New Zealand has its building and loan associations, though not to the same extent as the United States. The farmers have also organized all sorts of coöperative associations. The stock of the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Company, a big firm which buys up produce and ships it abroad, is owned chiefly by the New Zealand growers from whom it buys. I have visited a big store, the stock of which is held by its customers. It has a large capital, and its manager told me that it paid ten per cent. dividends. It is much like one of our department stores, with the prices marked on all articles offered for sale. Many of the meat-freezing establishments are managed by stock companies, in which the sheep and cattle owners are interested, and most of them pay good dividends.
There is a National Provident Fund, which any one between the ages of sixteen and fifty may join, provided that his income during the three years prior to joining has not been more than fifteen hundred dollars. No medical examination is required. A contributor to the Fund is protected in case of incapacity to work, his children and widow receive an allowance upon his death, and on reaching the age of sixty he receives for the rest of his life a pension of from two dollars and a half to ten dollars a week, according to the scale of his contributions. Married women contributing to the Fund get a bonus of thirty dollars on the birth of each child. The applicant joins by filling in a form at a postal money-order office or local office of the Fund and paying his first weekly contribution. Although the Fund is only about ten years old, it has nearly twenty-two thousand contributors.
Another institution in which New Zealand takes especial pride is the office of the Public Trust, the first institution of its kind in the world. Through this the government acts after the fashion of our commercial trust companies. A public trustee is appointed for the whole country and he has under him a staff of lawyers of high reputation. Suppose a man dies intestate; the Public Trust administers his estate. If you want to make your will, the Public Trust will draw it for you and you may make the Trust your executor. Suppose you have been acting as trustee to an estate and wish to lay aside your responsibility; the Public Trust will take it over. If an insane person has no guardian, the Public Trust will look after his affairs. Unless expressly directed otherwise, all money coming into the office goes into a common fund. This is invested by the public trustee in first-class securities for the benefit of the estates in his charge.
The Public Trust now handles estates and funds to the value of more than one hundred and twenty-five million dollars, and the amount is growing every year. More than thirty thousand wills are on deposit in the office, an evidence of the increasing public confidence in the institution. Although it was established to give the people service at low rates and not to make money, and though its fees are never above three per cent. the office has been so well managed that it not only pays for itself, but yields a profit of more than fifty thousand dollars a year. While it is a government institution, the Public Trust provides its own buildings and pays taxes and postage just as if it were a commercial enterprise. Its employees are under the civil service and hold office during good behaviour.
Practically every New Zealand post office is a telegraph office, a telephone office, a savings bank, a government life-insurance and pension agency, and a money-order office, so you see postman and postmaster have plenty to do. There are now government telephones almost everywhere, although they are not so numerous in proportion to the population as they are in the United States. Telephones are still considered somewhat in the class of luxuries. In the hotels, for example, one rarely sees a telephone in every room, but there will be an instrument in the hall on each floor.
But there is another side to the picture of New Zealand’s government activities. A man is worth not what he makes, but what he has left when his debts are paid. It is the same with a nation, and New Zealand has rapidly rolled up a huge public debt. At the end of the century it owed about two hundred and twenty million dollars, or more than three hundred dollars per head, or fifteen hundred dollars per family of five. This debt kept on growing, and then was more than doubled by expenditures in the World War, which were a tremendous burden to a small country like New Zealand.
Suppose the same conditions to prevail in the United States with its one hundred and five million inhabitants. Instead of the twenty-two billions we now owe, we should owe more than eighty-seven billion dollars, or almost exactly four times the sum that we and our children, and our children’s children for generations to come, must be heavily taxed to pay.
On the other hand, it must be remembered that nearly half the total debt of New Zealand is invested in railroads, telephones, telegraphs, hydro-electric systems, farm land, and loans to settlers. These investments pay interest, and are represented by assets of much greater value than the amount of borrowed money spent upon them.
CHAPTER XXIX
WHERE THE WORKING MAN RULES