will suffer. Probably what happened after Wairau helped to precipitate the war in the far north. At any rate the following year (1844) Hone Heke, a Bay of Islands chief, feeling that British rule cramped his way of living, and out to make a name for himself, cut down the flagstaff at Kororareka as a symbol of defiance, and in March 1845, he attacked the guarded spot and the town, drove out the defenders, and sacked the place. Church property was respected. Working with Henry Williams on the beach that day, tending the wounded and getting them off to the ships, was George Augustus Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand. Selwyn, who had arrived in the colony in 1842, and was to stay until 1868, was one of the shining lights of our early history. A muscular Christian after Charles Kingsley’s heart, he was one of the greatest of missionary bishops. Zealous and indefatigable, with a crusader’s spirit in an athlete’s body, he travelled great distances through his diocese, including many hundreds of miles on foot. In ships that he navigated himself, he carried the Gospel to the Melanesian Islands. If Selwyn ever heard it he must have appreciated the story of a hard-bitten old salt who watched the bishop sailing a boat up the Auckland harbour against a strong wind. “ Look at him,” commented the admiring expert, “ It’s enough to make a man a bloody Christian !” Selwyn was a wise and valiant friend of the Maori; like Hadfield, he did not hesitate to champion what he was convinced were his rights, against public opinion. He was the architect of the Constitution of the Anglican Church in New Zealand.
The British, reinforced from Sydney, took the field against Hone Heke in the interior, and British infantry
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had their first experience of attacking Maori fortified positions. It was not a happy experience and the honours lay with Heke. Fortunately the tribes did not combine against us. Then, as so often in these wars, we had the help of friendly Maoris, and the name of one chief, Waka Nene, has a high and honourable place in our history. By the end of 1845 New Zealand was in a very bad way. The Treasury was empty; The Maoris were flushed with success; the settlers were despondent and embittered ; and British prestige was at its lowest ebb. Fitzßoy was recalled, and in his place there came at the end of the year, the most famous figure in our history, Captain George Grey. Grey was then only thirty-three, but he had distinguished himself in Australia, first as an explorer, and then as Governor of South Australia. A soldier by profession, distinguished in his military studies, Grey was a man of wide interests. What he observed on service in Ireland had given his politics a strong radical bent. He was interested in literature and art. His connection with New Zealand was to last for half a century, and he was to become Premier in a self-governing country where he began as a Crown Colony Governor. He was to endow libraries in two countries, to popularise Maori legends among Europeans, and to found the Liberal Party in New Zealand. At the end of a very long and crowded life, marked by mingled failure and success, he was laid to rest among Empire-builders in St. Paul’s. Grey was a baffling mixture. It is easy to recognise and applaud the man of action and the man of ideas, the soldier who acted swiftly, and the statesman who believed passionately in popular rights ; what is not so easy is to defend, account for and judge, is his disposition—his tortuous ways, his economy with truth (there are some who call him a plain liar), his impulsiveness and vindictiveness, and his habit of acting alone. Grey was a radical in ideas and an autocrat in temper.
Grey acted quickly and decisively against the rebel Maoris and tempered victory with moderation. Taking the field himself he captured the principal Maori strong-
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hold in the North and brought about such a peace that in subsequent wars in other parts of the country the Northern tribes gave no trouble. Grey then turned his attention to Wellington, where there had been increasing tension over land claims and Te Rangihaeata had moved from obstruction to raiding and killing of civilians. The Maoris, it is only fair to say, contended that the British began hostilities, and certainly there was mishandling on the European side. In 1846 there was fighting in the Hutt Valley between Maoris and British infantry and Wellington militia, in which service was compulsory. On the main Hutt Valley road you may see a memorial to the action known as Boulcott’s Farm. The scene then shifted to territory round Porirua harbour, north of Wellington, and Te Rangihaeata was eventually driven north and well away from settlement. Te Puni, the principal chief of Port Nicholson, stood by the British. Maori fought Maori; and Wiremu Kingi barred the way to possible reinforcements for Te Rangihaeata along the coast from the north. In 1847 there was fighting at the settlement of Wanganui, a struggling and somewhat disreputable outpost that was trying to establish itself on another of the Company’s dubious purchases. The settlers had to rely on the protection of stockades. Eventually the Maoris retired up the river and Grey made an agreement with their chiefs. This closed what may be described as the first volume of the wars with the Maori. The colony was to experience a dozen years of peace before the perennial land questions and other factors involved it in a more serious chain of conflicts. Grey put vigour into every department of government. He straightened out the finances, founded a real civil service, hastened the settling of land claims, encouraged education, completed the establishment of law courts, and strove to win the Maoris’ respect and affection. By understanding and helping them Grey made a strong appeal to the Maori. His knightly demeanour as well as his strength in action impressed them. He could humour their childishness and respect their intelligence, says Reeves.
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He learned their language and introduced their myths and traditions to generations of European readers. Perhaps the most serious mistake he made was in trying to Europeanise the Maori instead of governing him through his own institutions. Grey, however, had this great advantage over his predecessors. Ihe British Government came to see the folly of its parsimony and helped him freely with money and men.
Meanwhile the new settlers had plenty to think of besides war. Ihe first shiploads came to an entirely new land, where they had to start from scratch in building homes and communities. They camped on the beach in tents or raupo huts while houses were being built, and did much of their cooking in the open. At first the novelty ot everything, the birds and trees, abundance of sunshine, a summer Christmas, and the Maori, gave the adventure the flavour of a picnic. There was piquancy in the sight of aristocrats taking off their coats and working as labourers by the side of labourers. But this novelty wore off. Prospects were not so good as they had been painted ; they never are in a new colony. When the home came to be built, perhaps timber had to be pit-sawn. The housewife had to cook with a camp oven or on, an open fire. She would probably have to make her own soap and candles and resort to many shifts. Her loneliness might be extreme. One family that settled not very far from Wellington in the mid-forties was visited by only one white woman in ten years. If the New Zealand climate was excellent. New Zealand weather could be execrable. There was scarcely a road, ram made deep mud, and at two miles an hour on self-made tracks a journey by bullock dray was very tedious. It was a rich country, but nature had protected its treasures with heavy forest or thick scrub. And most important to many, where was the available land ? To-day it needs only half an eye to see that apart from its central position and its splendid harbour. Port Nicholson was a very unsuitable place for a settlement. In that ring of hills the Hutt Valley was the only substantial area of land suitable lor farming
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and it was heavily forested. At Nelson some two years elapsed before the Company was able to allocate rural land, and there, as in Wellington, there was much distress. Moreover it soon became apparent that agriculture, the activity on which the Wakefield theory of settlement was based, was going to be difficult. Land was not easy to bring under the plough, and where were the markets for its products ? There was some cropping, and besides the local market, Australia was a customer. Whale products were a substantial export in those early years. The settlements lived largely on the money brought in by colonists. The economic solution for New Zealand was found in sheep. All the pasturage needed was open or partly open country. Even before Hobson came New Zealand had exported wool. Now, looking beyond the restrictions of Port Nicholson, pastoralists took flocks to the hills facing Palliser Bay and the Wairarapa Valley. Marlborough in the South Island was invaded from Wellington and Nelson, and a start was made with sheep, in a small way, on the Canterbury Plains. In a few years the colony was exporting a substantial quantity of wool, and the foundations had been laid of an industry that was to place New Zealand fourth among the wool-producing countries of the world.
So, amid war and alarms of war, expectations unfulfilled and hope deferred, the little settlements progressed. The frontier line was slowly pushed further out; the towns grew ; churches, schools, banks, theatres and libraries were opened. In the unlit, undrained, mud-tracked little towns, inns were the chief places of resort, and the gentry, following English custom, voiced protests and celebrated occasions by dining in company and working through long toast lists. There were parties, public and private dinners, sports gatherings, regattas and race meetings. New Zealand society took on an English stamp from the outset. True, class distinctions melted a good deal in the sunshine of this new unfenced land, but the gentry naturally took the lead in public affairs and perhaps seldom dreamed that their class would ever lose it. In habits of life and ways of
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thought society was English, and what later came to be known as Victorian. The absorbing interest was politics, which were pursued with a ferocity and resort to personalities that almost shocks this much more decorous age. Then, and for many years afterwards, letters and papers from Home (the word by which most New Zealanders still habitually refer to the Motherland) were an event; and no wonder, when it is remembered that a voyage took three or four months, and twelve might be required to get an answer by mail. At sight of a ship in the bay an editor might drop his pen and row out to get precious files of the London press. Country dwellers had less material to weave into amusement, but it is astonishing what can be done with little when the heart is young. One pioneer records in his reminiscences that he spent “ many a happy evening ” dancing on a hard clay floor to the music of a comb and a piece of paper, with a tin milk-dish for percussion ; never at grander balls did he and his wife enjoy themselves more. In our much more comfortable age we are apt to think of pioneering as unrelieved hardship. The pioneers really had a lot of fun.
The end of the decade brought New Zealand two most important additions to its settlements. One was the Otago foundation in 1848, the other the planting of Canterbury in 1850. The New Zealand Company assisted in both enterprises. The idea of the Canterbury settlement originated with Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Otago province and Dunedin city were founded by Scottish Presbyterians who, for conscience sake, had seceded from the Established Church of Scotland and founded the Free Church. The minister of the settlement, the Rev. Thomas Burns, a nephew of the poet, gave up a comfortable living for his convictions. They were God-fearing men and women with a passion for good work and education. Canterbury was an Anglican settlement and that church is as characteristically English as the Presbyterian is Scottish. Both bands of pioneers attended special services before they sailed, but the Anglicans also held a ball. The Canter-
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bury Pilgrims of 1850 brought out their bishop with them (he did not stay long and was succeeded by a much more suitable man); called their city Christchurch (after the Oxford college) ; named many of their streets after Anglican dioceses ; planted streets and parks with English trees ; made their river Avon into something very pleasantly resembling Cambridge’s Cam; and set up a completely equipped Cathedral (as distinct from a cathedral church) in the very heart of the settlement. Otago’s capital received the old name of Edinburgh, Dunedin, and is not inappropriately called the Edinburgh of the South. Neither settlement realised its wish to confine membership to the elect—inevitably all the world broke in—but to-day there is something unmistakably Scottish in Dunedin and English in Christchurch. The principal monuments of these two companies of pioneers are the fine cities they founded— Dunedin at the head of its hill-walled bay and Christchurch sleeping amid its trees on the plains, with its background of snowy Alps—and the hundreds of miles of well-farmed lands, arable and pasture, stretching from sea to mountains. An invisible monument is the influence on the whole of New Zealand of these well-equipped communities planted in comparatively favourable conditions. When the adventurers of Otago and Canterbury arrived the government of the country was firmly established. They came to the half of New Zealand that carried only a small Maori population, developed (after the Wairau affair) no serious trouble over land, and was never to be disturbed by war. The nature of the countryside favoured comparatively quick settlement. In contrast with the great bush or thick scrub areas of the North, much of the eastern slope of the South Island was open country, easy ground for the plough and the flock. Forest was scanty ; this was tussock land, stretching from Otago right up to Marlborough. True it had a cold winter, and snow could be cruel to stock, but it was country where the sheep farmer could advance and establish himself with less labour than the pioneer in the North. The Canterbury plains, more than a hundred miles long by
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forty or so wide, were to become famous for their lambs and their wheat. That such large tracts of country were suitable for immediate sheep-raising was a fact of enormous economic importance to New Zealand. Pioneers made their way across the plains into the mountain valleys right up to the glaciers of the Alps. Soon there were sheep on a thousand hills. The Canterbury settlement was only nine years old when young Samuel Butler came to it from England to seek his fortune. He took up a sheep run in the high country (where he got the idea of “ Erewhon ”) and after four years was able to return with a competence. Standing outside the wars that shook the North Island in the middle of the century and greatly retarded its development, the Canterbury and Otago settlements were able to give all their energies to the development of their rich estate. In both communities were many men of education, ability and character. In 1869 Dunedin founded the first University institution, which, though affiliated with the University of New Zealand, is still called Otago University. Canterbury followed in 1873, but Auckland did not get its own college until 1883, and Wellington had to wait until 1897. For years the cultural influence of Dunedin and Christchurch was predominant in New Zealand. Dunedin in particular produced a remarkable list of statesmen, officials and professional men for service elsewhere. By reason of these advantages the South Island, in spite of its later start, passed the North in population and wealth, and in consequence it became stronger in political power.
That political power was soon to be exercised in a constitutional way. Men with the courage and enterprise necessary to bring them across the world to a new country were not content to be governed on Crown Colony lines. They had one very strong argument in the distance from the Motherland. How could a country be governed efficiently from London when it took a year or so to get an answer to despatches ? Before the planting of Otago and Canterbury self-government had become the foremost question among colonists. The gentry were accustomed to
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governing, and they stood in no awe of the Governor or the Colonial Office. Because he was believed to be opposed to self-government Grey became as unpopular as Hobson, and was attacked with the same violence. He certainly took a very unusual and courageous step for a Governor in postponing the operation of a Constitution conferred by an Act of the British Parliament. This was a way Grey had ; if he did not think his instructions from the other side of the world were wise he ignored them. In the end it was part of his undoing; he tried the patience of the Colonial Office too much and his employers had no further use for him. Grey disapproved of the Constitution of 1846 because he considered it unjust to the Maoris, in that it gave them no representation and infringed their land rights under the Treaty of Waitangi. In this he was supported by two of the wisest and most influential friends of the Maori, Bishop Selwyn and Chief Justice Martin. The Colonial Office took his objections most amicably, suspended the Act, and gave him authority to establish Legislative Councils for two provinces—New Ulster, from the North Cape to the middle of the North Island, and New Munster, the rest of the Colony. These Councils cansisted of officials and nominated members, but seeing that the New Ulster body was never summoned and the New Munster sat for only one short session, their history need not concern us. The move was a taste of blood to the agitators who demanded self-government. In 1851 the Wellington reformers called for an elective Upper House and universal male suffrage. The second demand was not granted for many years, and the Legislative Council, from the beginning of self-government to the present day, has been nominative. This period, however, was one of probation and preparation. Grey was advising London about a complete new Constitution, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield was helping at the other end. This was conferred by an Imperial Act of 1852. The constitution nominally came into force in January, 1853, but it was the middle of 1854 when the first National Parliament met in Auckland. That
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New Zealand should have achieved self-government in a dozen years was proof of the determination of the colonists and of a new spirit in Empire development. It is noteworthy that the Maori had the right to vote. True, his property system was such that few were qualified as voters, but that the Constitution placed him on equal terms with the European was very significant. Some years later he was given Members of Parliament of his own, and this method of representation is still in force.
The Constitution reserved several questions to the British Crown. With the exception of control of native affairs, these specific reservations, which were gradually removed, must have troubled colonists hardly at all. They wanted to get on with the job of developing their country, and for most practical purposes they now had power to do this. The franchise, confined of course to men, was liberal, but not universal. There was plural voting ; a qualified citizen could vote wherever he had property. Voting was open, as it was in England, and the colony, as well as the motherland, furnished examples of that curious infirmity of noble minds, objection to the secret ballot. Grey wanted the Legislative Council, the Upper House in the National Parliament, to be elected by members of the Provincial Councils. Had he got his way, the political history of the country might have been very different. The nominee Council has always been much weaker and less authoritative than the elected House of Representatives. In charge of each of six provinces were set up an elected Council and a Superintendent. The position of this Superintendent was like that of the President of the United States. He was in
most cases elected by the people. He combined the offices of provincial governor and premier. He was the chief executive officer of the province, and appointed a cabinet but did not generally sit in the Council. The provincial portion of the Constitution was put into operation before the national, which did not ease the inevitable conflict between the General Assembly and the Provincial Councils, but to many colonists this seemed natural. They were more
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interested in the government of their province than in the government of the nation. New Zealand was not a nation, but a collection of settlements, widely separated and jealous of each other. Transport difficulties as we have said, largely governed politics. In 1850 two prominent men, one of them a judge, took six days to travel in a Government vessel from Nelson to Wellington, a journey that now takes a few hours, and a few years later Otago members of the first National Parliament were over eight weeks getting to Auckland. When two young Richmonds, members of a family justly famous in New Zealand annals, arrived in New Zealand in 1851, they walked from Auckland to Taranaki, and it took them twenty-six days. At this stage in the country’s history, local government with wide powers was absolutely essential to progress. The Provincial Councils managed Crown lands, police, immigration, and roads and bridges. In the eyes of settlers the last responsibility was probably the most important. Unfortunately the provinces were not equal in opportunity or means. The South Island provinces, relatively unhampered by forests and not troubled by difficulties with the Maoris, had a much larger land revenue. Certain provinces had to be continually asking the National Treasury for help. Moreover, it became easy to form new provinces : all that was required was a petition by a threefourths majority of electors. Marlborough landowners, to further their own interests, set up house for themselves, and a thousand people in Hawke’s Bay, cut off from their provincial capital Wellington, did the same. A large number of well-educated capable men were elected to both the National and Provincial Parliaments. Provincial superintendents could, and did, sit in the General Assembly. This added to the National Parliament’s wisdom, but it heightened the clash between national and provincial interests, for the superintendents followed a divided duty. The Provincial Councils, looking after the interests of a mere handful of people, copied carefully the procedure of the General Assembly and of its august parent at West-
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minster. They had their maces and their ministerial crises, and as the population of the country grew an increasing number of people regarded such things, in the circumstances, as comic and useless. In the National Parliament there were for a long while no clear party divisions such as have marked our politics for many years past. Majorities grouped round personalities. In the first twenty years of responsible government (which began in 1856) there were fifteen ministries ; in the second twenty years twelve ; in the third twenty years eight. “ One serviceably industrious lawyer, Mr. Henry Sewell,” says Reeves, “ was something or other in nine different ministries between 1854 and 1872.” The provincial period—lBs3 to 1876—was one of great provincial activity in politics, and intense feeling between provinces and between provinces and National Government, with increasing pressure on the Colonial Treasury. In the end, as we shall see, the provincial system broke down from its own complexity and lack of uniformity, and selfishness and stupidity among its parts. But it was a period of solid achievement by provincial governments. The work of breaking in the country for the pioneer and providing the amenities of civilisation went on steadily. Wellington built 837 miles of roads and 371 bridges. The four main provinces began to build railways. Canterbury linked itself with Westland by a mountain road which for skilful engineering and beauty of scenery became famous abroad. What was much more striking, this Canterbury society of only 9,000 souls, to get railway access to its port, pierced the Port Hills with a tunnel a mile and three-quarters long at a cost of £240,000, a piece of foresight and courage which deserves to live in pioneering anjials,* Christ’s College in Christchurch, Nelson College in Nelson, and Otago Boys’ High School and Otago University in Dunedin, were among provincial foundations. Those provincial communities, so isolated and so pre-
*The population of the province was 9000 when the first contract was let, and 16,000 when work began in earnest.
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occupied with their own affairs, were building themselves into the fabric of a nation.
Long before the provincial political system came to an end there were two developments of first-rate national importance. One was the discovery of gold, the other the Maori Wars of 1860 to 1872. Gold was found in payable quantities in Otago in 1861. The discoverer got £25 worth of alluvial gold for ten hours work and a mighty rush set in. This treeless and inhospitable country was a poor man’s field in the working, for he might win gold by washing dirt with the most primitive gear, but it was no poor man’s country when as much as £l2O a ton was charged for cartage of food from Dunedin. However, here, as in so many other countries, the lure of gold made men shoulder their swags cheerfully and tramp off into the wilderness. Diggers poured in from near and far. Half of Dunedin, it is said, set out for the diggings, and the influx from Australia rose to a thousand a day. Returns from the Otago “ dirt ” justified this rush. The weekly winnings soon grew to 10,000 ounces, and in 1863 the province exported £2,000,000 worth of gold. Before the discovery there were 12,000 persons in Otago, but in 1863 there were 79,000. In 1865 the centre of excitement moved to Westland, that narrow strip between the Southern Alps and the Tasman, a land of heavy bush, roaring rivers, copious rain, and surfbeaten shore. This wild territory had been visited by few white men and the Maori population was tiny. California, one imagines, was much more hospitable to the gold-seeker. But within a few months 30,000 diggers who had crossed the Alps or landed in dangerous harbours, were searching the beaches and valleys of Westland. This rush to the coast produced a particularly colourful chapter of New Zealand history. The coast was dotted with towns, first of canvas, then of wood. Liquor flowed plentifully, flour might be £l5O a ton and candles a shilling apiece. Dancing girls were imported in batches from Australia. It was a wild, free, gay, reckless life in keeping with the dangers of
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bush and river and the exciting gamble of gold-seeking, but not a lawless one. Reeves remarks that “ New Zealand diggers did not use revolvers with the playful frequency of the Californians of Mr. Bret Harte.” The reference is a reminder that though the Westland diggings were at least as romantic as the Californian, they still await their novelist. What mattered, however, was that the gold was there. Diggers poured it out to buyers by the pannikin, and over two millions came from the Coast in 1866. These discoveries increased the population of New Zealand, added to its wealth, and helped to make the South Island the stronger half of the colony. The addition to the national wealth came at a particularly opportune time, for when Gabriel Read opened the door to the treasure house, the colony was shouldering the expense of the first of a series of wars with the Maori that were not to end until well into the next decade.
Of these wars it may be said that they resolved problems raised by the Treaty of Waitangi. The process was the darkest chapter in our internal history, but the results were by no means wholly tragic. Had the Europeans been wiser the conflict might have been avoided, but conditions were such that a high degree of statesmanship and forbearance (which really was the same thing) on both sides, was required, and this standard was not quite reached. That governments blundered was always asserted by many, and is now accepted by most, if not all. It is creditable to New Zealand that there have always been outspoken champions of the Maori cause. Selwyn was hooted in the streets of
New Plymouth for speaking his mind about it. Perhaps the question now is whether the case for the Maori has not been pushed a little too far, and history would not be better served if there were a fuller realisation of the extraordinary difficulties that beset the authorities. The basic trouble was the land. But in a sense the land was only a symbol. What many Maoris saw behind the settlers’ desire for land was a tide of European settlement that threatened
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to swamp them and their way of life. Waitangi had settled a principle; the implementing of that principle proved to be desperately difficult. The Maori had the right to withhold his land. What, then, was the position of settlers who saw land unused (in the European sense) but could not get it even though some Maoris wished to sell ? This is what happened in Taranaki. Settlement was confined to a narrow strip and beyond this was plenty of land, for which settlers clamoured. The clash came over what is known in history as the Waitara blunder. A certain chief offered to the Government land near New Plymouth, and the Government, satisfied that he had the right to sell, accepted the offer. Wiremu Kingi, who had been a protector of the Europeans at Wellington, but had returned to his ancestral lands in Taranaki, vetoed the sale. The Government, convinced that they were right, sent surveyors to delimit the block, and, when the Maoris obstructed them, called in the military. Thus the first Taranaki War began. The men responsible for the assertion of authority at Waitara were honest. There never was a more con-
scientious public servant than C. W. Richmond (afterwards Mr. Justice Richmond), the Minister for Native Affairs at the, time, or one of greater integrity. Sir Thomas Gore Browne, the Governor, with whom the ultimate responsibility lay, was also a high-minded man with a strict sense of duty, but he lacked knowledge of Maori law and the Maori mind, and his authority with the Maori was not nearly so high as Grey’s had been. It came out later that the selling chief had deliberately offered the land to revenge himself on Wiremu Kingi by getting him into trouble. In the eyes of the Maori there and elsewhere Wiremu Kingi had the right of veto. The Native Land Court did not then exist to settle titles by expert knowledge and judicial process. Ultimately the Government acknowledged their mistake by withdrawing the land from settlement, but by then much blood had been shed. Once fighting began the question of asserting the Queen’s authority came to the
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front. Besides, the killing of settlers by Maoris enraged European opinion.*
If the first Taranaki war had not broken out, there might have been no Waikato war, no second Taranaki war, no Hauhau rebellion, in short, no wars at all, for undoubtedly there was a chain of events. But if there had been no conflict as the result of the Waitara purchase, the fundamental differences between Maori and pakeha would still have had to be settled. These differences lay deep. Before Waitara, the situation in Taranaki had become well-nigh intolerable. Some Maoris were willing to sell. Other Maoris formed a league against selling, and assaulted and killed members of the other party. Such acts of lawlessness took place even within the whites’ settlement. These were clearly acts against the Queen’s sovereignty, but despite Grey’s declaration years before that he would not permit Maori to injure Maori, the Government did not assert that sovereignty. The Queen’s writ did not run. The Government was afraid lest stern measures should bring about a war for which their resources were not adequate. Supposing all or most of the Maoris rose, what would be the position of the white settlements ? Then there was the setting up of a Maori king in the Waikato. The connection between the Waikato and Taranaki was close. The war in Taranaki made the Waikato Maoris still more determined on having their king, and some of their warriors went to help the Taranaki Maoris in their battles against the European. There were various elements in the King movement. There were braves thirsting for battle
* Valuable new material from the early days of Taranaki has recently been made available by Miss Mary Richmond and Miss Emily Richmond, of Wellington, daughters of C. W. Richmond. These arc Atkinson-Richmond letters, written in England and New Zealand by members of these historic families. They throw a most interesting light on the social, economic, and political life of the time. They bring out the difficulties of the New Zealand Government and the Taranaki community, and the honesty of the Government’s intentions. A Royal Commission appointed in 1926 to consider certain Maori grievances, presided over by Sir William (Mr. justice) Sim, went into the Waitara affair and found that the Government acted wrongly.
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against the white men. There were statesmen seeking peace but wishing to set up a Maori authority that would hold the people together and preserve their institutions against European pressure. Under the new Constitution the Maori had little voting power, and special representation in Parliament had not yet been granted him. There was an up surge of Maori nationalism. “ I love New Zealand !” cried one old chief, quoted by Mr. James Cowan in his history of the Maori wars. “ Let us have order, so that we
may increase like the white man. Why should we disappear from the land ? Let us have a king, for with a king there will be peace among us.” The Government had been asked to set up Maori local governments but the half-hearted response encouraged the move for independence. So the Waikato tribes set up their king and hoisted their flag, and the movement, the meetings of which were at first attended by many whites, became more and more anti-British. The situation was not without its humour. The Kingites published a newspaper “ The War Bird.” John Gorst, afterwards Sir John, and a prominent figure in English politics, was sent to the Waikato as a magistrate and civilising agent. He set up a rival paper called “ The Lonely Lark on the House-top.” Incensed by the song of this lark, the war like wing of the Kingites raided the printing office and seized the plant, and eventually Gorst had to leave.
In 1861 an alarmed Colonial Office, pacific in policy, and acting as the guardian of the Maoris, sent Grey back to New Zealand to pull things together. It has been said that if Grey had been Governor in 1860 there would have been no Taranaki war. This is quite likely, but in his second governorship Grey found himself working in conditions very different from those of his first term. He now had to work with a Parliament and he was at his best when he worked alone. There was trouble over responsibility for native affairs. The Colonial Office wanted New Zealand to take it over, but Ministers demurred, and London had to insist. Moreover, the whole situation was worse. There was now something like a national movement among
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Maoris, which there had never been before. Grey worked hard for peace in Taranaki and the Waikato, but he also had to prepare for war. He had to consider the possibility of a Waikato descent on Auckland. Grey became convinced that the Waitara purchase was an injustice to Wi Kingi, and recommended that it be abandoned. Unfortunately another block (to which the Government’s title was sound) was occupied before the Government avowed its mistake, the occupation was regarded by the Maoris as a declaration of war, and the truce in Taranaki, which had lasted since March, 1861, was broken in May, 1863. Grey was then deeply concerned about the Waikato. He tried conciliation, but offers which earlier might have brought peace, were now considered insufficient. The King party wanted to keep their king and their flag, but to this Grey would not agree. The Kingites had their plans for an attack on Auckland. Grey decided that attack was the best defence, so a British force moved into Kingite territory, and on July 17th, 1863, the Waikato war began with an engagement near the present town of Mercer. This was the most considerable of the Maori wars, and the one in which the issue of sovereignty was most clearly defined.
Once the Government had decided to make itself master in New Zealand, the end of the conflict was certain, but we may ask why this series of wars lasted so long. The Government had some ten thousand British troops, local militia and volunteers, units recruited in Australia under promise of land grants, and Maori auxiliaries. Grey estimated that the Maoris never had more than two thousand men in the field at one time. Save in one respect, that the Maori’s double-barrelled gun gave him two shots to the soldier’s one, the British were better armed. They had artillery to breach the Maori palisades. By no means all the Maori tribes came in against the Government. There was no war north of Auckland, and south of a line drawn from Wanganui to Napier. The South Island was untroubled. Even within the war territory there were actively loyal tribes, like the Arawas of Rotorua. The Maori’s tribal
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organisation prevented him from combining to make the best use of his strength ; his tactics were better than his strategy. Why, then, did it take the British so long to clear away all opposition ? First, because geography is always a factor in history. The British had to campaign in a country where there were no roads outside the settlements (save those made by troops), a country of mountain, river, forest, scrub, and swamp. In the last few years much of the campaigning was done in the remote and extremely difficult Urewera territory, a tumble of steep-sided forested hills. Second, the Maori was a first-class fighting man. Highly courageous, strong, athletic, as enduring as an American Indian, a master of bush-craft and skilled in military engineering, he was formidable with a gun behind entrenchments as well as in hand-to-hand combat, longhandled tomahawk against bayonet. Again and again these weapons clashed as European and Maori met in breach or trench. These were largely wars of position. Both sides dug themselves in, and Maori as well as European hurled himself against well-defended entrenchments. Wellington’s men in the breach at Badajoz did not display finer and more sustained courage than the Maoris who charged the earthworks at Huirangi, when the ditch was left full of their dead and wounded. The Maori sited and built his fortifications very skilfully, and the British constructed many a redoubt and blockhouse. The Maori was the British soldier’s inferior in collective discipline, though he withstood bombardment with admirable fortitude. He was much the Briton’s superior in mobility and knowledge of the country. Time after time he slipped out of reach of his heavy-footed opponent, and of course he was much more at home in the bush. Third, the British made mistakes. Their methods were sometimes too cautious. Cameron, one of the British generals, was ridiculed on this account by Maori as well as European, but he and some of his officers came to sympathise with the Maori, and their heart was not in their work. His successor Chute showed by his resolution and speed in driving through the
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Taranaki forest that a regular soldier could overcome New Zealand conditions. Fourth, the large scale confiscation of Maori lands by the Government caused bitterness and helped to prolong the struggle. Besides wishing to punish the rebels, the Government wanted land for settlers, mili-
tary and civilian. Apart from the possible unwisdom of so gravely penalising hostile Maoris, with whom the whites would some day have to live in peace, confiscation of whole districts did not always clearly distinguish between foe and friend.
Lastly there developed out of the Taranaki wars a religious fanaticism desperate and infectious, and it added several years to the struggle. This was the Pai-marire faith, held by those known in New Zealand history as Hauhaus. Maori people had a strong religious sense, and many a Maori had ardently embraced Christianity. There is nothing so poignant in the story of these wars as the examples of Christian faith among Maoris in battle against the race who brought this faith to them. When the British shells began to fall into the Maori position at the Gate Pa, the defenders were at morning service. As the attackers at Huirangi desperately tried to scale the escarpment, a Maori catechist in the ditch recited Christian prayers, and his blood-stained prayer-book was found on his body. After this fight a British officer gave water to a young Maori warrior who had been shot through the lungs. Lying in the white man’s arms, with his last breath the Maori spoke words from the Lord’s Prayer—” Forgive us our trespasses.” The Pai-marire or Flauhau religion gave this attachment to Christianity a twist back into paganism and combined it with fiery patriotism. The new faith was a blend of ancient priestcraft, of beliefs in spells and magic incantations, with (in Mr. Cowan’s words) “ smatterings of English knowledge and English phrases and perverted fragments of Church services.” The founder of the faith, a man of peace (“ Paimarire ” meant “ good and peaceful ”) was a close student of the Bible. The new religion developed horrible practices of blasphemy and mutilation. Heads of British
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soldiers were cut off and sent round the tribes like a fiery cross, and the practice of eating the hearts of enemies was revived. It was the Hauhaus who shed the first missionary blood. The new faith ran like a fire in the fern and engendered a furious fanaticism of religion and race. It began in the Taranaki district and spread to Wanganui, the Bay of Plenty, and the East Coast. The stamping out process was long and arduous. Then in these troubles on the East Coast the authorities made a blunder that cost them dear. They deported to the Chatham Islands, without trial, a Maori named Te Kooti Rikirangi. He had fought on the Government side, but was suspected of treason and generally regarded as an undesirable. Te Kooti protested his innocence and went into captivity nursing an undying grudge. At the Chathams he made himself leader of the prisoners, seized a schooner, and returned to New Zealand, where he was quickly but unsuccessfully brought to action. He took his revenge by descending on the Gisborne settlement and killing thirty-three Europeans and thirty-seven Maoris. Only a few of the victims were military men, and there were a number of women and children. Homesteads were looted and burned. This was in 1868. For four years Te Kooti led the Government forces a dance in the country between the Bay of Plenty, Hawkes Bay and Taupo. He had a genius for guerilla warfare and was never caught. In the end he took refuge in the King Country, below the military frontier in the Waikato, where the defeated Kingites had been left unmolested, and where for some years it was death for a European to penetrate. Eventually Te Kooti was pardoned. He was prophet as well as soldier, and the church he founded became a recognised establishment, and still has adherents.
These Maori wars were very small affairs compared with the conflicts between nations that this generation has known. There were many actions. In his official history Mr. Cowan lists more than 160 principal engagements and skirmishes between 1860 and 1872. But in all the New
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Zealand wars, from 1845 onwards, the British losses, including friendly Maoris, were only 736 killed and 1014 wounded, to which have to be added a few settlers. Losses like this might be incurred in an hour or two in present-day warfare. For some time the brunt of the fighting, especially in the Waikato, was borne by the red-coats of the British Army. There are British regiments that bear “ New Zealand ” on their colours, and units of the New Zealand Army have appropriately been affiliated with them. Some of the officers and men of British regiments settled in New Zealand, and their descendants fought on Gallipoli, in France and in Libya. Their blood is in our people, and their record is part of our national story. As the war progressed, New Zealand developed her own military strength. Soldier-settlers like Harry Atkinson, who was afterwards four times Premier of New Zealand, became highly proficient in the art of war. They were tough and resourceful and the Maori’s equal in the bush. In the last years of the wars the regulars were withdrawn from the field, and the business of hunting down the Hauhaus was left to colonial contingents and Maori auxiliaries, led by white and Maori officers. Often the skill and endurance of European and Maori soldiers were stretched to the limit by the conditions of campaigning. Mr. Cowan notes a close resemblance between our frontier warfare and that of British North America. “ There was the same dual combat with wild nature and with untamed man ; there was the necessity in each land for soldierly skill ; the same display of all grades of human courage ; much of the same tale of raid and foray, siege, trail-hunting and ambuscade.” This country produced frontiersmen every bit as hardy and daring and colourful as the backwoods of North America. Yet generation after generation of New Zealand boys have fed with shining eyes on stories of European and Indian scouts and have scarcely realised that these men have had prototypes in his own land—Von Tempsky, prince of Forest Rangers ; Gilbert Mair and his tireless Arawas ; Ropata, fighting chief of Ngati-Porou ; Te Keepa Rangi-
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hiwinui (Kemp), who led the Wanganui contingent; Porter, Preece, Large, and many a brave sharp-eyed subordinate hardened to steel by the rigours of campaigning in country as wild as some of its weather. Here is one of many stories. In the fastnesses of the Urewera (the narrative is Mr. Cowan’s) during the chase of Te Kooti, one of Porter’s scouts climbs a tree and reports smoke a few miles away. They take their bearings and set out through the bush, scouting carefully, to surround the rebel camp. They get there at dark and crouch in the cold bush all night, to attack at dawn. Just before the time for the assault a gun is fired prematurely, and Te Kooti awakens and instantly dives through the wall of his hut and escapes, leaving many of his men to be killed or captured. Next day the victors are snowed in. There are numbers of such stories, telling of courage, endurance, resource, unceasing skill in the bush, and chivalry mixed with the savageness of war. In years to come Mr. Cowan’s volumes, so rich in human interest as well as in military facts, will be a quarry for a long line of romances.
The wars, of course, caused much loss and suffering. In the New Plymouth settlement the work of years on numbers of farms was destroyed. The Waikato Maoris, who grew wheat and ground their own flour, lost their richest plantations. The colony was burdened with a heavy war debt. When peace came settlement on the war frontiers was naturally retarded. The beaten Maori was inclined to be dispirited. He had sampled European civilisation and it had used him ill. The Church lost some of its hold on the people. There was a widespread belief that the Maori was doomed. His position, however, was not as hopeless as it seemed. He had been defeated but not crushed and subjugated. He had put up a great fight against odds ; he knew it and the Europeans knew it. His opponents in the field knew it best. They paid many tributes to his courage and endurance. During a pursuit an officer was obliged to shoot a Maori who kept levelling a gun. It was found afterwards that the gun was not loaded. “ I was terribly
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grieved—we all were—to think we had killed so brave a man.” After the wars there was much fraternising between former enemies. Some Europeans might clamour for the Maori s land and be horrified at his occasional excesses, but in their hearts they knew he was a man worthy of their respect. It is significant that the one engagement in the Maori wars that is known to all New Zealanders is remembered because it sheds lustre on the Maori. At Orakau, in the Waikato, a Maori force, weakly entrenched and tortured by thirst, was in a hopeless position. To a summons to surrender the Maori replied in words that ring down our history ; “We shall fight on for ever and ever !” When it was suggested that the women should leave, the reply was that the women would die with the men. The defeated Maori could look back on such deeds. The tribes who fought for the British had also something to remember. Numbers of tribes had not been in the wars at all. Save in land confiscation the Maori was not penalised for his rebellion. He retained representation in Parliament; he could still appeal to the Treaty of Waitangi; and he had the Native Land Court to protect his interests. Governments were wise enough to handle him gently (in the main) and let time heal wounds. No attempt was made to dispute by force the life-and-death line drawn in the Waikato, but after a few years the King Country was opened peacefully to the white man. The Waikato tribes retained their king. The Maori wars were a tragedy, but they had a credit side. They helped to weld two peoples into a nation. They taught the European a truth to which some Europeans in the early days had been extraordinarily blind, that the Maori was a great warrior. They taught the Maori that the British red coat was as brave as himself, and that there were white scouts who could hold their own with the best Maori in the bush. They added to our history chapters of martial endeavour and adventure, endurance and self-sacrifice ; the savageness of war was shot through with the light of chivalry and mutual respect. It was a struggle in which not so much right and wrong, as right
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and right, contended. The Maori has not wrapped his blanket round him and pined away. He is increasing in numbers, though his blood is being diluted. Enlightened measures to adapt him to European ways without destroying his own culture have had good results. In the first world war the Maori fought on European battlefields by the side of his European brother. All the world knows what he has done in this war, in Greece, Crete, Africa and Italy. Is it too much to think that his strong arm has been strengthened there by memories of Huirangi and Orakau, of the Gate Pa and the long trail after Te Kooti ? The period of the wars was the most unhappy chapter in the history of New Zealand’s relations with the Motherland. It was a time of painful adjustment, misunderstandings, lack of sympathy, and mutual recrimination. The colonists regarded the British Government as a hardhearted parent who would not help a young son struggling with difficulties at the other end of the world. The British Government thought these difficulties were largely of the son’s own making; the son retorted that they arose from the father’s policy. London, always pacific, deprecated the use of so many British troops, and considered the colony should do more in its own defence. New Zealanders complained that the British troops were ineffective. Called on to pay so much a head for their maintenance, they chafed at the slowness of some of their operations. The Governor was in a very difficult position. He had control of the troops, but was dependent on his Ministers for the money to pay for war. It took some time to settle exactly where the responsibility for native affairs lay. Grey and General Cameron quarrelled. Once, when Cameron refused to attack a Maori position, Grey took over and captured the place with a loss of one man. Cameron not only condemned the war policy, but sent his views to the War Office. Grey’s predecessor had permitted himself to say, in a despatch to London, that Europeans coveted the Maori’s lands, and were determined to get them by fair means or foul. Both Grey and the Colonial Office thought the con-
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fiscation of lands excessive, and the original proposals were drastically reduced. In England the Aborigines Protection Society tried to stop the war. In New Zealand there were those who urged that self-government should be suspended. What is most surprising to later generations reared in an atmosphere of almost unquestioned Imperialism, is the bitterness felt in those times towards the Mother Country. We must bear in mind that the new Imperialism had not yet been born. In 1870 the questions of independence and neutrality were actually brought forward in the New Zealand Parliament. Official circles in Britain were mostly lukewarm towards the colonies, and there and overseas it was taken for granted by many that separation was inevitable. The mounting fire of interest in the Empire, which marked the last twenty years of Victoria’s reign—the age of Kipling and Chamberlain-had hardly been lit. Some resentful New Zealand colonists talked of separation and turned their eyes to the United States. The Governor noted this attitude in 1869. We may feel sure it would not have stood thq test of reality, but as a sign of the times it was significant. Fortunately this period of stress was short. New Zealand adopted a policy of self-reliance in dealing with the Maori. Grey, who was replaced by the Colonial Office in 1867 and not employed again, was the last of the executive governors. Henceforward, to an increasing extent. New Zealand was left to manage her domestic affairs. When, in the early nineties, the Governor demurred to the number of gentlemen the Premier proposed to call to the Legislative Council, John Ballance took his stand on the constitutional principle that the Governor was bound to take the advice of his Ministers, and the Colonial Office supported him. The last British troops left New Zealand in 1870, and the last shots in the Maori wars were fired on February 14th, 1872. That nothing untoward followed the departure helped to improve relations between the colony and London, and by 1872 New Zealanders had something new and startling to think about.
f>4
CHAPTER 111
YOUTH
But what is history? So I looked at the sacred fields of harvest Consecrated by the labour of man and the blessing of heaven, • And strove to see their story.
-philip carrincton, Rangiora
This was the public works policy of Julius Vogel. There is some resemblance between Vogel’s career in New Zealand and Disraeli’s in Britain. Both were garish exotic birds in a sober-suited society. Disraeli, a Jew whose head teemed with ideas, made himself indispensable to a political party that was founded on caste and distrusted intellect. Julius Vogel, a Jewish immigrant from England by way of the Australian goldfields, became a leader among the colony’s governing class of landowners, lawyers, and business men—the oligarchy, as Reeves calls them. These men were all, or nearly all, transplanted from the Homeland. Socially and politically they were conventional. Vogel was not. He was sanguine, brilliant, original, daring, even dazzling. He gave New Zealand the State Life Insurance Office, its convenient fand transfer system, the San Francisco mail service and the submarine cable to Australia, and the Public Trust Office ; opened the way to colonial tariff reciprocity ; improved New Zealand’s position on the London money market; and tried so hard to extend British power in the Pacific that he made himself a nuisance to the Colonial Office. Vogel had a strong literary bent. He was a journalist by profession, and wrote a novel, Anno Domini 2000, in which he foreshadowed aviation. But it is by his public works policy that Vogel is best remembered in New Zealand. Borrowing for public works was not new ; the provinces had debts of several
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millions. But there were only forty-six miles of railway in the whole country, and these were in three gauges. What Vogel proposed was that the whole country should take a great leap forward. He would borrow ten millions, bring in a host of immigrants, and cover the country with railways, roads, and telegraphs. Seeing that the colony had only a quarter of a million people, and was still saddled with war, the plan staggered many New Zealanders. Vogel got his way, with limitations, and his policy changed the face of New Zealand. Had he been able to impose the whole body of his ideas on New Zealand—rapid construction of trunk lines, linking north and south, the creation of a great Crown endowment from the lands through which the railways would pass, and the establishment of a nonpolitical Board of Works—the effect would have been still more profound. Provincial interests were too strong for him, especially when he tried to lay hands on their most sacred possession, the land, and he had to abandon what he held to be an essential part of his scheme, financing of railways by land betterment. The provinces, however, paid the highest price for their parochialism; they were abolished in 1876. Disgusted with the short-sightedness and selfishness of the provinces, and their pressure on him for money, Vogel, from being a provincialist, quickly became an abolitionist. Besides, people were pouring in from Britain —in the 1871-1880 period 100,000 State-aided immigrants were introduced—and to many of these newcomers provincial government was absurd. Communication was improving by sea and land, barriers were being broken down, and a national spirit was beginning to grow. Vogel’s own public works policy, a plan for national development, at once symbolised and implemented the new spirit. So, after a bitter struggle, in which Grey came out of his retirement in his island home at Kawau, near Auckland, to lead the defence of his beloved provinces, provincial government went, and county and municipal government took its place. This had several important effects. It concentrated political interest in the National Parliament. It removed
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to that arena the great land question, agitations about development, tenure and aggregation, which were to stir the political world for decades. It led to centralisation of business and influence in the capital, which a better organised system of local government might have checked. Wellington had become the capital in 1865. The provinces had clamoured for money from the central government. Counties and municipalities did the same. The State did not gain directly from the rise in land values caused by railway building (as Vogel had thought it should) and the public works fund, though it conferred immense benefits on New Zealand, grew into a gigantic plum-tree for sweetening the constituencies. Every district agitated for roads and bridges and railways, and the “ roads-and-bridges member ” became a conspicuous figure on the political landscape. Deputations to Ministers developed into an industry and a pastime. Trunk line construction was delayed while branch lines were built as a result of local pressure. Vogel put railway connection between Auckland and Wellington in the forefront of his programme, and the fact that the route presented exceptional engineering difficulties was by no means a sufficient explanation of the thirty-five years that passed before the first train ran through. A whole twelve months’ work in many places might not add anything to “ open lines,” and what the country lost in this dissipation of effort and in the building of political railways, cannot be computed, but it must have run into millions.
History, however, is far from being a record of only the mistakes and follies of mankind. Anyone can see with half an eye that in those earlier years and later many persons, from statesmen to navvies, must have done a good job of work. The results of these labours are seen in laws, and in the more visible form of railways, bridges, roads, and other kinds of public works, schools and hospitals, in the growth of towns and cities, and in a smiling countryside. The wonder indeed is that so much has been done in so short a time, and by (and for) so few. The seventies is a con-
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venient stopping place for a look round at the work of building New Zealand. For one thing, public works were woven into the story of pioneering. While European fought Maori, the work of nation-making had gone on, the work that is so finely described in the poem by Philip Carrington of Christchurch, an extract from which stands at the head of this chapter.
This is the high procession that I saw
And would love to draw)
Wind round the paddocks by the gorse fence edge,
Blessing the boundary hedge.
And consecrating it with sweat and blood.
Who made that poplar grove.
And drew those lines of oak.
That stiffly hide the little house of wood,
Whose heartfire dimly smoke.
A cloudy blue?
Settlement was pushed out and out, and while families waited for roads and railways and telegraphs, they made shift with what was to hand. The settlers who came in during the seventies found a more comfortable land, but their lot was often hard enough. They came in larger and faster ships. This was the short heyday of the clipper, the sailing ship of a thousand tons or more, which might make the run across the world in under three months. Twenty years later anyone who chose sail for this long voyage was a curiosity. As in the forties, all classes came, from the gentry in the poop cabins with their books and plate and pictures, to navvies engaged for the building of Vogel’s railways. The Government’s emigration agents went beyond Britain to the Continent, and some of the best settlers this country has ever had were the Danes, Norwegians and Swedes who cleared the forest at Palmertson North and founded settlements in Hawkes Bay and the Wairarapa. Settlers pitched their tents and built their homes in all sorts of places, good and bad. It is again important to remember the lie of the land in New Zealand, and to note the difficulties in the way of pushing out settlement methodically and with a proper eye to communications. In no young country does land conquest proceed on the lines of an advancing army, at any rate an armv as we
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knew it before the days of tank thrusts and infiltration. There is never a regular line, consolidated step by step, and linked securely to its base. There are always adventurers who plunge ahead of the main body and are liable to find themselves isolated. In some parts of New Zealand, notably the Canterbury Plains, there was a somewhat regular advance, but irregularity was the general rule. There were several reasons for this. Mountains, forests, swamps, and blocks of Maori land interposed barriers between areas of suitable country. Long stretches of coast lacked good harbours. The earliest organised immigration had been directed from Britain at certain localities, and the provinces had power to make their own arrangements. As a result of all this there was no national plan of settlement designed to make the best use of the best land. There is not nearly so much really first class land in New Zealand as is widely believed. There is a great deal of fairly good land and poor land. Much poor land was settled in the days when markets were uncertain and fertilisers were not in common use, and it must have sorely tried many hearts. Settlements were planted here, there and everywhere, sometimes with scant regard to quality of land and access. Perhaps the most extraordinary case was the dumping of a colony of foreigners in Martin’s Bay, in the far south of Westland, a spot which has become reasonably accessible only in the last few years. So far was this place from being an Eldorado that money was actually collected by their compatriots in Europe for the succour of these unfortunates. Some of the settlers in North Auckland nearly starved. The Bohemian settlers at Puhoi perhaps touched the lowest depths of privation. One family lived for a while on five shillings a month. The wife, who was nursing a child at the time, had nothing but boiled nikau palm for two or three weeks. The settlement could not afford tea, so they used a native plant as a substitute, and for sugar, wild honey. It was ten years before the first horse appeared. The men used to carry produce on their backs to Auckland, thirty miles awav, sell it in the streets, and walk back.
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Three difficulties faced the pioneers of those days. The first was Nature, and the second and third, which may be bracketed, were isolation and lack of markets. We are so accustomed to sing the praises of this land of ours, that we are apt to forget it can be a harsh companion. The New Zealand bush takes a good deal of felling, burning and stumping before the clean paddock is achieved. What is called secondary bush is apt to come up viciously in such country, and fern and manuka land brought under the plough is quickly attacked by the original inhabitants. Plentiful rain means mud on unmetalled roads, and in the shade of the bush mud dries slowly. Many districts had no road metal to hand, and little money to put it on the roads. Mud has been a strong factor in the shaping of New Zealand life. It has tried many hearts and broken some. It has cost members of Parliament their seats and swayed Governments. It has marooned settlers in the winter, and levied a toll on health and lives. Even well into this century, and possibly today, two miles an hour might be as fast as a settler could travel behind horses on an unmetalled road. Add to all this that New Zealand is a land of rivers, many of them swift and treacherous, and one can realise the great importance of public works. It is easy to sneer at the “ roads and bridges member,” but to thousands of settlers roads and bridges have been the first things needed. They meant access, and at times they meant the difference between life and death. So if some farmers have tended to judge governments by what they are prepared to do to improve transport, rather than by their policy in higher spheres, let us bear in mind backblock conditions. In the view of these New Zealanders there are few higher spheres.
The surveyor, the road engineer, and the railway engineer, with their chainmen and navvies, are among the forgotten builders of New Zealand. Surveyors have been the advance guard of settlement, and their life in the field has often been arduous. At one time, to the rigours of work in the bush, far away from a base, there was added
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the possibility of trouble from the Maori. If one learns from difficulties. New Zealand should be a civil engineer’s paradise. Tours by rail or road show that in this up-on-end land of ours cuttings, curves, gradients, bridges, viaducts and tunnels abound. A Chief Engineer of the Public Works Department has said that New Zealand presents every difficulty in railway construction. Nor is it an easy country for railway management. There are many branch lines, and few points naturally fitted to be great focal junctions. Critics of our railways, many of whom come from countries where conditions are very different, might consider this fact, that the Limited Express between Wellington and Auckland, using a narrow gauge line and traversing a long stretch of high country at elevations rising to nearly three thousand feet, covers 426 miles in a little more than fourteen hours. Like the New Zealand farmer, road and railway engineers learned their job in a hard school, which developed initiative and resource, and it is no wonder that men trained in these professions have done well abroad.
In the early days markets were more restricted and uncertain than they have been in our time. The sheep farmer had an assured market overseas, though prices might drop disastrously. The wheat farmer grew something that was always in demand locally and might be wanted abroad, and the grower of oats had for consumer the horse, which, apart from the railways, was the almost universal carrier on land. But many a farmer, especially in the North Island, when he had cleared and ploughed his land, and grown his crops, was faced with the difficulty of disposal. There was a limited market in the towns, but perhaps miles of mud, and after that sea carriage, lay between him and possible customers. Those were the days before refrigeration. Many of these settlers had very little capital, and their struggle was hard. Some were glad to eke out a living digging kauri gum, cutting timber, taking jobs on public works, or working for some better-off neighbour, who perhaps had an income from the Old Country.
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Public works were a double god-send to many a settler; they lessened his isolation and put wages into a well-nigh empty pocket. A good deal of British money flowed in privately to nourish the young society, a companion stream to the millions from British investors that financed public works and immigration. And this brings us to a profoundly important development in New Zealand’s relations with Britain. It became a settled policy that New Zealand should be opened up with British money, and this not only tied New Zealand to the Homeland economically, but affected defence policy, and strengthened the imponderable links of culture and spirit. With the revolution to be wrought by refrigeration and direct steamer services, trade was bound to run towards Britain, but British willingness to lend money helped the process. In 1865 seventy per cent and in 1871 forty-four per cent of New Zealand’s exports went to Australia, but in the forty years between 1875 and 1914 seventy-eight per cent went to Britain. Professor Wood says “ there appeared a material impulse, of enormous strength, to fortify the sentimental bond with the home country.”* A British loan for public works in 1870 softened the ill-feeling produced by Maori wars. In the years to come New Zealand was not always satisfied with British policy, but it grew less critical, and there was a strong disposition to regard Britain as the pattern in politics, social life and culture. Sentiment was interwoven with economic interest and a realisation that this little lonely outpost was entirely dependent for protection on British power. Perhaps this deepening affection for the Motherland did not prevent some New Zealanders from reflecting that the large British investments in their country might be a useful guarantee that this protection would not be withheld.
We may draw a picture, then, of New Zealand society, its achievements and tone, and what it handed down to later decades. The stock was good, and the foundation
New Zealand and the World— Centennial Surveys.
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included may men and women of education and culture. New Zealanders were thrown upon their own resources much more than the people of the Homeland. The life developed initiative, independence and handiness. Even the children of the well-to-do had much less done for them than the corresponding class in England. There was less division of labour ; the New Zealander was often required to be jack of all trades. There was plenty of sunshine and fresh air, hard work, and, in the main, good food. Conditions of life were healthy. An Act of 1877 established a national system of free, compulsory, and secular education. If a church wished to establish its own schools, it had to pay for them. Religious instruction has been an issue ever since, but the principle of the original Act has been maintained. Scholarships were established to take boys and girls to secondary schools and the University. This country was in the van of higher education for women, and it is claimed for Helen Connon that she was the first woman to graduate with honours in a British university. All this helps to explain why so many men and women from this small communuity have carved out careers for themselves abroad, and we may find here too the foundation for the reputation that New Zealand soldiers established by their work on Gallipoli, and in France, Greece, Crete, North Africa and Italy.
It was a scattered society, and its parts were strongly provincial in their allegiance. To some extent they are so today. In choosing their Cabinets, Prime Ministers have not been able to disregard provincial representation entirely. But transport was improving and isolation decreasing. Steamers ran on the coasts and across the Tasman and the Pacific. Before the seventies were out there were a thousand miles of railways. The straggling unkempt towns were acquiring some dignity of architecture. Colonists amused themselves privately by means of musical evenings, dances and picnics. They found communal recreation in musical and debating societies. “ Mutual Improvement Societies ” they called some of these bodies, a period-piece
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title. The reader may again be warned not to pity these colonists too much ; they enjoyed life as much as we do, possibly more. Concert, operatic, and theatrical companies began to brave distances and visit the colony. In the seventies and eighties New Zealand saw certain famous operas and plays that have seldom if ever been presented since. The English, of course, brought cricket to New Zealand ; the game was played here before Hobson came. New Zealand has achieved test rank, but it has never developed Australia’s skill and devotion. The love that Australians give to cricket goes in New Zealand to Rugby football. The national game dates from the seventies, small beginnings for a passion, a religious fervour, that was to make the name of an “ All Black ” scrum half or wingthreequarter a household word, and to invoke a Prime Minister’s intervention in the deadly serious business of choice between players for a tour of Britain. But the most popular sport was, and always has been, horse-racing. Made easy by the Government-controlled totalisator, open betting is a pastime of many, and the compulsion on clubs to devote a proportion of their profits to improvement of their courses provides very pleasant outing places for those who hardly know one horse from another.
The community that was thus shaping itself was predominately English. Scots and Irish came in numbers, it is true, and since then the land has periodically resounded to perfervid toasts to Robert Burns, and grief for Tara. The Pipe Band is the most popular item in a military pageant. St. Patrick is a much better known saint than St. George, who, indeed, was many years late in making an official appearance. It may be noted however, that though Scots and Irish have waxed sentimental over the heather and the dear little shamrock, they have not returned to the lands where these grow, but have remained here in agreeable exile, to build their own special qualities into the fabric of this young country. The early Protestant missionaries showed their feelings towards Bishop Pompallier all too plainly. Later, relations between Protestants
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and Catholics were complicated by the projection of the Irish Question from British politics to this part of the world. Whatever power the “Catholic vote ” (a current phrase) may have exercised in politics, there certainly developed an anti-Catholic sentiment in this century, and a former Prime Minister lost his seat because he was a Catholic. Roman Catholicism was identified with the Irish; it may not have occurred to some New Zealanders that there were English and Scottish Catholics. But English folk in New Zealand, though the least demonstrative, have been by far the most numerous, and theirs is the widest and deepest influence on our nation-making. They have given us our political system, our law, and most of our social customs. All three peoples, English, Irish and Scots, combined to call the United Kingdom Home, and to plant here a society which they hoped would grow, with improvements of course, into something like the communities in the Motherland. The ties with Home were strong. The day the English mail arrived was the most important in the month. From the first New Zealand was Victorian and the immigration of the middle period deepened the stamp. Social intercourse was freer here, and opportunity more plentiful to the man without money or influence, but from top hats and social calls to celebration of Guy Fawkes Day, recognition of Santa Claus, and heavy dinners at Christmas (regardless of the summer season), English customs were imported in a block. New Zealand followed English fashions, read English books and periodicals, and cherished the same ideas on religion and sex. There was, however, a time-lag in the appearance of new ideas. We have always been rather like a settlement at the top of a long arm of the sea, where the tide is later than at the mouth. The Royal Academy, for example, inspired awe in New Zealand long after its position had been weakened in Britain.
In this country social barriers have been much less rigid than in the Homeland, but class distinctions were imported; indeed they were regarded at first as an integral
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part of most of the special settlements. As in other societies, families have gone up and down, and there has been irony in the social comedy. Only a few years ago it was seriously proposed that persons in trade should be denied membership of a certain jockey club. The proposer’s father had kept a shop in the city. There are several aristocracies in New Zealand : wealth, the land, the official world, and small circles of intellect in the Universitycentres. The difference between Auckland and Christchurch is plain to see. Wealth rules in the one ; in the other social leadership derives, for the most part, from the First Four Ships (the equivalent of the American Mayflower) or broad acres, or both. The most clearly defined foundation of social eminence is sheep-farming on a big scale. The Gisborne district and Hawkes Bay, the Wairarapa, Marlborough, Canterbury and Otago—these belts of social tone can be traced almost as accurately as varieties of land on a soil map. There are large cattle farms and small sheep farms, but, generally speaking, the cow denotes small farming, and the sheep is associated with ascent to those grades of envied comfort and luxury where are to be found spacious homesteads, leisure alternating with hard work, membership of city clubs, participation in and direction of racing, trips abroad, sons at Home Universities or in the Imperial services—New Zealand’s nearest approach to county families.
It is necessary to understand that these immigrants were transplanted Britons, energetic and happy in their new home, but naturally inclined to look at things as Englishmen, Irishmen or Scotsmen. Their children had to grow up, and their children after them, before a national sentiment rooted in the soil could be definitely charted. The country was governed for the most part by men born oversea. New Zealand did not get its first native-born Prime Minister till 1925. The newcomers saw New Zealand as a site for another Britain. “ Deer and hares we positively must have, as well as partridges and pheasants,” wrote J. R. Godley, the founder of Canterbury. The results of
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some of this acclimisation were serious and even disastrous. There are now Rabbit Boards to control this pest, and deer in the high country of the South Island have become nothing less than a national menace. The Government has to employ riflemen to try to shoot them out. Colonisers made New Zealand into an English park-garden, gracious and beautiful with oaks and chestnuts and roses, but some of their introductions proved undesirable. Gorse and blackberry, developing a greater vigour under these warmer skies, have been a curse to many farms. The effect of colonisation on native bird life was deplorable, and for a long time few people cared. “ All sorts of vermin have been loosed on the devoted land,” wrote Herbert Guthrie-Smith, our leading literary naturalist, himself Scottish-born. He referred bitterly to the “ insanity ” of the seventies, when it was considered that our native plants and native birds were unworthy of us ; the former were of no great beauty, and the latter must perish. To this state of mind is partly attributable (there were always warnings, even in those days) the reckless destruction of so much of New Zealand’s forest, which has confronted this generation with so many more or less useless bared hills and grave problems of erosion.
The taking of tonics can be overdone, and the sudden introduction of all that money and all those people into the country, the rapid quickening of the tempo of development, were too much for society’s health. Between 1870 and 1880 the public debt rose from under eight to more than twenty-eight millions. The seventies witnessed one of those fevers of speculation to which young communities seem to be particularly susceptible. There was a wild land boom. In places there was still good land to be got cheaply, and there were instances of farmers paying £2 an acre and making £5 per acre profit on the first crop of wheat. This sort of thing naturally sent up land prices. Much land was bought on narrow margins of equity. Financing on heavy borrowing has become such a permanent feature of New Zealand farming that a farm has been defined as a piece
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of land entirely surrounded by mortgages. When prices fell numbers of farmers were in difficulties. New Zealand prosperity was largely dependent on gold and wool. Both were uncertain factors; gold because output was liable to fall, wool because the oversea market fluctuated. Gold production began to fall in 1867. Wool suffered from that decline in world prices which began in the seventies and continued till the nineties. This world movement was the main cause of New Zealand’s period of depression. The eighties were bad times. It is probable they were worse than the depression of the nineteen thirties. The wealth of the country, proportionate to population, was smaller; primary industry was less varied, and secondary was in its infancy; and the community was less well equipped to deal with distress. The supply of labour exceeded the demand, wages fell, and thousands of disappointed people left the country. Between 1885, when things were at their worst, and 1891, the excess of departures over arrivals was twenty thousand. It was a period of rigid retrenchment. Atkinson, the farmer-soldier from Taranaki, was at heart a social reformer; he wished to introduce a national insurance scheme against sickness and pauperism. Fate, however, made him, as Colonial Treasurer, the stern reducer of State expenditure, and linked his name in history with conservatism in politics. From the Governor’s downwards, salaries were cut. But the colony faced the crisis with courage, and it was helped by an economic development of enormous importance. This was the application of refrigeration to the oversea carriage of meat. The first shipment of frozen mutton went from New Zealand to England (by sailing ship) in 1882. Hitherto the sheep had been valuable, setting aside the small demands of the local market for mutton, for its wool and skin and for what the carcase was worth when boiled down. In 1880 the sheep meant wool and little else. Refrigeration greatly increased the value of the carcase, and there were thirteen million sheep in the country. Within ten years the new industry was worth a million to New Zealand ; within twenty years
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two millions ; in 1940 the value was nearly twenty millions. Refrigeration however, did not stop at meat. It was extended to dairy produce and fruit. It changed the economic face of New Zealand by adding greatly to the country’s wealth, spreading the basis of industry more safely, and stabilising national finance. It affected politics and social life by encouraging relatively small farming and reducing the power of the big landowner. It tied New Zealand still more closely to Britain, for nearly all the food so treated went to the Home market. The eighties were also notable for the introduction of direct steam communication with Britain. Single-screw ships, equipped with sail, using the Cape Horn route home and the Cape of Good Hope route out, brought down the voyage to a regular five or six weeks, less than half the time of the clipper.
At the beginning of the next decade came the most important political development since the granting of selfgovernment. Politics had been a confused business, without definite party divisions, the conservative spirit in operation with spasms of liberalism and radicalism. As Atkinson’s biography shows, a statesman could wear the conservative badge and be progressively minded*. Sir John Hall, another conservative, led the women’s franchise movement. In the seventies Grey came out of retirement to found Liberalism as a political force and to be Premier in the colony where he had twice been Governor. Grey was fertile of ideas and passionate in his advocacy. No one did so much as he to give Australia as well as New Zealand manhood suffrage. He wanted, among other things, triennial Parliaments, taxation of land, leasehold rather than freehold tenure, compulsory purchase of estates, and restriction of holdings. Most of his proposals he lived to see adopted. Unfortunately he could not do what was needed in the rough and tumble of party politics ; he could inspire a democracy, but not lead it. Atkinson lacked his
* " Dictionary of New Zealand Biography,” G. H. Scholcfield
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genius, but he was much abler as a practical politician. Grey’s term of office was disappointing, and not long afterwards his party, tired of his trying ways, threw him over. Grey could not realise that in politics idealism is not enough ; that besides asking what is truth, it is sometimes advisable to ask what are trumps.
Progressive ideas were in men’s minds. What was needed was a well-organised, well-led party to adopt them with conviction and push them with vigour. This came. There were many reasons for the change. The depression was one. It caused discontent and made people think. Young as was this colonial society, it was beginning to develop some of the social evils of older lands. The worker’s wages were low, and his protection against exploitation and misfortune was thin. Sweating had developed in industry. Home work, sometimes done after a day in the factory, had become established, and there was no check on it. Hours were very long, even for young workers. There was a large proportion of boys and girls to adult workers in factories, and the pleasant practice had arisen of engaging girls as “ learners,” at a few shillings a week or no wages at all, and dismissing them after a year or so to make room for others. The penniless worker had only the Charitable Aid Board to go to for relief. The land question had become a first-class political issue. Despite the smallness of the population, good accessible land was becoming scarce. Large areas had passed into the hands of a few men. The radical Grey had assisted this trend by allowing land to be sold for as low as five shilling per acre. There is more to be said for the big landowner in the early days than perhaps many New Zealanders realise. He was a pioneer who faced difficulties, hardships and dangers. In some cases his tenure was uncertain. He was often a good farmer, and by improving his stock he benefited his fellows. He was a natural step in the country’s development, and economically was indispensable. Sometimes he was a man of education and character, and his home was a centre of civilisation, from flowers in the garden to books in the
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living room. It must also be borne in mind that in certain parts of New Zealand holdings will always be big; the land cannot be worked economically in small areas. And the very term “ big landowner ” is sometimes a misnomer, for the land may not be owned, but leased from the State. As a class, however, the big landowners did play largely for their own hand and their moves were sometimes against the public interest. Powerful in Provincial Councils and the National Parliament, they made laws to suit their own interests, and were not above getting round the law by devious ways. The practices of “ grid-ironing ” and “ spotting ’’—laying out holdings in such a way as to keep out the stranger—were long remembered in Canterbury. Between 1868 and 1880 the area of land under cultivation increased sixfold, but the number of settlers little more than doubled, and ten years later two-thirds of the whole freehold area was held by 2259 individuals. Another factor in the coming political change was the stirring of thought among wage-earners. The dockers’ strike in London in 1889 evoked practical sympathy on this side of the world, and showed wage-earners what organised effort could do. In 1890 there was a big maritime strike in Australia and New Zealand, which involved officers, seamen and wharf labourers. It ended in the complete defeat of the men. The vanquished naturally turned their thoughts to political action, and the uncompromising attitude of the efnployers helped to prepare the way for a system of State arbitration in labour disputes. Lastly, the Conservatives, as the ruling political party may be called, lacked leaders of energy and ideas, but the Opposition was recruiting brains and enthusiasm and organising itself. At the general election of 1890 the country was offered for the first time a definite liberal-radical programme by a united party under a leader who was both popular and skilled in political management. The result was that John Ballance found himself Premier in January 1891, with a small majority in the Llouse. In the nominated Legislative
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Council the Conservative Opposition was overwhelmingly strong.
The new Ministry wisely decided to go full speed ahead. Ministers realised that the best way to achieve success was to deserve it, and that the next election would be critical. So they plunged into a programme of legislation which makes the nineties so exceptionally interesting a period. First let us look at the chief figures in the Government. There had been no Ministry so strong in ideas, capacity and resolution. John Ballance, an Irishman, had been a lieutenant of Grey’s. He was a newspaper editor and had fought in the Maori wars. Ballance was a student of politics and economics and a lover of literature. Dr. Scholefield says of him that he adopted Grey’s humanitarian ideals with quiet enthusiasm and promoted them with the practical common-sense of the trained politician. John McKenzie, New Zealand’s most radical Minister of Lands, was a huge strong-minded Highlander, who had brought out with him a hatred of private landlordism and land monopoly. Joseph Ward, then in his mid-thirties, was a successful business man with a flair for finance and administration, and a zest for adventure in the State’s business. As a progressive Postmaster-General, Ward has had hardly a rival anywhere. Thanks to him. New Zealand was the first country to adopt universal penny postage. To say that he established the State Advances Office to lend cheap money to farmers, the Department of Health (the first in the world), the Tourist Department, the National Provident Fund, the State Fire Insurance Office, and superannuation for the Public Service, is to name only some of his achievements. William Pember Reeves was the thinker, philosopher, and artist of the Cabinet, and in some respects the most gifted man our politics have produced. He was the first Minister of Labour in New Zealand, and the chief author of the great body of labour legislation passed in the nineties. He was a poet and wrote the most literary history of his country. When he went to England to be Agent-General (later High Commissioner), he was an
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influence in Fabian Society circles, and became Director of the London School of Economics. Fastidious, thinskinned, and not sparing of his exceptional wit, he was not the stuff of which popular leaders are made, but he cut a deep mark in our politics and cultural life. There was Richard John Seddon, Minister of Public Works, the man destined to succeed Ballance and to reign longer than any Prime Minister in our history. Of the Cabinet only Ballance and his Attorney-General, Buckley, had had Ministerial experience, but several of the others had served in local government. The rank and file of the party contained elements that helped to make the Parliament elected in 1890 a turning point in our political development. The days of a limited group’s ascendency were over, the days when most members had a good deal in common in origin, ideas and tastes, when a speech might be garnished with a classical quotation, and a member of Parliament was almost ex-officio a member of exclusive city clubs. Representation was now broadened. The wage-earner had arrived in some force. It was not purely a Liberal, but a LiberalLabour Government. The party had the backing of the unions, now reaching out for power.
Details of the huge body of legislation passed by the Liberal-Labour Governments of the nineties must be sought in a fuller history than this. The attack was all along the line. McKenzie took the land laws, which contained some provisions in line with his own ideas, and turned them into a national code, which encouraged settlement and discouraged monopoly. He set up a triple system of selection : cash purchase, occupation with right of purchase, and a new tenure of his own, a 999-year lease without revaluation. This lease-in-perpetuity favoured the selector of small means, but it was found to give the tenant most of the advantages of the freehold without his having to pay for it. The battle of the tenures, freehold versus leasehold, went on for years, and caused divisions in the Liberal-Labour ranks, but, save that his lease-in-perpetuity was replaced by a renewable lease with revaluation,
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McKenzie’s policy is today the basis of our land settlement. A graduated land tax was imposed to compel large holders either to make better use of their land or to cut it up for others. This was part of a land tax, which, with an income tax, replaced the old unpopular property tax. McKenzie took power to use compulsion in the purchase of big estates for closer settlement, and seized a golden opportunity to press home his convictions about subdivision. The Cheviot Estate, on the east coast of the South Island, 84,000 acres of good land, had been bought for ten shillings an acre. It was supporting some eighty persons and 80,000 sheep. The trustees and the Government differed about the valuation, and under the law the trustees called on the Government either to reduce the valuation or take over the property. McKenzie paid £260,000 for Cheviot, and immediately cut it up into freehold and leasehold farms. The success of Cheviot smoothed McKenzie’s path, and the enterprise remains the most striking example of the success of State sub-division. Within a year there were hundreds of people on Cheviot, and today the block contains 250 farms. Ward came along with cheap money for the farmer, lent by the Government. The farmer was helped in many other ways, by cheap railway freights, instruction in his business, inspection of stock, and grading of produce for export. There was farmer opposition to compulsory grading, but McKenzie realised that if New Zealand was to build up a reputation for its products abroad, it must set up the highest standards at this end.
Reeves built up a body of factory and anti-strike laws that attracted the attention of the world. Hours were regulated ; early closing and a weekly half-holiday made compulsory ; women and children protected ; and conditions improved. Reeves’ arbitration system, with its State compulsion and legal encouragement of unionism, was something new in the world’s politics. Disputes were to be heard first by a Council of Conciliation, and then, if there was no agreement, by a Court of Arbitration, presided over by a Supreme Court judge. Unions which took
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advantage of the system were forbidden to strike, and employers could not legally lock out their hands. There have been numerous amendments to the Act, but its principles still stand.
While all this was going on the Government had to deal with other problems. The Legislative Council stood square in its path, so Ballance appointed new members, and in the face of this and the Government’s persistence with its programme, the Council gave way. It was a piece of great good fortune for the Government that world prices began to move upward a few years after it took office; already, in the early nineties, the worst of the depression was past. The depression, however, had left one legacy that tested the initiative and resolution of the Government. The Bank of New Zealand, burdened with slumped assets, got into such a state that in 1894 it was faced with bankruptcy. To prevent the disaster of closed doors, Seddon, now head of the Government, put through at one sitting a Bill that saved the bank with State money and gave the Government a controlling interest. It proved a most profitable move for the State, for in the good times that were at hand the Bank became very wealthy. Then there was the coming of women’s franchise and local option in the sale of liquor. The two were closely connected, for the movement for the suffrage mainly grew out of the temperance crusade. The franchise law, a non-party measure, was passed in 1893, and New Zealand had the distinction of being the first country in the British Empire to take this step. The prediction that, as a result, men’s dinners would go uncooked and their socks undarned, was not fulfilled, but neither was the hope that a much better world would be evolved. The woman’s vote may be said to have swelled the anti-liquor forces and made it more difficult for a notoriously evil liver to be elected to Parliament, but it might be difficult to assign to it any other definite influence. The most curious thing is that whereas New Zealand led Britain by twenty-five years in the admission of women to the franchise, it was behind Britain not only in electing
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women to Parliament, but in giving them the right to sit there. The first woman was not elected to the New Zealand Parliament till 1933, forty years after the winning of the franchise. Local option in the liquor-licensing system, with which New Zealanders were to become so familiar (replaced in later years by the national prohibition poll), came into being in the same year as votes for women. It gave Parliamentary districts the right to vote themselves dry by a three-fifths majority, and then and later a dozen districts did so. Though Seddon put thi% measure through the liquor question was not a party issue, and never became one, but for many years it was the most confusing factor in our politics, and remains a possible complication in the background. Numbers of New Zealanders have put nolicense before any other question. The controversy perhaps has done more than anything else to block reform of the trade. To show how it has cut across party lines, no party has taken in hand comprehensive revision of the licensing laws. Today (1944) the number of licenses in New Zealand is below what it was fifty years ago, when the population was less than half, and there has been no redistribution to keep pace with the growth of communities.*
How did New Zealand take this radical programme ot the Government? There was a good deal of opposition. Measures like compulsory early closing were regarded as a grave infringement of personal liberty. There was constant denunciation of “ socialism.” The Parliamentary Opposition, however, could not stem the tide, though it might check a current. It was useful at times and not always hostile. The elections of 1896 and 1899, like that of 1893, gave the Government large majorities. The Opposition offered no attractive programme as an alternative, and had no leader to compare with Seddon in force and popularity. Besides, the sun of prosperity was beginning to shine. If,
* In the elections of 1943 both the main parties were pledged to reform the liquor traffic.
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as has been said, the worst crime a Government can commit is to encounter bad times, it is equally true that the shrewdest move it can make is to run before the wind of good times. Most New Zealanders were at least content with the Government; a great many were enthusiastic about it. The cry of “ socialism ” did not worry them at all. Not only were they not socialists ; they had not any clear idea what socialism was. They wanted a better society, including, of course, better conditions for themselves, and they were quite willing that the State should intervene here and there to bring this about. If such intervention was socialism, there had been socialism before Ballance and Seddon. In those days the Government had educated the children, run the railways (there has been only one important privately owned line in New Zealand, and it was absorbed years ago), insured lives, and provided a trustee for property who did not die or default. Very few New Zealanders in the nineties envisaged a society in which the Government would control everything. In the respectable sense of the word. Ministers, members and public were opportunists. They went for improvements which they thought would work, and did not trouble their heads much about abstract principles. A foreign observer called it “ socialism without doctrines.” Like all pioneering societies, New Zealand was deep in the stage (from which it has not yet fully emerged) of putting its money on the “ practical man,” and ignoring or distrusting the theorist and the expert. This produced a serious weakness. Advanced legislation was adopted, but there was little or no research into the foundations of policy or the working of laws. This was especially so with the social sciences. When the famous English sociologist Sidney Webb visited New Zealand in 1898 he commented on “ the absence throughout the colony of serious economic study, of scientific investigation of those industrial and social problems which the politicians themselves attempt to solve.” One example may be cited. One would think that the introduction of the epoch-making system of State
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arbitration would have been accompanied, or soon followed, by a thorough and enthusiastic investigation of every phase of industrial relations, including industrial psychology. This was very far from being so. Over forty years passed before the first University foundation for the study of industrial relations was set up, and this was a private benefaction. New Zealand fell far behind other countries in the study of industrial psychology. However, it is only fair to the University to say that in the intervening years a certain amount of industrial relations research was carried out by some, perhaps a rather surprising amount in view of the load of work borne by staffs. To go back to the military analogy. New Zealand was like an army that thrusts wedges into territory but does not resolutely press its advance and straighten its line. A spirit of complacency was engendered. New Zealanders not only believed it when they were told they led the world in social progress; they went on believing it when the justification for the compliment had visibly shrunk. However, the leaven of education and ideas was working slowly and producing some notable results. By the end of the century there was university education in each of the main centres. The doors of secondary schools were soon to be opened wider to primary pupils. New Zealanders were beginning to make a name for themselves abroad. Reeves had written “ The Long White Cloud ” and was a figure in the intellectual world of London. Jessie Mackay’s poetry had attracted attention abroad. Richard Maclaurin and Ernest Rutherford had gone from university studies here to Cambridge. Maclaurin died head of the Institute of Technology in Boston, the dignity and importance of which he did so much to enhance. Rutherford became one of the greatest scientists of this or any age. William Marris had set out on the career that was to take him to the Viceroy’s Council in India. And in New Zealand a native-born mental hospital doctor named Truby King was laying the foundation of the work in infant
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welfare that was to bring him fame far beyond his own country.
The domination of Richard John Seddon in these years has no parallel in our history. This man who jumped to the first position in politics over the heads of men much better educated and more polished, was a leader and a legend—a clarion voice, a swelling personality, huge, rough, robust, virile, all-seeing, ignorant of learning but most knowledgeable in the ways of men, acute, a national character and institution, a statesman who maintained and strengthened his hold on the country even when he was a figure of fun. Seddon was trained as an engineer in England. He had a fair education, but after he left school at fourteen his contact with books must have been negligible. Reeves says he never saw Seddon read a book for more than ten minutes, except a Blue Book, but he would talk politics all day. What Seddon didn’t know about the forces he tried to shape would have filled volumes (he lectured England on her trade economy, without knowing anything about invisible exports) but what he did know, and felt, carried him fast and far. He had learned to manage men in the rough though not lawless school of the West Coast, where he had sought gold, advised miners, opened stores, and made a name for himself as a wrestler. Ballance has been described as amiable. No one ever said this of Seddon. He could be genial, but he was often overbearing, and sometimes a bit of a bully. He lacked humour, but this saved him from what weakens the springs of action in some men—fear of being thought ridiculous. He had a powerful mind, which was quick to grasp realities, a huge capacity for work (which, breaking down his splendid physique, killed him at sixty-one), a most exceptional political sense, and a genuine passion for social reform. The political achievement of which he was proudest was putting through the Old Age Pensions Bill. This involved an uninterrupted committee stage of ninety hours, during which 1400 speeches were made. He was master of Parliamentary business, and what he didn’t
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know about party management was not worth knowing. In his attitude towards the people he was most frankly a man of the people. They called him “ Dick,” and he liked it. Then they called him “ King Dick,” and probably he liked that still more. “ Good Old Dick!” One imagines that no one ever called out “ Good old George!” to Grey. When on his first visit to England Seddon appeared in gold lace and white kneebreeches and stockings there was joy in New Zealand. “O, mother, look at Dick!” said the Prince of Wales to Queen Victoria—in a New Zealand cartoon.
That Seddon had his faults has been indicated. He said it was “unreasonable and unnatural” to expect the Government to be as kind to Opposition districts as to those that returned Government members. It was an indication of the place of Government grants in politics that a Government member once referred to Seddon as “ the donor.” They tell a story of Seddon, as was his wont, sending a man to take up a job in a department. The departmental head protested. Seddon overruled him. The head said the man was useless. Seddon again overruled him. The head reported that the man could not read or write. Back came the memorandum with the minute, “ Learn him!” The story may not be true, but it is based on the fact that Seddon was unblushing in finding civil service jobs for his friends, and that many of them were of little or no use to the State. Seddon’s patronage was a plain scandal. He could no more resist an appeal from a West Coaster than Henry Irving could turn down a trouper out of luck. Seddon not only stuffed the civil service, but arbitrarily revised salary lists. His treatment of the civil service was one of the things that caused Reeves to leave the Cabinet and go to the London post.* Seddon also did New Zealand the disservice of encouraging the practice, which became well established, of going to the Prime Minister with requests, rather than to subordinate Minis-
* The author had this from Reeves himself
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ters. Nothing was too small to escape his notice. In his later years most of his Ministers were mediocrities, and to say that this did not distress him would be to put it mildly. But he is remembered as a great leader and a great humanitarian.
The leonine statue of Seddon in front of Parliamentary Buildings is the man in the habit as he lived. It is two Seddons, the Imperialist as well as the national leader. Seddon was as ardent for the Imperial connection as he was for social reform. He wanted more Imperial unity and cooperation, and said so emphatically. He introduced the preference on British goods which has been a feature of our fiscal policy for forty years. He wanted a New Zealand empire within the Empire. He was deeply disappointed that the dreams of taking Fiji and Samoa into the New Zealand orbit had not been realised. He told the British Government just what he thought of the diplomacy that gave Samoa to Germany and the United States. In 1900 he asked Britain for Tonga and the Cook Group, and was allowed to take in the Cook Islands and outlying spots to the north, which put the furthest boundary of New Zealand jurisdiction 2000 miles from Wellington. Seddon’s personality and views, which he never had any hesitation in expressing, made him a conspicuous figure at the Imperial Conference of 1897. Two years later the outbreak of the war in South Africa gave him a chance to put into practice his ideas on Imperial unity, and he seized it. His offer of troops to Britain was the first. It gave the Empire a lead, served notice on the world, and provided New Zealand with a resounding and lasting advertisement. Seddon began by taking authority to enrol two hundred men, but altogether New Zealand sent over six thousand, and the difference throws light both on the surprises of the South African War and the growth of colonial cooperation. In New Zealand there was little opposition to participation. Old grievances had for long been forgotten. The people of New Zealand warmly accepted the new Imperialism. The soldiers who went to South
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Africa, all of them mounted, fought with distinction. Historically, they, and not the units of 1914, were the First New Zealand Expeditionary Force. There was a significant sequel to New Zealand’s participation in this war. Seddon protested against the importation of Chinese labour to work the Rand mines. 4he British Government did not change its policy, but it recognised New Zealand s right to express an opinion. As a member of the British Empire New Zealand had grown up.
CHAPTER IV
MANHOOD
"Many things will come to New Zealand in the next hundred years and many things pass away. But liberty will not pass away while our grand-children can spell Olympus.” —Oliver Duff, New Zealand Now.
When the twentieth century began, there were, including Maoris, about 800,000 people in New Zealand. The million mark was reached eight years later. Already a few New Zealanders were anxious about the future. The country could obviously accommodate many more people, but the nation was growing slowly. A great social change had come in the fall of the birth-rate. Like true Victorians, the pioneers had raised large families, but their descendents, despite the opportunities of a new land, were determined to have small ones. In 1879 the birth-rate was over 40 per thousand of mean population; in 1900 it was 25.6; in the slump of the thirties it fell to under 17. The rate has risen substantially during the second world war, but after a century of European colonisation New Zealand has been showing signs to cause concern : a low rate of natural increase in population which is inadequate to secure expansion without revival of immigration. A very low death rate, for many years the lowest in the world, has not been sufficient to off-set the low birth-rate, and New Zealanders are in danger of becoming an ageing population*.
In the early nineteen hundreds the State was busy with the health of the people. The Health Department was established in 1901. The status of midwives was raised and
* In 1944 the League of Nations credited New Zealand with a higher expectation of life than any other country.
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maternity homes for the wage-earner were set up. In 1905 Dr. Truby King made history by founding in Dunedin the Society for the Promotion of the Health of Women and Children, which was to be the main agency for putting into practice his views on the rearing of infants. From the name of the first patron. Lady Plunket, wife of the Governor-General, the society is popularly known as the Plunket Society, and infants brought up by its methods are called Plunket babies. Truby King’s system has been adopted in many lands. At a conference in London there were present from eighteen countries nurses who had received training in Truby King’s mothercraft; the Prime Minister, Mr. Fraser, was introduced to one when he visited Khartoum during one of his war tours. That this country’s infant mortality rate is the lowest in the world is largely due to Truby King and the Plunket Society.
In the twentieth century the population was not greatly increased by immigration. There was still a steady stream of immigrants, many of them State-assisted, but it was not a river. In this nation of immigrants and children of immigrants, there developed an objection to any large influx of people, and even a prejudice against the newcomers themselves. “ New Zealand for the New Zealanders ” took root as a principle. The wage-earner, perhaps with memories of the depression in the eighties, feared for his job. It was apparently believed that if the population was 875,648, as it was in 1903, there were a corresponding number of jobs and no more. Also the New Zealander thought as his Australian brother did about keeping the country white. Mainly to exclude Asiatics, Seddon put through a bill imposing an education test on persons not of British birth. This involved shutting out British subjects from the East. That the British Government was not pleased caused little or no concern. New Zealanders were determined to keep their race pure and maintain their standards of living.
Internally there was an important shift of population. In 1901 the North Island overhauled the South, and
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went on to draw away steadily, until in the census of 1936 it carried nearly 63 per cent of the country’s total. One result of this was to weaken the political power of the South, because by law there is periodical re-division of electorates according to re-distribution of population. The South Island steadily lost seats in the House, until today (1944) it elects twenty-nine members against the North’s fifty-one. The reason for the shift was the opening up of North Island lands. Numbers of farmers and farmers’ sons from the South seized these opportunities, which were all the more attractive because the climate of the North was milder. On the whole, farming in the South was more efficient, and the North benefited by southern infiltration. Indeed, the influence of southern farming may be traced through Taranaki and the Waikato to North Auckland. The chief agency in opening up the North Island was the Main Trunk Railway, a development of first-class importance in the history of our transport and social relations. This greatly reduced Auckland’s isolation from the southern centres. Wellington was some twelve hours distant by sea from Christchurch, but up to 1908 it was nearly thirty hours from Auckland, and the sea portion of the broken journey was apt to be highly uncomfortable. At first the train journey was eighteen hours, but it was cut down to fourteen and a half. About the same time a daily specialised ferry service—they call it “ steamer express ” now—was established between Wellington and Lyttelton, the port of Christchurch. Ships were built for this run that in combined speed and comfort had no superiors anywhere. These improvements did much to break down New Zealand provincialism. Travelling had been fairly arduous, and comparatively few New Zealanders went far unless they had to. Now more and more travelled for pleasure, with the result that they became much better acquainted with their own country. There are figures to show that travelling increased far out of proportion to growth of population.*
* See The City of the Strait, the centennial history of Wellington.
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The great economic change which was closely connected with the opening up of the North Island was the rise of dairying. The writer remembers two prominent Aucklanders in the early days of the century discussing the prospects of the province and regretting that the three main products, timber, gold and kauri gum, were exhaustible. The province had one of the great quartz mines of the world, the Waihi, which has produced twenty-two million pounds worth of gold and silver, but within a few years Auckland was to be the leading producer of dairy goods in what came to be known as the Dairy Farm of the Empire, and the value of this wealth far exceeded that of gold. Consider these figures. In 1900 the value of the country’s export of butter and cheese was under a million. Five years later the value was £1,613,000, and five years after that, £3,000,000. In the last year of the war butter and cheese were worth nearly seven and a half millions. Between 1921 and 1940 there were only two years in which butter did not top the ten million mark, and in 1940 it reached the amazing total of £18,228,000. The aggregate of butter and cheese was £26,461,000.
What were the reasons for this extraordinary development? First and foremost, climate—the sun and rain of New Zealand, and the relatively mild winter, which makes housing of stock unnecessary, and over a great deal of the country leaves grass for feed. The fertility of New Zealand soil is patchy, but generally where the soil is second-class or poor and can be ploughed, it can be made to grow good grass with the aid of fertilisers, and in the last forty years these artificial foods have been poured on to the land in millions of tons. An expert has estimated that New Zealand, only partly developed, produces eighty million tons of grass in a year, and the fruits of this have been worth in one year as much as £80,000,000. After attending a World Grass Conference in 1937, another expert came to the conclusion that grass meant more to New Zealand than to any other country. Grass, of course, feeds sheep as well as cows. The other explanations of dairying
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development are : use of machinery on the farm and in the factory : cooperative manufacturing ; improvement in stock breeding and farm and factory methods ; and strict supervision of the industry from milking shed to market. It used to be said there was only one milking machine in Denmark, New Zealand’s greatest rival, and that was in a museum. In New Zealand there are over thirty thousand. There is nothing like shortage of labour to develop invention and use of machinery. Nearly all dairy farmers send their cream or milk to cooperative factories, in which they hold shares. The home separator takes the cream out of the milk; the cream lorry carries the cream to the butter factory ; the farmer is kept posted in the quality of his cream ; and a cheque comes to him every month, with a bonus at the end of the year.
Dairying created a large body of small farmers dependent on two products. Economically, socially and politically they were a homogenous community. The rise of the industry swung political power still further from the large landowner to the small. There was more money in sheep than in cows ; on the other hand there was more risk. The dairy farmer was the hardest worked man in the country. The sheep farmer sometimes rose at two in the morning to muster till dark, but he had his periods of leisure in which he could amuse himself in town and even travel far afield. The dairy farmer worked from dawn to dusk seven days a week, milking twice a day, for nine months in the year or more. He had little leisure or strength for recreation or self-improvement, nor, in many cases, had his family. The child that was too tired through early milking to do his lessons was observed in schools. Many wives—and this not on dairy farms only—were overburdened. There has never been enough labour on New Zealand farms for the full service of the land and the health and happiness of farmers’ families. New Zealand has not raised a peasantry in the European sense. Farming households have lived, as far as possible, like their town cousins. Hospitality has always been a sacred law.
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and its observance has helped to break many a mother’s health. In town and country New Zealand housewives have striven, with little or no assistance, to order their days after the fashion of English households that run on oiled wheels of domestic help.
Thus New Zealand was launched on the tide of the Great Prosperity which flowed from the mid-nineties to the nineteen-twenties. Trade reached levels which to the founders of the country would have seemed astronomical. League of Nations statistics put New Zealand’s trade per head as the highest in the world. The standard of living rose steadily. There were, however, certain weaknesses in the economic system. One was the lack of a national plan of land development. The army of settlement was still sending out advance parties haphazardly. For some years agricultural and economic research made slow progress. Money was made rather too easily. We see now that a good deal of the hill country that was opened for settlement should have been left in its covering of native forest. Unfortunately, till the third decade of the century forestry remained a branch of the Lands Department, which naturally preferred cleared to wooded land. Hills have been eroded and rivers made more liable to flood. This is a reminder that pioneering did not cease with the years following Vogel’s measures; indeed it has never ceased. In the early years of this century much back-breaking work was done in bush country in remote parts of the North Island. Then there was the factor that still troubles New Zealand, land prices*. Figures were paid for farm land—up to £lOO per acre—that drew warning after warning from financiers and economists. In vain it was pointed out that for a fraction of the prices often commanded by land in New Zealand good land could be bought in the English shires, within easy reach of London, and equipped with buildings of size and quality rarely found in this country. The reply was : look at the advantage we have in our climate. The retort
Part of the object of the Servicemen's Settlement and Land Sales Act of 1943 is to check inflation of land prices.
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to that was we were already capitalising that advantage. There was much buying on incomplete valuations, and this was closely connected with speculation. Numbers of farms changed hands over and over again, and when the slump came they had strings of mortgages trailing from them in the dust. Often men bought farms, perhaps on rough-and-ready methods of valuation, not to settle down on them permanently, but to sell them at a profit as quickly as possible. An Auckland schoolgirl defined a farmer as a man who sold farms. Since even big financial institutions, which could be presumed to take particular care with their valuations and margins, were caught when values began to fall, it may be imagined what the position was with many individual mortgagees.
Though in many cases improvement preceded sale at a profit, the system was not good for farming. In the seventies the South Island had speculated more heavily than the North and felt the depression more acutely. In the twentieth century it was the North Island, where there was so much more opportunity for buying and selling, that set the pace and had to face the sharper headache in the morning. When Reeves visited New Zealand after the first war, he noted the number of properties in the South Island that were still held by the original families. There was a steadiness in southern farming that served it well when the bottom seemed to drop out of things in the thirties. It followed that a good many farmers were heavily burdened with interest debt, and had paid so much for their land that they could not find the money for improvements that the land deserved. Domestic finance on the farm was often rule of thumb. The farmer (and the New Zealander was not alone in this) had not thought out his position. It was not until the man-power tribunals got to work in the first world war, that public attention was directed to the economics of farming on the farm. Then the farmer began to discover that if he reckoned all his costs, including standard wages to his family, who sometimes worked for
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little or nothing, his net income was perhaps less than the wages of the town artisan or labourer.
Seddon died suddenly in 1906, on his way back from a triumphal visit to Australia. In his last election, a few months before, the Opposition had been massacred, so his successor. Sir Joseph Ward, inherited a great majority. Ward, however, was not a Seddon. Polished in manners, more considerate to those about him, and more businesslike, confident, energetic, and fertile in ideas, he lacked Seddon’s strength of personality, his flair for party management, and his popular appeal. That he had been out of public life for a while owing to a clouding of his own financial affairs, was remembered against him. The wageearner was suspicious of the business world in which Ward moved. Ward’s premiership showed that he was better fitted to work under a strong Prime Minister than to lead. It must be said in his defence that he encountered difficulties that would have tried even Seddon’s qualities. The great vote for the Liberals in 1905 was partly a personal vote for Seddon. The party began to develop weaknesses that always come with long terms of office. The radical wing showed discontent. The leasehold flag was raised, but had to be lowered. Seddon had been able to keep the party Labour as well as Liberal. Now Labour was beginning to think about political independence. It was not satisfied with the Liberal achievement. Wages rose, but so did the cost of living. Liberalism was suffering from the operation of the law of diminishing returns. The wageearner saw Labour in Australia working for itself and reaching office. There was a revolt against the arbitration system. Strikes began to occur among unions. The employers, once opposed to the State machinery of arbitration, now defended it, because it protected them. The law was amended, but this did not prevent strikes more serious than anything since the maritime trouble in 1890. New ideas were preached, largely by newcomers—the doctrines of internationalism, the class war, direct action, and control of industry by the workers for the workers. The amiable
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socialism of the nineties gave way in some quarters to a bitter and uncompromising evangel. New Zealanders began to hear of Karl Marx.
In September 1907 the colony of New Zealand officially received the title of Dominion. The change was necessitated by the status of Australia and Canada, but it aroused no enthusiasm. The Governor became the GovernorGeneral, and members of the House advanced from the appellation of “ M.H.R.” to the greater dignity of “ M.P.” Two years later Ward took steps that focussed attention on the drift of the world towards war. New Zealand had not taken defence seriously. It had paid £20,000, then £40,000, then £lOO,OOO, to the cost of the British Navy. It was also training some seamen in its own waters. The volunteer system of land defence had nothing to commend it except the interest of the few who did duty for the many ; it was so inefficient as to be a joke. New Zealanders were well informed by their newspapers about German ambitions, and the contrast between the small populations of Australia and New Zealand and the teeming millions of the East was too striking to escape notice. In 1909, when the German building programme caused agitation in Britain, the New Zealand Government created a first-class sensation by offering Britain one battleship, and two if necessary. The smaller offer, which involved the Dominion in an expenditure twenty times the current naval subsidy, was gratefully accepted, and the battle-cruiser New Zealand was the result. In the same year the Government, with Lord Kitchener as adviser, introduced compulsory military training. The preparation in evening drills and summer camps was not intensive, but the system built up a body of competent officers and non-commissioned officers who were to be useful when the call came in 1914, and the organisation for war was vastly improved. Samoa, the first enemy territory to be captured, was taken by New Zealanders, mainly Territorials, who needed little preparation for the expedition.
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Meanwhile, Ward had suffered a set-back in the elections of 1908, and the encouraged Opposition, under William Ferguson Massey, made greater preparations for the test of 1911. The Opposition took the name “ Reform.” This covered, if it did not hide, the conservative element in the party, and its promise of change was general and not embarassingly particular. The administration of the Liberals, rather than their legislation, was what Reformers attacked. Reform stood for the freehold, which it promised to Crown leaseholders, control of the Civil Service by a non-political board, and an elective Legislative Council, chosen by the proportional representation method of voting. The elections of 1908 and 1911 were notable because they were conducted on the only departure from the first-past-the-post system New Zealand has tried. If the leading candidate did not obtain an absolute majority of votes, he and the runner-up went to a second ballot a fortnight later. Since 1911 the country has apparently been content with the old system (Reform did not fulfil its promise to put something better in place of the second ballot), though this is quite plainly liable to give parties a strength in the House disproportionate to the votes they have received. A cynic might say that the reason no party has since taken up electoral reform is that every party has hoped to benefit by the existing method. In 1911 prosperity favoured Reform. Many farmers who had owed much to Liberal legislation, turned over to Reform. The leader of the Reform party was a farmer. The party’s organisation was excellent, and the Liberals had been in office for over twenty years. The strange spectacle was presented of Labour candidates promising to vote Ward out and Reform supporting Labour to this end. The result of the election was equality between the parties, with a handful of Labour men and independents to hold the balance. When Parliament met in March 1912, voting was even on a no-confidence motion, and the Speaker gave his casting vote for the Government. Ward, who was considered by many to be largely responsible for his party’s set-back,
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resigned, and the Liberals carried on for three months under Mr. Thomas Mackenzie (afterwards Sir Thomas, and High Commissioner in London during the war). When Parliament met in July another no-confidence motion was carried by 41 votes to 33. Five members who had voted for the Liberals in March now voted for the Opposition, and one had been a member of the Ward Cabinet. In the interval Mr. Massey had evidently played his cards well. On July 10 he and his Cabinet took office. Mr. Massey had said that in a democratic country no Government should remain in office continuously for more than a very few years. He himself was to be Prime Minister without a break for nearly thirteen years, a period only a little shorter than Seddon’s.
It is said that democracy should choose for its leaders its ablest men, but, one may ask, ablest for what? Massey had nothing like the breadth of interest of Mr. James Allen (later Sir James) who took Finance, Education and Defence in his Cabinet, or the intellectual distinction of Francis Bell (later Sir Francis), leader of the New Zealand Bar, who became Minister of Internal Affairs and served the country as Minister and Elder Statesman for many years. Massey had few intellectual interests and little imagination ; on the platform he was commonplace. There was a rush of words, a small vocabulary, and few ideas. However, simplicity of language, accompanied by forceful expression, has its uses in politics. His popular appeal, especially in the cities, was nothing like so strong as Seddon’s. Yet there was never any question about the leadership of the victorious party. Massey owed his ascendancy to his physical strength—like Seddon he was a big deep-chested man, with an enormous capacity for work ; his record as a leader through years of opposition ; his mastery of Parliamentary business; his political sense; and his ability to manage men. He had been in Parliament for sixteen years, and for nine he had been Leader of the Opposition. He had seen his ranks reduced to sixteen, but he had never despaired. His indomitable courage and per-
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severance and unceasing industry were the mainspring of his party’s attack. He grasped political measures quickly, and when he led the House no one was a better judge of its moods. For this last quality he had ample need. In judging Massey’s record it must always be remembered that throughout most of his career as Prime Minister (leaving out of account the coalition period) he carried on with small majorities. Only once, in 1919, did he win a decisive victory at the polls, and in one Parliament he held office by consent of one Liberal member and two independents. He had therefore to walk warily. If Seddon had to consider the susceptibilities of the trade unions, Massey had to study those of the farmer, big and little.
Massey’s period was more notable for events than for legislation, and the biggest of those events rode not only the nation but mankind. The great body of Liberal legislation stood. Among the notable changes was the putting of the Civil Service (with important exceptions, including the Railways Department) under the control of commissioners responsible only to Parliament. The Act made it an offence to attempt to exercise patronage. The system is in force today, and the Civil Service would not change it. There was legislation to enable over 15,000 Crown tenants holding nearly three million acres, to convert to freehold more readily. This stimulated speculation, which was already too common, and inflated land prices still further. Parliament also passed a Bill making the Legislative Council elective, with two electoral divisions in each island. The Act was suspended during the war. It still lies in the Statute Book in a state of coma, and no Government has tried to bring it back to life. The Government, however, soon had other things to think of besides law-making. Industrial unrest increased. For some months in 1912 there was a strike, marked by some violence, in the gold-mining town of Waihi, where a registered and a deregistered union clashed. In 1913 New Zealand experienced its worst strike. It began with a dispute between shipwrights and the Union Steamship Company in Wellington,
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and spread to waterside workers, seamen, carters, and miners. It became a general strike, or an attempt at one. Farmers and townsmen enrolled as special police. Farmers rode into the cities, set up camps, and with city volunteers opened the wharves to trade. Ships were manned with officers as deck hands and amateurs in the stokehold. There were some ugly situations, but little violence. The community asserted its strength and the strikers were defeated, but the struggle left memories longer than the long batons carried by the farmer “ specials,” and turned the thoughts of many to organising Labour on the political side. In the same year, 1913, preliminary steps were taken to combine all Labour and socialist bodies into one political Labour movement. When Mr. M. J. Savage, afterwards Prime Minister, stood for Parliament in 1914, it was as a Social Democrat. The Labour Party as we know it dates from 1916.
If any New Zealander was surprised when the world war broke out, it was his own fault, but he could hardly have been blamed for not foreseeing the extraordinary response the war produced from his countrymen or the adventures into which they were led. In international law there was no question of neutrality, but New Zealand was entirely free to decide what contribution, if any, it should make to the effort of Britain and the Empire. That contribution was amazing. At the end of 1914 the population was 1,145,000. More than 100,000 men sailed for service overseas. This was nearly ten per cent, of the total population, and nearly forty per cent, of the males between the ages of twenty and forty-five. In addition, a considerable number of New Zealanders served with the British and Australian armies and the British Navy. The Government had been in close touch with London on questions of defence and foreign policy, and the war came as no surprise to Ministers. Like Seddon, Massey was a devoted Imperialist, but, also like Seddon, he was quite prepared to stand up for what he thought were New Zealand’s rights. He showed his strength of character when, against the wishes
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of the Admiralty, and to the point of threatening to resign, he insisted that the ships carrying the Main Body of the Expeditionary Force to Egypt, should not leave without what he considered' an adequate escort. Massey spoke for the country when he said ; “ All we are and all we have are at the disposal of the British Government.” Recruits flocked to the depots, and the voluntary system nourished the fighting units until the end of 1916, when conscription came into force. Conscription was also applied to Maoris, over 2,000 of whom went overseas. The Cook Islands sent a contingent. Meanwhile the New Zealand soldier had earned undying fame. The occupation of German Samoa in the first weeks of the war was bloodless, but the force sent to Egypt took part in the assault on Gallipoli and helped to give the word “ Anzac ” to the world. Afterwards the New Zealand Division was employed on the Western Front, and the Mounted Brigade was part of Allenby’s command in Palestine. The reorganisation of defence undertaken a few years earlier proved its value. The force for Samoa left the country only eleven days after the war began, and the Main Body, 8,500 strong, was ready in less than two months. The New Zealander, like his cousins from the Motherland and the other Dominions, showed that a citizen soldiery could be quickly made into first-class troops. He was given hard jobs to do, and did them all so well that the New Zealand Division was ranked among the very best units of the Empire’s armies.* New Zealanders helped to stem the German advance in 1918, and were prominent in the final victory. Of the 100,000 who went overseas, 17,000 did not return. The fighting man was backed by excellent organisation at home. Units were kept up to strength. At the head of the war effort at home was the Prime Minister. Unflagging in zeal and steadfast of purpose, he was as ready to cross the
The author once wrote that the fame of the Division was as secure as that of Caesar’s Tenth Legion or Craufurd's Light Division. He may be pardoned for noting here that Lieut.-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, who commands the New Zealand Division in the present war, has compared his troops to Craufurd's. 1
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world to take part in British war councils as to bear the ever-increasing daily burden of administration. Massey’s greatest service to New Zealand was his leadership in those swaying years.
It must have been a bitter disappointment to him that in this stress of war the country refused him a majority. The elections of December 1914 gave him only forty members in a House of eighty. There were thirty-four Liberals under Ward, and a Labour Party of six. This unstable situation led to the formation in 1915 of a National Government composed of the two main parties. It remained in office till 1919. Ward became Deputy-Prime Minister, took over Finance, and went with Massey to England on war business. Ward raised £80,000,000 in war loans, and when he left office had accumulated £15,000,000 in surpluses. This gives some idea what our war finance was like. An important change came over New Zealand borrowing. Ballance in the early nineties promised to stop borrowing, but of course this proved impossible. Britain continued to lend. But as wealth increased, so did the capacity to save, and Governments were able to borrow locally. Fifty-five of Ward’s eighty millions came from New Zealand lenders. The war increased the outward prosperity of the country. There were not many homes that were not darkened by bereavement or anxiety, but save for the laying of mines in our waters, which cost a few lives, the country was not touched by the actual hand of war. The White Ensign was rarely seen. The battle for sea-power on which victory ultimately depended, was fought thousands of miles away. It is ironical to recall that Japanese cruisers appeared in our harbours as convoy escorts. Some ships trading to Britain were lost through submarine or raider action, but the bulk of our immense export of produce arrived to help in sustaining Britain’s strength. There was no shortage of food here. Arrivals from Britain stared at our butter dishes and sugar bowls. Commandeering of produce for export, at liberal prices, was one of a long series of regulations controlling the busi-
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ness and conduct of citizens. There are now many New Zealanders who cannot remember the time when one could get a drink lawfully in a hotel bar after six in the evening. The liquor question continued to agitate the community. The first vote on national prohibition had been taken in 1911. Prohibitionists polled a majority of votes, but not the proportion required for victory. Subsequently voters were given the alternative of State control of the traffic, but this was not accepted. Save for a few no-license districts New Zealand is still a “ wet ” country, and the trade is still in private hands.
It is absurd to say that war settles nothing, but in the moment of victory people are inclined to another absurdity, that it settles everything. In relief from the agony of war. New Zealand was entitled to rejoice. The nation was a victor, and amid the experience of a later war against the same enemy we can form a clearer and more terrible picture of what defeat would have meant. Participation in the war had deepened the sense of nationhood. New Zealanders had fought in the gate beside men from the Motherland, and against a nation whose chief industry was war. In that fight New Zealand had won much honour. Right to full partnership in the conduct of Imperial affairs had been recognised. A task far greater than had ever been foreseen had been well done, overseas and at home. But the price had been heavy. Much of the flower of New Zealand manhood—men who in 10 or 20 or 30 years would
have been prominent in agriculture, industry, the professions, the arts, or the service of the State—slept in foreign lands. The finance of the war did not discourage personal and public extravagance and inflation of values. There was nothing in victory to help to solve a string of domestic problems, such as the best use of the land, population, conflict of interest between the farmer and the manufacturer, and transport. Indeed the conditions of the new time made some of these more difficult. And it was a new time, though the extent to which it differed from the prewar world was only gradually unfolded. We should see
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the Armistice period between the wars, 1918-1939, as one in which New Zealanders, like people elsewhere, were jolted and bewildered by the attack of new forces, internal and external. Ballance and Seddon and Reeves had worked on foundations that they felt to be secure and permanent. The old Victorian idea of order and even automatic progress still ruled. The first world war destroyed that security. When Woodrow Wilson talked of making the world safe for democracy, he meant political democracy. The post-war years were soon to show that this was not enough. Economic democracy began to make stronger and stronger claims. The old system of unrestricted competition, which had been shaken by the world war, was increasingly challenged. Much of the direction of trade war passed from private firms to State Departments. Governments took more and more control of production and trade, and though private enterprise protested in theory against State interference, it often asked for State protection when it was threatened. Farmer and manufacturer, assisted by science, whose pace in research was accelerating very rapidly, produced more and more, but it became a question where the product was to be sold. Many millions of people in the world, even in countries classed as civilized according to Western standards, lacked food and clothing, yet food and raw material were deliberately destroyed or withheld from production. Disillusionment gradually seeped through the victor nations, and weakened the will to stand up to new enemies. There was a tremendous ferment of ideas, and it was helped by the march of science. Aviation brought the ends of the earth much closer. Australia was reached from England in a few days, and in the thirties New Zealand was sending its letters to Britain by air mail. Radio arrived to open to mankind vast fields of entertainment and instruction, and to give propaganda an instrument of enormous power. Without radio, the extent of the dictatorships of Germany and Italy would hardly have been possible. Science produced artificial substances which challenged natural products, and
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thereby threatened to upset whole national economics, including our own. Communism was the political and economic creed of a nation of 142,000,000 people in the Soviet Republics (the figure for 1918) and Fascism seized power in two other great European countries. The League
of Nations was powerless to check rampant nationalism. On this world, already swaying and cracking under the strain of war losses, debts, oppression, poverty, denial of intercourse, hatred, and the impact of new ideas, on this world slipping from control by old formulae, there fell in the twenties and thirties, a devastating economic depression. Britain was hard hit by this storm, and Britain was New Zealand’s principal market. Prices to the New Zealand producer fell, but his costs did not fall; they rose. This, and the general fear that the British market might fail, made up the most important New Zealand condition in the armistice period, and the redressing of the balance was the hardest task of New Zealanders.
Of all the oversea Prime Ministers, Massey was the most strongly opposed to the idea of separate sovereign status for the Dominions. He believed that the Dominions should be more closely related to the Motherland, not move away. He did not like the League. “ Let us leave the League of Nations to fools like Bob Cecil,” he said on his way home from the Peace Conference.* Yet he signed the Peace Treaty. He did so, we may presume, because everybody else did, and because New Zealand was to get German Samoa as a mandate. Massey said that in signing the Treaty he did not see New Zealand as a sovereign State, but less than 10 years later the New Zealand Government made a commercial treaty with Japan without going through the British Foreign Office, and did so by virtue of “ the general sovereign power of New Zealand.” The Statute of Westminster defined the Dominions as autonomous communities within the Empire, but New Zealand, though it was consulted about the Statute’s form, has never ratified the
* 1 he author had this from the late H. D. Bamtord, a leading Auckland barrister, who heard Massey say it.
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document*. By our Constitution, the Governor-General must be “ guided by the advice ” of his Ministers, but if he sees reason to dissent from that, he may report the matter to His Majesty. How often, if ever, His Excellency so reports does not appear to be known. What seems to be clear is that we are master in our own house even to the point of making treaties. To explain our exact constitutional status to a foreigner might be as difficult as trying to get him to understand the game of cricket. New Zealand was regularly represented at League meetings, but interest in the League grew slowly, and until the Labour Government took a line of its own at Geneva over collective security, our delegates voted with Britain. In some quarters indeed, criticism of British foreign policy was still regarded as almost impious. For some time the Government declined to send representatives to the League’s Labour Conferences, on the doubtful ground that New Zealand had nothing to learn. It did not seem to strike Ministers that New Zealand might have something to teach. This brief reference to our external relations may be rounded off with a fact that in 1923 New Zealand extended its jurisdiction to the coasts of the Ross Sea in the far south, so that today the empire of New Zealand stretches from the tropics to the Antarctic.
Soldier settlement and transport were front-rank controversies in the years after the war. There was general agreement that the returned soldier must be treated handsomely, and millions were spent on settling him on the land. Unfortunately prices of land were generally high. Even when produce prices kept up, some of these settlers had a hard struggle, and when markets fell there was a good deal of distress. Farms had to be revalued and finance readjusted. The soldier-farmer, however, was not alone in this respect, for ultimately the State had to intervene all over the country to save the mortgagor, and (as some one said) to protect the mortgagee against himself. The new
* Early in 1944 it was announced that the present Parliament would be asked to ratify the Statute of Westminster.
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factor in transport was the internal combustion engine in private car, lorry, service car and omnibus. Henry Ford was little less of a benefactor to New Zealand than to his own countrymen, for New Zealand came to have, next to America and Canada, the largest proportion of motor vehicles in the world. The effect on social and economic life was marked. The farmer was put in closer touch with town. New Zealanders were discouraged from taking the healthiest of exercises—walking; on the other hand, the car enabled them to see much more of their own country. A car became not only a necessity for business and pleasure, but a social badge. In a cartoon Mr. Gordon Minhinnick drew a doctor bringing the news to an anxiously waiting husband. “ Congratulations, my dear sir. A nice little two sealer.” So much for the coming of life. Death and injury were deplorably common on the roads, but curiously enough this excited much less public interest than the competition of a car with other forms of transport. City tramways, railways, and steamer services all lost business to the car. Lorries picked the eyes out of railway traffic. Some shipping services had to be discontinued. It was no use appealing to travellers to use branch railways (their own property), with perhaps one or two trains a day, when there was a more convenient and faster service car. The most important question was whether the State would use its powers to crush its competitor. The problem was resolved by the acceptance of motor transport and the introduction of a system of licensing and co-ordination, with a Transport Department at the top, another extension of State Control. The railways were hard hit, some branch lines were closed, and construction on main lines was frozen. It was contended for a time that no more railways should be built. On the other hand, under the stimulus of competition, the attitude of the Railways Department to the public became more friendly, indeed genial. Sometimes the method of the Department had been faintly reminiscent of the Irish fish shop that closed down because it was bothered by people asking for fish morning.
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noon, and night; now it chased business. The universal vogue of motoring produced first-class roads. What in coaching days had been considered a good surface did not satisfy the motorist, so concrete and tar-sealed roads were built. Main highways became a national concern and were placed under the control of a Board. In addition to registration fees the motorist paid tyre and petrol taxes, and the money went to give him better roads. It became possible to travel all the way from Wellington to Auckland without passing over the shortest stretch of bad road in the old sense of the term. Indeed many of the younger generation have never seen a really rough road or a dusty one. This criss-crossing of the country with smooth highways, along which traffic purrs contentedly, is a spectacular manifestation of national progress in a hundred years. The bush track of the pioneer, as the title of this book indicates, has become the highway of the limousine and the lorry. But for the good of their souls New Zealanders should bear in mind that this is material progress, and apply to their society the remark of Matthew Arnold. Of what good is it to travel at sixty miles an hour from Wellington to Auckland if we only go from an illiberal life in Wellington to an illiberal life in Auckland? This period also saw the coming of air transport. New Zealand had trained a few airmen in the first world war, but the remoteness of the country made air travel development somewhat slow. The country woke up, however, when in 1928 Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith made the first successful flight from Australia. The first licensed air transport service began business in 1934. Of all the resultant reductions in travel time, perhaps the most interesting has been in journeys across Cook Strait. On a long sinuous course to Nelson, the steamer takes eight hours; the traveller by air gets there, on a direct course, in forty-five minutes. The post-war years also saw a great extension in the State’s use of water power for the generation of electricity. New Zealand has not yet produced natural oil in any substantial quantity, but its lakes and rivers offer a vast store of
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energy for harnessing by the engineer. The State has built or taken over a chain of generating stations in both islands, and in each island the stations are linked to form one system. With so much cheap current available, New Zealanders have become electrically minded. Gas has been entirely superseded by electricity for town lightning; numbers of farms use current in the house and the milking shed; and tens of thousands of electric motors drive machinery in factories.
Before we follow the trail of the political movements that led up to the historic change of 1935, we may notice some trends in New Zealand life. The growing difficulties and anxieties of the period did not weaken the people’s resolution and resourcefulness. To economic attacks were added two disastrous earthquakes, one in the MurchisonKaramea district, 1929, and one in Hawkes Bay, 1931. The first caused seventeen deaths, but it occurred in a sparsely populated district. The second, less severe as an earth movement, struck Napier and Hastings and killed 255 people—our worst visitation of the kind. Relief and reconstruction work was admirably organised. The impact of new problems was more stimulating to the New Zealand mind than the more cushioned and less questioned prosperity of a few years earlier. Ideas began to command more respect. Research made headway. There was a growing realisation that, in the words of Mr. Oliver Duff’s New Zealand Now, the nation “had come to the end of blind living. We can no longer dig gold out of the ground with a butcher-knife as Gabriel Read did, or put a match to the bush and wait till the rain and a little fertiliser bring gold out of the ashes.” Agricultural and pastoral methods were improved more rapidly. Today, for example. New Zealand is breeding grasses whose seeds are in demand all over the world. The expert commanded more attention. When the slump came the Government surrounded itself with what may be called a Brains Trust. University professors, who had been gradually emancipated from pioneering conditions (when they taught more than one subject
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with little or no assistance) became official and unofficial advisers ; they formed a majority on the Economic Commission that the beleaguered Government appointed in 1932. There was a widespread up-surge of public interest in economics, which manifested itself in a spate of articles and pamphlets. Professional standards were advanced. Architecture, helped by the establishment of a fully-fledged university school in Auckland, began to come into its own. Domestic architecture improved, and some of the public buildings of the period would grace any city. New Zealanders began to realise that a librarian should be something more than a pleasant hander-out and recommender of fiction. There was no sweeping reorganisation of education, but much searching of heart, and acceptance of new ideas. In industry the conflict went on between those who held that “ secondary ” industry must be strictly subordinated to the business of producing food and raw material, and those who argued that such a national development was lop-sided. “ Secondary ” industries, though restricted by the size of the poulation and the difficulty of finding an export market, steadily widened their field and improved their quality. Faced with the possibility of a reduced market for their food products in Britain, New Zealanders began to think seriously of a better balanced economy, with more jobs in the factory as those on the land became fewer. Import tariffs had provided moderate protection for home manufacturers, but in 1936, under the Labour Government, a policy of import selection gave definite encouragement to the country’s own factory products, regardless of tariffs or high exchange. The skill and resourcefulness of the New Zealand manufacturer and artisan were amply demonstrated when in the second world war they were suddenly called on to increase their outputs and turn their hands to many kinds of war work entirely new to them. That Bren gun carriers and hand grenades were supplied to troops overseas was not more surprising than that Russians marched to victory in New Zealand boots.
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In pictorial art New Zealand was still looking for a formula, but it was freeing itself from the convention of an oleographed Milford Sound and the conservative tradition of the Royal Academy. New Zealand sent David Low to England, and in Gordon Minhinnick (not native it is true, but we gave him the opportunity) it has a cartoonist whom some rank not far below that world figure. The cinema conquered New Zealand as it has conquered every other country. American films have been by far the most popular, but of late years British products have reduced the gap considerably. The competition of the screen, and high travelling costs, have almost completely banished the visiting company from New Zealand theatres, but the country is now dotted with repertory societies, and there are the faint beginnings of a local drama. Broadcasting came to New Zealand in the twenties. The first national service was provided by a company operating under charter from the Government. The next stage was board control on 8.8.C. lines. The Labour Government brought broadcasting under direct ministerial control, and put Parliament on the air. New Zealand was the first country to broadcast Parliamentary debates.
Of the arts, literature showed most plainly the influence of new ideas. From the beginning New Zealand had a tradition of good prose, brought from Britain and maintained amid the distractions of pioneering. By the end of the century the country was producing some authentic poetry, and showing signs of a national spirit in letters generally. The first war helped literature by deepening the sense of nationhood. Besides, what was called the “ mother-fixation ” complex was weakening. Third and fourth generations of New Zealanders felt less dependent on Britain for ideas and models, and thought and wrote as children of their own land. This post-war time was the period of Katherine Mansfield. It is true she had to go abroad to develop her art, but she remained a New Zealander to the end. In this period, too, appeared Eileen Duggan, whose poetry critics in England and America
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have read with delight. A goodly company of poets arose in those armistice years, men and women who had something new to say, and often said it with a new accent. As in Britain, old beliefs and values were challenged. Some of these writers were victims of the depression. But for this suffering, they might have been less bitter, but the “ fundamental brain-stuff ” of their verse might have been less closely knit. “ Tutira ” by Herbert Guthrie-Smith, was published then, that fascinating mixture of pioneering, natural history and philosophy, which some think is the best New Zealand book. There was a decided advance in the New Zealand novel. What was equally important, New Zealanders began to be really interested in New Zealand books, and especially novels. Previously there had not seemed to be anything very attractive in the romance at one’s own door, but in the thirties this took a bound forward into popularity. This was good for authors and encouraging to local publishers, who showed considerable enterprise. When the national centennial arrived in 1940, literature was well to the fore in the celebrations. The Government’s series of centennial surveys was admirably written and printed. By that time, too, the Labour Government, for the benefit of certain writers whose distinguished service to letters had brought them little material reward, had established literary pensions.
The greatest hindrance to the development of the arts was the dominant factor in our problems, lack of population, and this was largely responsible for another noteworthy condition, export of brains. Numbers of young men and women of outstanding ability went abroad, and too many stayed there. Compared with the great world, there were few opportunities at home. They made their mark in every profession and calling and were to be found in all sorts of places. One retired headmaster met in England nearly the whole of his top form of a few years earlier. Ten years after the School of Architecture was founded in Auckland, Professor C. R. Knight, its head, was entertained in London by some twenty of his old
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students. When the National Broadcasting Service dealt with “ New Zealand Brains Abroad ” in the centennial year, there was material for ten talks without exhausting the subject. It began to strike New Zealanders that though a certain amount of outward flow was desirable as well as inevitable, a greater effort should be made to keep more of the best talent at home, or to attract it back.
In the politics of the period, there were two main movements, the union of the old rivals, Liberals and Reformers, and the rise of Labour to the Opposition benches and finally to office. The war-time coalition was dissolved in 1919, and in the subsequent elections Massey secured his biggest majority and Ward lost his seat. After the next elections Massey carried on with difficulty. In the meantime the economic storm had begun to blow up. When Massey died in 1925, he was still in office. Had Mr. Downie Stewart, the philosopher and man of letters of the party, enjoyed robust health, he would probably have succeeded to the Premiership, but the choice fell on Gordon Coates. Historians may busy themselves with the question why Mr. Coates, the party’s most outstanding personality in later years, did not take and maintain a stronger hold on the confidence of the people. He was young and vigorous; he had a good war record ; and as a Minister he had shown energy and enterprise. In the elections following his promotion he was given a large majority. It is true he had little cultural background, but that is not uncommon in our politics. He was conservative one week and radical the next, but the pressure of new problems tended to produce that kind of apparent inconsistency. His careful dressing and innocent swagger irritated some. New Zealanders seem to prefer a leader to be like themselves. He was apt to be impatient with the importunate. He found it hard to live up to the picture of himself drawn by his party’s propagandists. It is certain that he was the victim of slanderous gossip. It is also certain that he was over-loyal to the personnel of the party. He was urged to rejuvenate the party, but took the line that he owed a great deal to
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its old followers. However, the new Prime Minister’s views and disposition were not the only factors. He encountered bad times. Over importation and falling prices had caused trouble early in the twenties. In 1926-27 the great depression began with a trebling of unemployment. Falling prices were not the only cause ; there was that world-wide condition, mechanisation. On farm and in factory more and better machines were being used. By 1928, election year, unemployment was a good deal worse. Dissatisfied with the Government’s handling of unemployment and its general policy, the electors reduced Coates’s party to 28, and sent back in the same strength the United Party (the Liberals under another name) led by Ward. It was the most astonishing “ come-back ” in our history, but a tragic one, for Ward was a dying man ; in the last months of his Premiership he was bed ridden and no one seemed to know exactly where power resided. Rather than see Reform continue in office, Labour made a United Party Government possible. There were so many new members in the United Party that four of them stepped right into the Cabinet. Ward’s chief election plank, a loan of seventy millions for public works, was never built into the national structure. Ward resigned in 1930 and died shortly afterwards. He was succeeded by Mr. George Forbes, a highly respected veteran, of whom Dr. Beaglehole says, in his history of New Zealand, that he had spent a lengthy period in Parliament without giving rise to the suspicion that he would one day lead it. Mr. Forbes is so honest a man and so good a sportsman that we can easily imagine him agreeing with this estimate. It should be added that it was personal ambition and driving force and not native shrewdness that he lacked.
The pressure of events was now irresistible. It was felt that to deal effectively with the problems of the hour, and to meet the growing power of Labour, union was necessary, so in 1931 a Coalition Government was formed, with Forbes as leader and Coates second in command. The result was to make Labour, for the second
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1 *9
time, the official Opposition, but with this vital difference, that there were now only two parties, and Labour could present itself to the country as the only possible alternative government. This was just what Labour wanted. It came back from the elections of 1931 twenty-five strong. The party had been led for ten years by Henry Holland, an Australian, who had been prominent in the movement for a longer period. Mr. Holland belonged to the left wing of the party. “He believed,” says Dr. Scholefield (“ Dictionary of New Zealand Biography ”) “ in increasing socialism rather than in reforming capitalism to make it more social,” but he wanted all shades of Labour opinion in a strong, vigorous, well-organised party. This party he marshalled and drilled into a fighting force. Holland’s devotion to the cause of Labour was complete. To his leadership he brought untiring industry, uncompromising adherence to principle, a deep and intimate knowledge of the wage-earner’s problems, and an exceptional gift of exposition, both in writing and speech. He was among the few of our political leaders who wrote poetry.
The storm was now nearing its height. It blew not only from the hills of New Zealand, but from a stricken world. In two years the value of exports and imports dropped by many millions. The price of wool fell so low that sometimes it hardly paid to carry it to the local market. Unemployment figures soared. Those out of work came from every class, because every kind of trade and industry was hit by the depression. Farmers had to leave their farms. Many were kept on by mortgagees wise enough to see that a good caretaker might be more profitable in the long run than a doubtful newcomer (if one could be got), and that the assets must be protected. Workers from city offices and factories were thrown on the market, and since many of them were specialists it proved very difficult or impossible to find them suitable work. At the highest point in 1931, there were roughly 54,000 men on the registers and wholly or in part a charge on the Unemployment Fund. In 1933 the maximum rose to 79,000. This,
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bear in mind, was in a population of only a million and a half. These figures far from represented the total of distress. New Zealand had been backward in the handling of unemployment. It had allowed Britain to get a lead of many years in the introduction of unemployment insurance. There was still a widespread belief that if a man was out of work it was his own fault. There were New Zealanders who declared scornfully that they would never have the “ dole ” in their country. (What an unfortunate term that has been !) Even generally well-informed men did not know that the British system was contributory. The Government tried to carry on for a time on the principle of “ no work no pay,” but eventually it had to introduce sustenance payments; the “ dole ” had arrived. By that time New Zealanders were being taxed for unemployment relief, so the system was really contributory.
The Government held that the budget must be balanced. Costs must be reduced. Ultimately they decided that the national income must be artificially increased by raising the rate of exchange on England. Costs meant wages and interest rates. Wages came down, and by an amendment of the law labour unions were virtually denied access to the Arbitration Court. (Women workers were excepted). Civil servants’ salaries were cut twice. Pensions, even those for the aged, were reduced. Interest rates
on mortgages were pruned by legal process, and the competent farmer whose inability to pay his debts was due to the depression was protected. The internal national debt was converted to a lower interest rate. The exchange rate on England was arbitrarily raised at one bound from ten to twenty-five per cent. This put more money into the farmers’ pockets, but it raised strong protests from other interests. It cost the Government the services of Mr. Downie Stewart, Minister of Finance, who resigned in disapproval. Coates took over the department. He was by far the most energetic and conspicuous member of the Government. Whether he was wise or not, he acted. It was he who, in setting up the Reserve Bank, made the
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historic break in the close relationship between the Government and the trading banks. The Reserve Bank, originally a public utility corporation, was given control of exchange, sole right of note isue, and the handling of Government accounts. The general trend of government under these non-Labour Ministries was towards more State or semi-State control of industry and finance. There was a Meat Board and a Dairy Board, and an Executive Commission of Agriculture, to advise the Government on marketing and production. The Commission made important recommendations for eliminating wasteful methods in the land industries. For the unemployed themselves the Government provided relief work (directly or subsidised) at low rates, and sustenance payments. The unemployed worked on farms, cleared or drained waste land, planted trees, made and tidied roads, trapped rabbits, and looked for gold. There was no comprehensive national scheme of development. Public works expenditure was severely cut, and railway construction almost ceased. The Government was not impressed by the argument that now was the time to push on public works in anticipation of brighter days. Private charity was kept busy supplementing the relief of the State. During seven months of 1932 the Auckland City Mission provided 37.000 free beds and 102,080 free meals, and in one year the Mission doctor had 8,200 consultations.*
Under-feeding and insufficiency of clothing may have sown the seeds of future disease, but it is a fact that, while the birth-rate dropped in this period, the death rate remained steady. There was, however, a great deal of hardship, and not a little misery, and as the months went by discontent deepened and became bitter. Numbers of unemployed were put into camps on low wages and separated from their wives and families. A men’s cheerless camp out of town in winter was an ideal breeding ground for grievances.
* Quoted from the Mission records by Dr. W. B. Sutch in Social Security in New Zealand.
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Backblocks camps for the outcast, the superfluous,
reading back-date magazines, rolling cheap cigarettes, not mated ;
witnesses to the constriction of life essential
to the maintenance of the rate of profit
as distinct from the gross increment of wealth.
So wrote one of the victims of the depression. Many were put to cleaning-up work on roads and in parks, and this “ weed-chopping,” which became a symbol of unproductive labour, bred a sense of futility. Some relief workers, discharged from black-coated jobs, were unused to manual labour, and fared badly. Conditions embittered class feeling. There were well fed and well housed citizens who were pained at the sight of relief workers leaning on their shovels. It would have been interesting to put these onlookers in the workers’ place and see how long they could have worked without a spell. Women were taxed for the Unemployment Fund, but were denied the organisation and payments provided for men. Since relief wages were lower than standard wages, there was a temptation to employ relief workers at the expense of ordinary hands. Good intentions, and there was an abundance of these in the official world, were not enough. In the handling of so wide and difficult a problem, for which so much machinery had to be erected quickly, there was inevitably some muddling, and every blunder added to the discontent. The worst outbreak of this feeling occurred in Auckland one night in 1932. A procession of unemployed marched to the Town Hall, where a section of civil servants were meeting to protest against wages cuts. There was an ugly clash between police and unemployed, and after this men ran down Queen Street and smashed most of the shop windows. A little later a deputation of unemployed in Wellington waited vainly in the grounds of Parliament Buildings to interview the Minister, and then descended on the main streets of the capital to break windows.
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The increasing number of people who were looking to the Labour Party for something better than the Government was giving, were not deterred by this lawlessness. They may have had no very clear idea how wealth could be distributed more equitably, but many were struck by the irony of men, women and children lacking food, clothing and shelter in a land of such plenty. The Government thought the times so grave that it prolonged the life of Parliament for a year, which increased the discontent. Before the four years were up the worst of the depression was over. Wages began to rise. But the impress on the popular mind was too deep to be affected. The Reform Party—Conservatives or Tories, their opponents called them—had been in office, either singly or in coalition, with only one break, for twenty-three years. As a team, the Government was not impressive. When in the middle of the crisis, a middle-aged nonenity was appointed Minister of Public Works, many New Zealanders were shocked. The old interests, it was felt, were still powerful, and youth and vigour were not wanted. The Labour Party never ceased preparing for the battle. In the unions it had always had an organisation of great strength which never put aside its arms, but it now appealed to a wider public. The radicalminded and dissatisfied in all classes turned to it for relief. To the coming victory the middle class contributed largely. The Labour Party’s leader, Holland, died suddenly in 1933, and was succeeded by Michael Joseph Savage, also an Australian, who had lived in New Zealand for nearly thirty years. The change strengthened the party in its appeal to the country. Holland had been very definitely associated with the militant wing of the party. In his passionate advocacy of social and economic change, there was an acrid note. As a leader. Savage was just as determined, but in disposition and style he was quiet and amiable. No political surgeon recommending a major operation ever had a more soothing bedside manner. Waverers felt that a man so gentle and kindly and personally popular, could not be a red revolutionist. Dairy
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farmers were promised a minimum guaranteed price, regardless of the oversea market, and thus the old rural allegiance to the conservative side was seriously weakened. At the end of 1935 the parties went to the polls, and the result was the greatest victory and defeat in the history of our politics. Labour came back with 55 seats in a House of eighty. In December 1935 the first Labour Ministry took office, with Savage as Prime Minister.
Here, with the briefest summary of what has happened since 1935, our story must stop. Like Ballance in the nineties, the Labour Government went full speed ahead with its social and economic programme. Access to the Arbitration Court was restored. Membership of unions was made compulsory. The working week was reduced to forty hours, the Reserve Bank was taken over, and, to steady exchange, imports were controlled. The Government took full powers to control marketing of produce. The principle of a guaranteed price for produce was made law, and dairy farmers were paid on this system. Full-scale expenditure on public works was resumed, and the Government resolved to close the railway gaps. Thousands of State-owned houses were built by a specially created department. But the legislation that attracted most attention at home and abroad was the Social Security Act. This recast the pensions law on a basis of universal contributions and benefits partly universal and partly dependent on income. The benefits to which everybody was entitled included general practice medical attention, hospital treatment, and unemployment allowances. Sir William Beveridge, author of the Beveridge Plan for Britain, acknowledged his indebtedness to New Zealand. The elections of 1938 left no doubt as to the opinion of the country on this programme. The Labour Party was returned with but little reduction in its great strength.
Then came the war of 1939. There was not the slightest thought of neutrality. Of her own free will, as in 1914, New Zealand placed herself by the side of Britain, and the Prime Minister’s words, “ Where Britain goes we go, where
A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW ZEALAND
■25
she stands, we stand,” were in the same strain as Massey’s. Savage died in March 1940, and was succeeded as Prime Minister by Mr. Peter Fraser. The story of New Zealand’s war effort is written on the sea, on land, in the air, on farms and in factories. It is written in Greece, Libya and Italy, (when we read that our sons and brothers were fighting on Mt. Olympus we felt that history had exhausted its capacity to surprise), in islands of the Pacific, in the Battle of the River Plate, and on all the other seas ; over sea and land from Iceland to the Pacific; and, in humbler but still essential accents, in the home front record of harder work, skilful adaptation, and cheerful shouldering of unexpected tasks. At the time of writing one fourth of the whole male population has seen full-time military service, and more than 100,000 have gone oversea.
As these last words are written, the war is at its height. There is no thought but of victory. “ A lovely land of the faithful ” was a visitor’s description of us during the struggle. “ 1 left their land believing their good earth to be the cleaniest and loveliest in the world.”* Praise is not necessarily to be rejected because we feel it is not fully deserved. Wise men are at once humbled by praise and spurred on to deserve it.
*Mr. Leonard Brockington, K.C
INDEX
Akaroa, settlement, 31.
King, Sir Truby, 88, 93
Allen, Sir James, 102.
Kingi, Wiremu,’ 38, 40, 52, 55
Arbitration Court, 83-8-
Atkinson, Sir Harry. 59, 77-78.
Knight, Professor C. R., 116
Kooti, Te, 58-60, 62
Auckland, foundation, 34-35.
Kororareka (Russell), 16, 22, 29, 30, 34, 38.
Ballance, John, 63, 80-82, 86, 88.
Bell, Sir Francis, 102. C • T-l
Laix)ur, legislation and conditions, 79-81, 83, 84, 99, 103. 104.
Browne. Sir Thomas Gore, 52.
Burns, Rev. Thomas, 43
Busby, James, 23, 30
Land Policy, 79, 80, 82, 83, 103.
Butler, Samuel, 45
Liquor Question, 84, 85
Cameron, General, 56, 62
Maori, migrations and life, 1113; contact with missionaries, 19-21; wars between tribes, 21, 22; wars with the British, 38-40, 51-63; in World Wars, 62, 105
Canterbury, foundation, 43. 44
Chute, General, 56
Coates, Gordon, 117, 118; 120
Cook, Captain, 14, 15
Dairy Farming, 95, 96
Mackay, Jessie, 87
Duggan, Eileen, 115
McKenzie, Sir John, 81-83
Durham, Lord, 23
Mackenzie, Sir Thomas, 102
Maclaurin, Richard, 87
Mair, Gilbert, 59
Education, 45, 49, 72, 87
Mansfield, Katherine, 115
Harris, Sir William, 87, 88
Fitzßoy, Captain, 37, 39
Marsden, Samuel, 19
Forbes, George, 118
Martin, Sir William. 46
France and New Zealand, 15, 18, 22, 29-31
Massey, W. F., 10M06, 109, 117
Minhinnick, Gordon, 111, 115
Fraser, Peter, 125
Missionaries, 19-23, 25, 26, 29 30
Freyberg, Sir Bernard, 105
Glenelg, Lord, 25 son, foundation. 32
Nelson, foundation. 32
Gold, Discovery, 50
Nene, Waka, 39
Gorst, Sir John, 54
New Plymouth, foundation, 32
Guthrie-Smith, Herbert, 116
Grey, Sir George, 39-41, 46, 47, 54, 55, 62, 63, 65, 78, 79, 81, 89.
Had field, Bishop, 38
Hall, Sir John, 78
Heke, Hone, 38, 39
Hobson, Captain, 29, 30, 32-35
Holland, Henry, 119, 123
Hongi, 21.
New Zealand, geographical features, 9-11; discovery, 11,13,14; name, 14; annexation, 29-31; relations with Britain. 45-47, 62, 63, 71, 73, 74, 90, 91, 109, 110; constitution, 46-49, 100, 109, 110; economic development, 70, 71, 76-78, 83, 95 99, 107-114, 118-123; society and characteristics, 42, 43, 71-76. 86, 87. 92-91, 96-99. 107, 108, 111-117; sport, 73; literature and art, 115, 116
Jones, Johnny, 16
120
A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW ZEALAND
127
Normanby, Lord, 25, 29, 33
Stephen, Sir James. 25
Stewart, W. Downie, 117, 120
Otago, foundation, 43
Tasman, Abel, 11, 13, 14
Porter, Colonel. 60
Tempsky, von, 59
Provincial Government, 46-50
Public Works, 49, 64-67, 69, 70. 121
Vogel, Sir Julius, 64-66
Puni, Te. 40
Waitangi, Treaty, 30, 36, 46. 51, 52
Rangihaeata, Te, 37, 40
Wanganui, foundation, 40
Rangihiwinui, Te, 59
Rauparaha, Te, 18, 21, 37
Read, Gabriel, 51
Wakefield, Arthur, 37; Edward Gibbon, 24, 26, 29, 33, 34, 43, 46; William, 24, 26, 27, 34
Reeves, W. P., 81-83, 87, 89 34
Richmond, C. W., 52
Ropata, 59
War, South African, 90, 91; World No. I, 100, 104-7; No. 2, 124, 125; (for wars in New Zealand see “Maori”)
Savage, M. 104. 123-125
.uuuii , Ward, Sir Joseph, 81, 83, 99-101 106, 117, 118
Seddon, R. J., 82, 85-91, 99
Selwyn, Bishop, 38, 46, 51
Wellington, foundation, 26, 27, 29
Sewell, Henry, 49
Sheep farming, 42, 45, 75, 77 96
Williams, Henry, 19, 30, 38
Woman’s Franchise, 78, 84, 8:
Reproduced by courtesy of Lands & Survey Dept.
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Bibliographic details
APA: Mulgan, Alan. (1944). From track to highway : a short history of New Zealand. Whitcombe & Tombs.
Chicago: Mulgan, Alan. From track to highway : a short history of New Zealand. Christchurch, N.Z.: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1944.
MLA: Mulgan, Alan. From track to highway : a short history of New Zealand. Whitcombe & Tombs, 1944.
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From track to highway : a short history of New Zealand Mulgan, Alan, Whitcombe & Tombs, Christchurch, N.Z., 1944
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