New Zealand Newest England

IN a journey two years ago among the coöperators of Great Britain, I undertook to study on the ground the results of this notable attempt to better industrial civilization by individual effort and voluntary organization. There the people are trying to settle the labor and capital question by playing both parts themselves and becoming their own employers and masters ; and they are even attacking the landlord and tenant problem, and setting up to be their own landed nobility.

The world of coöperation — " a state within a state ” — is a non-political democracy developing within the political government, an economic republic arising within the monarchical industries of Europe, an instance of emancipation of the people by the people themselves, unique for its independence of outside aid and for its accelerating success.

This year I went to New Zealand, to see what had been done for the same end, a higher social life, by opposite methods, those of politics, in the country in which those methods have been given the best trial. That that country is New Zealand will be admitted by all, — by those who approve and by those who disapprove. New Zealand democracy is the talk of the world to-day. It has made itself the policeman and partner of industry to an extent unknown elsewhere. New Zealand is the " experiment station ” of advanced legislation. Reforms that others have been only talking about New Zealand has put in practice, and it has anticipated the others in some they had not even begun to talk about.

The New Zealanders, Sir Charles Dilke says, have put into practical operation more of the " radical ideas ” that are under discussion at the present time than any other people. South Australia, founded, as I heard Chief Justice Way declare, upon “ philosophical radicalism,”once had the first place, and when Dilke wrote his Greater Britain virtually was the leader ; but now, by common consent, that rank belongs to New Zealand.

Coöperation is the “Farthest North" in the sphere of self-help. New Zealand democracy is the “ Farthest South ” in the sphere of politics, which must still be called “ self-help ; ” for in a democracy, in self-government, state-help is selfhelp.

This country, with the newest institutions, has the oldest land, Alfred Russel Wallace tells us, and his opinion is confirmed by colonial geologists ; but if the first to be made, it is the last to be used. When the Maoris reached it, about five hundred years ago, they found it almost wholly destitute of food plants or food animals, except a few unappetizing but, as the event proved, not indigestible aborigines. It was an unfurnished house; even the rat was imported, and by accident, in the canoes of the first Maoris. Cattle, game, cereals, vegetables, fruit, men, and institutions have all had to be provided, and the process is still going on. The ship on which I sailed carried, besides other American passengers, three hundred and fifty Kansas quail, sent for by the New Zealand Acclimatization Society ; and I arrived in time to see the first quarter’s payment made to worn-out working men and women by the only people in Christendom who have been willing to tax every one of themselves for old-age pensions.

New Zealand lies about as far to the south of the equator as Japan to the north. It is, like Japan, a group of islands, and is not unlike Japan in the lay of the land, running in a long, narrow strip about fifteen hundred miles north and south, and is like Japan in a beauty of scenery which even the coolest traveler finds it hard not to rave about. This country lies midway between the extremes of the tropics and the pole, and is cooled by the mountains and the sea, with plenty of rain and sunshine, and all that rain and sunshine bring. Australia is a sunburned continent, desert in the interior and almost without rivers, rimmed with a fertile coast line, with droughts lasting for years. The New Zealander begins to grumble about the “drought ” if he goes a month without rain. The New Zealand climate is like a wine with no headache in it; like that of Japan, — the best, though not the most perfect, to be found anywhere. It has the variability that gives vigor, without the perpetual smile that makes Hawaii so depressing, if you outstay its first welcome. The soil is largely a wash from the mountains, and you hear nothing of the malaria which plays such mischief with the early settlers in the Mississippi Valley and in Africa.

Almost every New Zealander lives within sight of the mountains or the ocean, or both. The landscapes show long ranges and solitary giants, tipped with alpine glow : there are waterfalls everywhere, some of them among the finest in the world, luxuriant countryside, golden farms, lakes, geysers, volcanoes, forests with miles of pink, white, and red flowering trees in spring : and there are fiords of the sea threading their way around the feet of mountains crowned with glaciers and perpetual snow. The scenery is a synopsis of the best of Norway, Switzerland, Italy, and England, with occasional patches of the Desert of Sahara in the pumice country around the hot lakes.

New Zealand has the area, approximately, of Italy, but Italy has forty times its population of about 780,000, 40,000 of them Maoris. Australia is as large as the United States without Alaska, but has only a little more than one twentieth of our population, and only one ninetyfifth of that of Europe, which it equals in area, but in area only. We speak commonly of New Zealand and Australia as if they were in hail of each other; but New Zealand is half as far from Australia as America is from Europe, and they are stormy waters that guard those shores. He will need to be a bolder and more successful invader than Philip of Spain who proposes to land hostile troops on the coast of this Britain of the Pacific.

It is not so much the fashion as it used to be to interpret men and their institutions in the terms of their climate and soil ; but if any people and any institutions are, and will be more and more, affected by these things, they are those of Australasia. This is especially true of New Zealand. Its isolation protects it from tidal waves of heat, cold, immigration, and invasion. The people are likely to remain what they are, the most homogeneous Anglo-Saxon blend there is anywhere, — English predominant, Scotch next, Irish third. There is practically no other blood ; the foreigners and Maoris are too few to color the strain.

The Australasian commonwealths have, beyond doubt, the most harmonious constituency of any country of our race; and this has been one of the things to make possible reforms for which we in America have struggled so far in vain, with our mixed and antagonistic races.

There is a soil of wonderful fertility in New Zealand, but it lies in patches, in valleys, and between mountains and the sea. The eyes were easily picked out by the first comers. Great stretches are fit only for sheep and cattle, and only profitable when held in large blocks. This is just the environment for land monopoly, which soon took on an intense form, with serious consequences, economic and political. Immigration into New Zealand and Australia was hard for men, easy for money; and Anglo-Saxon people on such a soil, with Anglo-Saxon institutions, including the greatest of all, the government bond, could borrow all they could use. Hence, there is here, on a very small population, a very large debt, —larger in proportion than in any other country, even France. The climate of New Zealand has no extremes, and the people are most moderate in their temper and policies. The purpose one hears them most often avow is that they mean to have no millionaires or paupers, — a political rendition of Agur’s “ neither poverty nor riches.” Their temperate climate is a democratic climate ; for the more opportunities there are, the more need there is for democracy, which is the organization of opportunity for all.

New Zealand is made up of two large islands and some smaller ones, — like the mother country, — and race and situation are at work here, as Emerson saw them in England, making every islander himself an island; and as is always the way with islanders, these are growing to their home with heartstrings stronger than steel. Its policy of prosperity for all, instead of excess for a few, will prevent for many ages the appearance in New Zealand of any concentrated splendor to tempt the cupidity of enemies. It is too far from Australia for federation. No matter what improvements are made in ocean travel, it will always be five or six times as far from Europe to New Zealand as from Europe to America. Modern steamships and, alas, men-of-war are converting the Pacific into a mere Mediterranean, but a Mediterranean of a new civilization, — a sea to connect, not to divide, the awakening East and the advancing West; but New Zealand, unlike its mother country, is so much to one side of the world’s great currents that it cannot become the clearing house of these movements of commerce and population, destined to be the greatest in history.

Australasia produces more wealth and spends more for every man, woman, and child than any other country, and New Zealand is the most prosperous of the seven colonies of Australasia. New Zealand has practically every resource for the support of life and the creation of wealth. It is a white man’s country, if there ever was one, and the people fit the country, with much more than the European or the American average of energy, physique, intelligence, honesty, and industry. A tree falls in the forest, and in its roots is found a gold mine; a citizen digs a post hole, and cuts into a vein of coal forty feet thick. The most precious metal of all, iron, is found in abundant deposits, one of them in the Taranaki sands, of inexhaustible quantity, and so pure and rich that it has thus far defied reduction. There is flax, and there can be cotton whenever the people choose to grow it. There are no other traveling rugs so soft and warm as those made out of New Zealand wool. Electric power beyond calculation is going to waste in a thousand and one waterfalls and rapids. This exceeding bounty and beauty of the new home pull more strongly every day against the recall of the old home. All these physical circumstances make for “ New Zealand for the New Zealanders,” and New Zealanders for New Zealand. We can easily foresee the “ lengthening chain ” that holds these people to old England lengthening into invisibility.

Other forces than these of nature, and not unfamiliar to the student of the official Briton, were suggested in an incident which occurred while I was there. The Premier, the Hon. Richard J. Seddon, during the Samoan trouble, cabled to Mr. Chamberlain, Secretary for the Colonies, an offer of soldiers and a manof-war. He could get neither acceptance nor acknowledgment, until, after more than patient waiting, he cabled again for one or the other. Many a New Zealander, none too loyal, grew less loyal still at this reminder of the crusted indifference of the “ imperial” Englishman to any Englishman outside his set in London.

The crow in New Zealand strikes as sweet a note as any heard in the woodland ; the robin has no song and no red breast; the native hen is the greatest of rat-killers ; there is a caterpillar which turns into a plant. These and some other productions of nature have done for New Zealand what the kangaroo and the ornithorhynchus have done for Australia, — given it the suggestion of oddity and the marvelous. Rabbits and sweetbrier, introduced for pleasure, spread like wildfire, and it is an attraction to be duly advertised, in the sale of land, that it has been cleared of sweetbrier and fenced against rabbits; and then later, the rabbit becomes a profit instead of a pest, and is exported by millions to feed the English.

There is something in the air which makes ideas, too, run, and not among men alone. A kea parrot, hungry or curious, tastes of a sheep lying derelict on one of the great grazing plains, and forthwith the whole tribe, hitherto irreproachably vegetarian, turns carnivorous ; and not carnivorous alone, but epicurean. The kea finds that the kidney is the choice morsel, and that it is most to its taste when eaten from the living animal. Within our memory, the Maoris, on the contrary, have turned from cannibals into citizens and members of Parliament, and their women have changed from squaws to voters. The woods and plains of Africa and America were found by the natives and by new arrivals rich in game, but the New Zealand larder was empty when man came. The European in search of “somebody else’s burden ” to carry off has never encountered any other aborigines with the strength, bravery, and intelligence of the Maoris. They won recognition which no other aborigines have received. As property owners, voters, members of Parliament, and even members of the government, their rights are unquestioned. The Maori fought the white man so well for his land because he had had to fight nature so hard for his life. The lack of food, animal and vegetable, in primitive New Zealand developed this Maori out of the inferior Polynesian, and has thus left deep marks and beneficent ones on the social institutions of the country.

There are earthquakes and volcanoes in New Zealand, and some of the conservatives there number with them the progressive land tax, the graduated income tax, the labor legislation, and oldage pensions. The traveler sees in and out of museums many varieties of the wingless birds peculiar to New Zealand ; and if he is a democratic traveler, he will think that not the least interesting among them are the capitalists, who have not taken flight, as it was predicted they would, if arbitration were made compulsory, and the great estates were “ resumed ” by the government and cut up into small farms for “ closer settlement.”

The secret, of the democratic efflorescence of Australasia is the same as that of the new vigor shown there by European plants and animals. The secret is the same as that of the long step ahead of the mother country taken by New England, with its Puritans and Pilgrims. The wonderful propagative power of democratic ideas in Australasia is a fact of the same order as the miraculous multiplication of the European sweetbrier and rabbits introduced there. The old ideas and institutions, given a new chance in a new country, gain a new vigor. It is their new world. Hopes and purposes which had fossilized in the old country live again. When the holdback of custom, laws, and old families is removed, there is a leap forward as from a leash. What Australasia has been doing is only what England and the older countries have been slowly attempting to do. Paradoxically, too, this renaissance of democracy in Australasia is not the fruit of colonization by religious enthusiasts, or social reformers, or patriots choosing exile, but of colonization by plain, every-day, matter-of-fact Englishmen, thinking only of making a better living.

The one new idea which the founders of New Zealand carried with them — and a very important one it was, and most interesting to Americans — was that which revolutionized the policy of England toward its colonies and gave them home rule. The political foundation of the present English colonial empire was laid by a man almost unknown to the general public, though a man of genius both in thought and in action,—Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Wakefield was the first Englishman to read and apply the lesson written for English statesmen between the lines of the American Revolution. He took the lead in the colonization of New Zealand, and secured for it and the other colonies of England the rights which have kept Canada, Australasia, and, so far, South Africa, for the home country, — the rights to have their own legislatures, to tax themselves, and to be free from all control, industrial or political, by the home government, except that a governor general sent from England represents the Crown, mainly as a figurehead. He makes speeches at the opening of Parliament, and gives state balls. The actual government is in the hands of a ministry on the English plan, responsible to the colonial Parliament alone. The only real power of the governor general is, like that of the Crown, the right of veto, and that, like the Crown, he practically never uses.

The Australasian people are not different from people elsewhere ; they pursue their self-interests as others do, and have no more fondness for martyrdom than others have; but these English people found themselves in a place and in a time in which the English tendencies could run instead of crawl, and they ran. Of everything that has been done in Australasia the germs were stored in the older countries, — every one. In all the list of Australasian reforms, there is nothing bizarre, nothing out of line with the evolution in progress, even in monarchical countries ; but it was the good fortune of the Australasians, and of us who can see that they are experimenting for the rest of the world, that they could make the history we sigh for, without making the revolutions for fear of which we do nothing but sigh. The importance of the work they are doing cannot be overestimated. In Australasia, the westward march of empire has reached around to the eastern point of beginning. Even the Maori is believed, by the best students of the Polynesians, to have originated in India, and when the white man arrived in Maoriland Aryan met Aryan. There waited the last piece of virgin soil on earth where the white race can spend its governing genius unhampered by climate, slavery, monarchy, vested rights and vested ruts, immigration, or the enervating seductions of power over subject races. As Englishmen admit that America, in its Revolution, saved English constitutional liberty, we can hope that the Australasians, in their extension and acceleration of reforms that are in the air everywhere, are saving the commonwealth of the whole world.

This Newest England is no Utopia, no paradise. That is self-evident from the fact that honest, industrious people can reach the age of sixty-five, after having been twenty-five years in New Zealand, and yet need an old-age pension. Both New Zealand and Australia are far behind England and the United States in the new municipal life which is the most promising thing in our politics. Trade-unionism there is still weak from the effects of the catastrophe in which it was overwhelmed by the defeat of the great strike of 1890. When I was in New Zealand, a representative body of workingmen would not order the names of their officers published, for fear it would make them “ marked men ” in the eyes of their masters. The press and the people are anxiously discussing the decrease of the birth rate, which, the inquirer learns, is certainly in part due to an economic pressure which makes people afraid to have children. Just now New Zealand is in a boom and everybody can get work, but it was only a few years ago that the reports of the secretary of labor were as gloomy reading as the statistics of any other country. The streets of the larger towns swarm at night with young men and women, who, unfortunately, are not unemployed, though their hands are idle. When the traveler reads the police reports of the principal Australasian cities, he feels as if he were at home in New York, London, or some other Babylon.

There is a sheep ring and there is a coal ring in New Zealand, — we would call them trusts ; and there are indications of other combinations, — one in timber, and another against the sheep farmers, among the great meat-freezing exporters. There is not one of the new institutions, on trial to deal with land, labor, taxation, finance, and government industry, which is not lame somewhere, as any reporter who is not a rhapsodist must declare ; but the experimenting has this superiority, that, though lame, “ it still moves,” and moves faster there than elsewhere.

New Zealand has reached no final “ social solutions, " and no New Zealanders, citizen or official, can be found who would pretend that it had. All they claim is that they have tried to find solutions, and they believe the fair-minded observer will declare that they are entitled to “report progress” to the rest of us. They are experimental. They know it and are proud of it, but they do not think that could be made a reproach against them by the political heirs of such experimenters as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Samuel Adams.

The prudent portrait painter would not say that the New Zealanders are the most civilized, the most happy, the most prosperous people in the world; but, they certainly are the least uncivilized, the least unhappy, the least disinherited. Danton’s great political genius taught him to say of the laws and policies he proposed, not that they were good, but that they were “ the least bad.” There are no absolutely good governments or peoples ; but some are not so bad as others, and for New Zealand it may be claimed that its government and people are " the least bad " this side of Mars.

Henry Demarest Lloyd.