Both the North Island and the South Island have much good land. I visited a farm on the Canterbury Plains in the South Island which a good authority tells me has produced ninety bushels of wheat to the acre, and I have travelled through sections where thirty, forty, and fifty bushels are not uncommon. Some of the land produces a hundred bushels of oats to the acre and much of it yields turnips by the ton. There are millions of acres sown with English grasses. In northern New Zealand, swamp areas once considered worthless have been drained and now form some of the richest land in the Dominion. On the whole, New Zealand comes as near being a rich and beautiful garden as any country with a temperate climate lying south of the Equator.
As for the people, they are enthusiasts about their country. They believe in New Zealand for the New Zealanders. It is estimated that the Dominion could accommodate perhaps four times its present population of a million and a quarter, but I doubt whether away down in their souls the inhabitants really want immigration. Certainly the government has put no premium upon it. Even British subjects wishing to go out to New Zealand must be nominated for admission by a resident of the Dominion before they can get their transportation at the reduced rates sometimes offered. The government is especially anxious to keep out the Chinese, and limits the number admitted, each of whom has to pay a tax of five hundred dollars. The result is that there are now less than three thousand Chinese in the country, and practically no Japanese.
Of the more than a million population only forty thousand are Maoris or aborigines. The remainder are nearly all British-born subjects, more than half of whom were born in New Zealand. The rest have come from England, Scotland, or Ireland. The Dominion is in fact a little Britain. The houses are much like English cottages, the business places are like English shops, and the money is in pounds, shillings, and pence. The language is English and I sometimes hear the cockney accent of London. The people are, I think, far more progressive and less provincial than the inhabitants of Great Britain, and they seem to me much more like the nephews of Uncle Sam than the sons of John Bull.
CHAPTER XXVI
“SOCIAL PESTS”
WHILE other countries have talked about land reform or their peasants have staged revolutions to get farms of their own, New Zealand has quietly gone ahead and put through a system of land ownership and taxation which in the United States would be called socialistic.
What would our people say, for example, if Congress should pass laws carrying out a land policy such as was explained to me by one of the national leaders of New Zealand? He said:
“We do not look upon land as like other property. Land should belong to the state. It is given to it by the Lord, to be held in trust for the people. It is all right for a man to own the improvements he makes and to be allowed to sell them or leave them to his descendants; but as to the land itself I don’t think God ever intended any one man to own vast tracts and be able to hand on the property to his descendants through generation after generation.
“As the trustee of the people the government has no more right to sell large tracts of land than it has to give them away. The ideal method would be for the government to own all the land and lease it, and that is what we some day hope to accomplish here. As it is now, I think we have blasted the ambitions of those who dreamed of building up great estates as family inheritances.”
