A PATAKA
In a word, the outlook for the Maori, though still doubtful, is by no means desperate. They will own land; they will collect substantial rents from white tenants; they will be educated; they will retain the franchise. At last they are beginning to learn the laws of sanitation and the uses of ventilation and hospitals. The doctors of the Health Department have persuaded them to pull down hundreds of dirty old huts, are caring for their infants, and are awaking a wholesome distrust of the trickeries of those mischievous conjuror-quacks, the tohungas. Some of these good physicians—Dr. Pomaré, for instance—are themselves Maori. More of his stamp are wanted; also more Maori lawyers like Mr. Apirana Ngata, M.P. Much will turn upon the ability of the race to master co-operative farming. That there is hope of this is shown by the success of the Ngatiporou tribesmen, who in recent years have cleared and sown sixty thousand acres of land, and now own eighty-three thousand sheep, more than three thousand cattle, and more than eight thousand pigs. Only let the sanitary lesson be learned and the industrial problem solved, and the qualities of the Maori may be trusted to do the rest. Their muscular strength and courage, their courtesy and vein of humour, their poetic power and artistic sense, are gifts that make it desirable that the race should survive and win a permanent place among civilised men.
Watching the tendencies of New Zealand life and laws to-day, one is tempted to look ahead and think of what country life in the islands may become in a generation or so, soon after the colony has celebrated its hundredth anniversary. It should be a pleasant life, even pleasanter than that of our own time; for more gaps will have been filled up and more angles rubbed off. Limiting laws and graduated taxes will have made an end of the great estates: a land-owner with more than £120,000 of real property will probably be unknown. Many land-owners will be richer than that, but it will be because a part of their money is invested in personalty. But in peacefully making an end of latifundia the law-makers will not have succeeded—even if that were their design—in handing over the land to peasants: there will be no sweeping revolution. Much of the soil will still be held by large and substantial farmers,—eight or ten thousand in number, perhaps,—educated men married to wives of some culture and refinement. The process of subdivision will have swelled the numbers and increased the influence of land-holders. The unpopularity which attached itself to the enormous estates will pass away with them. Some of the farming gentlemen of the future will be descendants of members of the English upper and upper-middle classes. Others will be the grandsons of hard-headed Scotch shepherds, English rural labourers, small tenants, or successful men of commerce. Whatever their origin, however, education, intermarriage, and common habits of life will tend to level them into a homogeneous class. Dressed in tweed suits, wide-awake hats, and gaiters, riding good horses or driving in powerful motors, and with their alert, bony faces browned and reddened by sun and wind, they will look and will be a healthy, self-confident, intelligent race. Despite overmuch tea and tobacco, their nerves will seldom be highly strung; the blessed sunshine and the air of the sea and the mountains will save them from that. Moreover, colonial cookery will be better than it has been, and diet more varied. Nor will our farmers trouble the doctors much or poison themselves with patent drugs. Owning anything from half a square mile to six or seven square miles of land, they will be immensely proud of their stake in the country and cheerfully convinced of their value as the backbone of the community. They will not be a vicious lot; early marriage and life in the open air will prevent that. Nor will drunkenness be fashionable, though there will be gambling and probably far too much horse-racing. Varying in size from three or four hundred to four or five thousand acres, their properties, with stock and improvements, may be worth anything from five or six thousand to seventy or eighty thousand pounds, but amongst themselves the smaller and larger owners will meet on terms of easy equality. They will gradually form an educated rural gentry with which the wealthier townspeople will be very proud and eager to mix. A few of them, whose land is rich, may lease it out in small allotments, and try to become squires on a modified English pattern. But most of them will work their land themselves, living on it, riding over it daily, directing their men, and, if need be, lending a hand themselves. That will be their salvation, bringing them as it will into daily contact with practical things and working humanity. Conservative, of course, they will be, and in theory opposed to Socialism, yet assenting from time to time to Socialistic measures when persuaded of their immediate usefulness. Thus they will keep a keen eye on the State railways, steamships, and Department of Agriculture, and develop the machinery of these in their own interests. A few of the richer of them from time to time may find that life in Europe so pleases them—or their wives—that they will sell out and cut adrift from the colony; but there will be no class of absentee owners—growling, heavily taxed, and unpopular. Our working gentlemen will stick to the country, and will be hotly, sometimes boisterously, patriotic, however much they may at moments abuse governments and labour laws. Most of them will be freeholders. Allied with them will be State pastoral tenants—holding smaller runs than now—to be found in the mountains, on the pumice plateau, or where the clay is hungry. Socially these tenants will be indistinguishable from the freeholders.
Solitude will be a thing of the past; for roads will be excellent, motors common, and every homestead will have its telephone. And just as kerosene lamps and wax candles superseded the tallow dips of the early settlers, so in turn will electric light reign, not here and there merely, but almost everywhere. Their main recreations will be shooting, fishing, motor-driving, riding, and sailing; for games—save polo—and pure athletics will be left to boys and to men placed lower in the social scale. They will read books, but are scarcely likely to care much about art, classing painting and music rather with such things as wood-carving and embroidery—as women’s work, something for men to look at rather than produce. But they will be gardeners, and their wives will pay the arts a certain homage. The furniture of their houses may seem scanty in European eyes, but will not lack a simple elegance. In their gardens, however, those of them who have money to spare will spend more freely, and on brightening these with colour and sheltering them with soft masses of foliage no mean amount of taste and skill will be lavished. These gardens will be the scenes of much of the most enjoyable social intercourse to be had in the country. Perhaps—who knows?—some painter, happy in a share of Watteau’s light grace or Fragonard’s eye for decorative effect in foliage, may find in the New Zealand garden festivals, with their music, converse, and games, and their framework of beauty, subjects worthy of art.
COROMANDEL
Socially and financially beneath these country gentlemen, though politically their equals, and in intelligence often not inferior to them, will come the more numerous, rougher and poorer races of small farmers and country labourers. Here will be seen harder lives and a heavier physique—men whose thews and sinews will make Imperial recruiting officers sigh wistfully. Holding anything from twenty or thirty up to two or three hundred acres, the small farmers will have their times of stress and anxiety, when they will be hard put to it to weather a bad season combined with low prices. But their practical skill, strength, and industry, and their ability, at a pinch, to do without all but bare necessaries, will usually pull them through. Moreover, they too will be educated, and no mere race of dull-witted boors. At the worst they will always be able to take to wage-earning for a time, and the smaller of them will commonly pass part of each year in working for others. Sometimes their sons will be labourers, and members of trade unions, and this close contact with organised labour and Socialism will have curious political results. As a class they will be much courted by politicians, and will distrust the rich, especially the rich of the towns. Their main and growing grievance will be the difficulty of putting their sons on the land. For themselves they will be able to live cheaply, and in good years save money; for customs tariffs will be more and more modified to suit them. Some of their children will migrate to the towns; others will become managers, overseers, shepherds, drovers. They will have their share of sport, and from among them will come most of the best athletes of the country, professional and other. Nowhere will be seen a cringing tenantry, hat-touching peasantry, or underfed farm labourers. The country labourers, thoroughly organised, well paid, and active, will yet be not altogether ill-humoured in politics; for, by comparison with the lot of their class in other parts of the world, theirs will be a life of hope, comfort, and confidence.