Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;
Ten who in ears and eyes
Match me; we all surmise,
They this thing, and I that; whom shall my soul believe?"
During the ten years beginning in 1879 New Zealand finance was little more than a series of attempts to avert deficits. In their endeavours to raise the revenue required for interest payments on the still swelling public debt, and the inevitably growing departmental expenditure, various treasurers turned to the Customs. In raising money by duties they received support both from those who wished to protect local industries and from those who wished to postpone the putting of heavy taxation upon land. Sir Harry Atkinson, the treasurer who carried the chief protectionist duties, used to disclaim being either a protectionist or a free-trader. The net result of various conflicts has been a tariff which is protectionist, but not highly protectionist. The duties levied on New Zealand imports represent twenty-four per cent. of the declared value of the goods. But the highest duties, those on spirits, wine, beer, sugar, tea, and tobacco, are not intentionally protectionist; they are simply revenue duties, though that on beer has undoubtedly helped large and profitable colonial breweries to be established. English free-traders accept as an axiom that Customs duties cannot produce increased revenue and at the same time stimulate local manufactures. Nevertheless, under the kind of compromise by which duties of fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five per cent. are levied on so many articles, it does come about that the colonial treasurer gets his revenue while, sheltered by the fiscal hedge, certain colonial manufactures steadily grow up. The factories of the Colony now employ some 40,000 hands, and their annual output is estimated at ten millions sterling. Much of this would, of course, have come had the Colony's ports been free; but the factories engaged in the woollen, printing, clothing, iron and steel, tanning, boot, furniture, brewing, jam-making, and brick and tile-making industries owe their existence in the main to the duties. Nor would it be fair to regard the Colony's protection as simply a gigantic job managed by the more or less debasing influence of powerful companies and firms. It was adopted before such influences and interests were. It could not have come about, still less could it last, were there not an honest and widespread belief that without duties the variety of industries needful to make a civilized and prosperous nation could not be attained in young countries where nascent enterprises are almost certain to be undercut and undersold by the giant capitalists and cheaper labour of the old world. Such a belief may conceivably be an economic mistake, but those who hold it need not be thought mere directors or tools of selfish and corrupt rings. The Colony will not adopt Free Trade unless a change comes over the public mind, of which there is yet no sign; but it is not likely to go further on the road towards McKinleyism. Its protection, such as it is, was the outcome of compromises, stands frankly as a compromise, and is likely for the present to remain as that.
So long as the Provinces lasted the General Assembly had little or nothing to do with land laws. When, after abolition, the management of the public estate came into the hands of the central authority, the regulations affecting it were a bewildering host. Some fifty-four statutes and ordinances had to be repealed. Nor could uniformity be substituted at once, inasmuch as land was occupied under a dozen different systems in as many different provincial districts. Only very gradually could these be assimilated, and it was not until the year 1892 that one land act could be said to contain the law on the subject, and to be equally applicable to all New Zealand. In the meantime the statute-books of 1877, 1878, 1883, 1885 and 1887 bore elaborate evidence of the complexity of the agrarian question, and the importance attached to it. On it more than on any other difference party divisions were based. Over it feelings were stirred up which were not merely personal, local, or sectional. It became, and over an average of years remained, the matter of chief moment in the Colony's politics. Finance, liquor reform, labour acts, franchise extension may take first place in this or that session, but the land question, in one or other of its branches, is always second. The discussions on it roused an enduring interest in Parliament given to no other subject. The Minister of Lands ranks with the Premier and the Treasurer as one of the leaders in every Cabinet. Well may he do so. Many millions of acres and many thousands of tenants are comprised in the Crown leases alone. Outside these come the constant land sales, the purchases from the Maori tribes, and in recent years the buying back of estates from private owners, and the settlement thereof. These form most, though not all, of the business of the Minister of Lands, his officers, and the administrative district boards attached to his department. If there were no land question in New Zealand, there might be no Liberal Party. It was the transfer of the land from the Provinces to the central Parliament in 1876 which chiefly helped Grey and his lieutenants to get together a democratic following.
Slowly but surely the undying agrarian controversy passed with the Colony's progress into new stages. In the early days we have seen the battle between the "sufficient price" of Gibbon Wakefield and the cheap land of Grey, the good and evil wrought by the former, the wide and lasting mischief brought about by the latter. By 1876 price had ceased to be the main point at issue. It was agreed on all hands that town and suburban lands parted with by the Crown should be sold by auction at fairly high upset prices; and that rural agricultural land should be divided into classes—first, second, and third—and should not be sold by auction, but applied for by would-be occupants prepared to pay from £2 to 10s. an acre, according to quality. More and more the land laws of the Colony were altered so as to favour occupation by small farmers, who were not compelled to purchase their land for cash, but permitted to remain State tenants at low rentals, or allowed to buy the freehold by gradual instalments, termed deferred payments. Even the great pastoral leaseholds were to some extent sub-divided as the leases fell in. The efforts of the land reformers were for many years devoted to limiting the acreage which any one person could buy or lease, and to ensuring that any person acquiring land should himself live thereon, and should use and improve it, and not leave it lying idle until the spread of population enabled him to sell it at a profit to some monopolist or, more often, some genuine farmer. As early as 1856 Otago had set the example of insisting on an outlay of 30s. an acre in improvement by each purchaser of public land. Gradually the limiting laws were made more and more stringent, and were partly applied even to pastoral leases. Now, in 1898, no person can select more than 640 acres of first-class or 2,000 acres of second-class land, including any land he is already holding. In other words, no considerable landowner can legally acquire public land. Pastoral "runs"—i.e., grazing leases—must not be larger than such as will carry 20,000 sheep or 4,000 cattle, and no one can hold more than one run. The attempts often ingeniously made to evade these restrictions by getting land in the names of relatives, servants, or agents are called "dummyism," and may be punished by imprisonment—never inflicted—by fines, and by forfeiture of the land "dummied."[1]
[Footnote 1: Many a good story is founded on the adventures of land-buyers in their endeavours to evade the spirit and obey the letter of land regulations. In 1891 a rhymester wrote in doggerel somewhat as follows of the experiences of a selector who "took up" a piece of Crown land—
The political battles over the land laws of New Zealand during the sixteen years since 1882 have not, however, centred round the limitation of the right of purchase, or insistence on improvements, so much as round the respective advantages of freehold and perpetual leasehold, and round the compulsory repurchase of private land for settlement. Roughly speaking, the political party which has taken the name of Liberal has urged on the adoption of the perpetual lease as the main or sole tenure under which State lands should in the future be acquired. As a rule the party which the Liberals call Conservative has advocated that would-be settlers should be allowed to choose their tenure for themselves, and to be leaseholders or freeholders as they please. Then there have arisen, too, important questions affecting the perpetual lease itself. Should the perpetual leaseholders retain the right of converting at any time their leasehold into a freehold by paying down the cash value of their farm, or should the State always retain the fee simple? Next, if the State should retain this, ought there to be periodical revisions of the rent, so as to reserve the unearned increment for the public? Fierce have been the debates and curious the compromises arrived at concerning these debatable points. The broad result has been that the sale of the freehold of Crown lands, though not entirely prohibited, has been much discouraged, and that the usual tenure given now is a lease for 999 years at a rent of four per cent. on the prairie value of the land at the time of leasing. As this tenure virtually hands over the unearned increment to the lessee, it is regarded by the advanced land reformers with mixed feelings. From their point of view, however, it has the advantage of enabling men with small capital to take up land without expending their money in a cash purchase. Inasmuch, too, as transfers of a lease can only be made with the assent of the State Land Board for the district—which assent will only be given in case the transfer is to a bona fide occupier not already a landowner—land monopoly is checked and occupancy for use assured. Meanwhile there is plenty of genuine settlement; every year sees many hundred fresh homes made and tracts reclaimed from the wilderness.