If the United States had a similar law, with the same proportion of pensioners, we should have 7000 of them in Washington, almost 90,000 in New York, 40,000 in Chicago, 28,000 in Philadelphia, and a thousand or more in each of a score of other cities. In the whole country we should have a million and a half pensioners, and if each received $180 a year, the amount of the average pension in New Zealand, the total distribution of money among our old people would amount to more than $288,000,000. As a matter of fact, this sum would be only about $30,000,000 more than our government now pays out each year in pensions for old soldiers and their dependents, not including the payments to veterans of the World War.
One of Wellington’s big buildings is the government life-insurance office. Here you may find out just how much the body politic is willing to bet on the chances of life and death of its people. The government has been in the life-insurance business for fifty years, but it has never forbidden the private companies to operate, and competes with them right along. Indeed, it is said that the latter are getting most of the new business because they put more life and energy into selling insurance than the state institution does. The government life insurance company uses the postmasters as its agents, and thus has offices at every crossroads. It requires as strict a physical examination as any private company, but its rates are low and the insured feel certain of their money. There are now some sixty thousand state policies in force representing an insurance of about eighty-five million dollars.
The state insurance business is managed like our private life-insurance companies and upon similar calculations of the chances of life and death. It sells some policies on the paid-up system and has also a savings-fund plan. Special rates are granted to those who abstain from intoxicating liquors, and another form of policy provides annuities for government clerks after they are sixty years of age. Fire and accident policies are also written in competition with the commercial companies.
One reason the government went into the business was the fact that the companies operating in New Zealand at that time were charging rates as high as those in the United States, England, and other countries, where the “expectancy of life” is not so great as it is here. The New Zealanders are wonderfully healthy. They live, on the average, eight years longer than we do. It may be that their lives are lengthened by the amount of protection and security they have from their various government enterprises. Moreover, the country is not over-populated, there is no competition with coloured or cheap foreign labour, a living wage is guaranteed to all, farms may still be had on comparatively easy terms, there is little poverty throughout the Dominion, and the general level of comfort is high. The average wealth for all persons over twenty years of age has been estimated at four thousand dollars, and that notwithstanding the fact that there are few millionaires in New Zealand and not many persons who are rich according to our standards.
The per-capita deposits in New Zealand banks are steadily increasing, showing that the country is accumulating wealth. In 1890 the average was just under one hundred dollars for every one of the population; twenty years later it had risen to a little more than one hundred and twenty-five, and the latest figure is two hundred dollars. The present assets of the six principal banks total more than three hundred and forty millions of dollars, and their liabilities come to less than three hundred millions.
The postal savings banks are banks of deposit, paying interest of from 3¼ to 4 per cent. on all accounts. At present the deposits approximate a total of $220,000,000 held by about 680,000 depositors. This equals one savings account to every 1.8 persons of the population. Deposits as low as one shilling, or twenty-five cents are taken, but no interest is paid on any sum below $5 or above $25,000. On sums up to $2500 the rate is 4 per cent.; on larger amounts it is 3¼ per cent.
On the beautiful curved shore of Hawke Bay, protected from the ocean by a breakwater, is Napier, the chief shipping point of a large meat- and wool-producing district.
In the Mt. Cook Range of the Southern Alps are ten peaks more than ten thousand feet high. The great Tasman Glacier provides thrills for the most expert mountain climber.