Page:EB1911 - Volume 19.djvu/655

 cheese; breweries; printing houses; foundries; agricultural, implement and machine shops; soap and candle works; coach-building and furniture; gas-works. Except in meat-freezing, wool-scouring, butter- and cheese-making, flax-milling and timber-sawing, manufacturing is almost entirely for consumption within the colony.

Government.—New Zealand was not colonized in the ordinary manner around one centre. There were in its early years six distinct settlements—Auckland, Wellington, Nelson, New Plymouth, Canterbury and Otago—between which communication was for several years irregular and infrequent. To meet their political wants the Constitution Act of 1852 created them into provinces, with elective councils and superintendents respectively, subordinated to one colonial legislature. In 1876 the provincial system was abolished. The general assembly, as it is called, is composed of the governor, the legislative council, and the House of Representatives. The governor is appointed by the crown, but his salary, £7500, is paid by the colony. The legislative council consists of members appointed for seven years by the governor in council; the number of legislative councillors stays at or near forty-five. The House of Representatives consists of eighty members chosen by the electors. The members of both houses are paid. The franchise is adult suffrage, conditional on a previous residence in the colony for a year, including six months in the electoral district for which a claim to vote is registered. Every elector is qualified for election. Four members of the house must be Maori elected by their own race. The duration of the house is for three years, but it is subject to re-election whenever the governor dissolves the general assembly. Legislation is subject to disallowance by the crown, but that power is seldom exercised. Executive administration is conducted on the principle of English responsible or parliamentary government. The government is represented in England by a high commissioner. Local administration is vested in local elective bodies, such as municipal councils, county councils, road boards, harbour boards, charitable aid boards, and others, with power to levy rates. The colonial revenue is chiefly derived from customs, stamp duties, land tax, income tax, beer excise, postal and telegraphic services, railways, and crown land sales and rents. The proceeds of land sales are applied to surveys and public works. Customs duties, railways and stamps are by far the most important sources of revenue. They yielded £3,103,000, £2,765,000 and £1,550,000 respectively out of a total revenue of £9,056,000 in the financial year 1907–1908. The gross public debt had reached £66,500,000 in 1908. The money has chiefly been spent on railways, telegraphs, roads, bridges, land purchase from the native tribes and private estate owners, on loans to settlers and on native wars. The state railways (2500 m.) return about £800,000 after paying working expenses. This does not quite defray the interest on the cost of their construction and equipment, inasmuch as it barely comes to 3% thereon, but rates and fares are deliberately kept low to encourage settlement and communication. The debts of the local bodies amount to about nine millions. They raise rather more than a million a year by rates, licence fees and dues.

Education.—Under the Education Act of 1877 state schools are established, in which teaching is free, secular and compulsory, with certain exceptions, for children between the ages of seven and thirteen. A capitation grant is given for every child in average daily attendance at the schools. Grants are also made for scholarships from primary to secondary schools, for training institutions for teachers and for school buildings. Large reserves of public lands have been made for primary, secondary and university education. All primary and some secondary public schools are controlled by provincial education boards elected by school committees of the parents of pupils. The percentage of attendance has rivalled that in the primary schools of Scotland, and in 1905 attained to 86·9%. Native village schools are also provided by the state in native districts. There are, moreover, industrial schools, orphanages and institutions for the deaf and dumb and blind. There are about ninety secondary schools, state-supported or aided by public endowments. The university of New Zealand is an examining body, and grants honours, degrees and scholarships. It is empowered by royal charter to confer degrees entitled to rank and consideration throughout the British dominions, as fully as if they were granted by any university in the United Kingdom. Colleges in the four chief towns and in Nelson are affiliated to the New Zealand University,

which has about fifteen hundred undergraduates keeping terms. The state in no way controls or interferes with religious administration. Each denomination attends to the religious instruction of its own adherents, chiefly by means of Sunday schools, which count 108,000 pupils. Roman Catholics support about 150 clerical day schools attended by about 11,500 scholars. State school buildings can be, and sometimes are, used for religious instruction on days and at hours other than those fixed by law for ordinary school work; but no child can be required to attend, except at the wish of its parent or guardian. The government spends £35,000 a year on manual and technical instruction, a branch of teaching which includes about two hundred cookery classes. A school of engineering and an agricultural college are attached to the university college in the province of Canterbury, and there are several schools of mines elsewhere.

About 157,000 white children and 6500 Maori children attend schools of one degree or another. Private schools claim about 10% of these. The annual parliamentary expenditure on education exceeds £700,000. In this Connexion it may be claimed that the proportion of policemen to population (1 to 1375) is lower in New Zealand than in any other colony. The fixing of the legal minimum “factory age” for children at fourteen undoubtedly favours school attendance.

Land.—Apart from gold-mining, coal-mining and gum-digging, the industries are still mainly the growing of food and raw material; and the occupation of the land is easily the chief of all economic questions. Sixteen million acres were in 1907 already held in freehold, as against about six million acres rented from the state on permanent leasehold. Crown lands are still alienated, though but little is now sold for cash outright. The number of holdings of one acre and upwards in size rose from 33,332 in 1886 to 58,904 in 1896, and 72,338 in 1906; but the area held in estates of 5000 acres and upwards remains very large and has diminished but slowly despite the severity of the graduated land-tax. Many interesting experiments in settling lands have been tried. The best known of these, perhaps, is the repurchase of large pastoral estates for subdivision and lease in perpetuity. In the fourteen years 1893–1907 about a million and a quarter acres were thus acquired at a cost of somewhat under five millions and a half. Over 13,000 souls had been settled in this area, and the yearly rent received from them, about £220,000, left a substantial balance to the credit of the enterprise in the books of the treasury. The tenants (who had been favoured with good years) were with very few exceptions prospering.

Old Age Pensions.—The Old Age Pensions law, enacted in 1898, provided for the free grant of pensions, not exceeding £18 a year, to persons of sixty-five years and upwards who had lived for twenty-five years in the colony. Pensioners must be British subjects, poor, and not ex-criminals or of notoriously bad character. In 1905 the maximum pension was raised to £26 a year. Official figures show that the total number of applications for pensions up to that date had been 31,271, of which 23,877 had been granted. The number of pensioners then on the books of the Pensions Office was 13,257. In the first three years after enactment of the law the growth of the number of pensioners was very rapid; in the next five it was remarkably slow—only 481 altogether. The proportion of whites qualified by age and residence who were actually drawing pensions was rather less than one-third (it had been 9% more in 1902). The reduction was due to stricter administration. The total sum paid out in eight and a quarter years had been a million and three quarters. The amount paid in pensions in the financial year 1906–1907 was £325,000 The money is found by the central government. The administration of the system, which is in the hands of a special department, costs a little over, £5000. Frauds and evasions by applicants and pensioners, though they exist, are not believed to be numerous. Public thrift does not, so far, seem to have been diminished. Since the coming of the system the amount spent on outdoor relief in the colony had by 1906 diminished from £51,000 to £36,500, in face of an increase of nearly 23% in the population.

History.—The date, even the approximate date, of man’s arrival in New Zealand is uncertain. All that can be safely asserted is that by the 14th century Polynesian canoe-men had reached its northern shores in successive voyages. By 1642 they had spread to South Island, for there Abel Jansen Tasman found them when, in the course of his circuitous voyage from Java in the “Heemskirk,” he chanced upon the archipelago, coasted along much of its western side, though without venturing to land, and gave it the name it still bears. One hundred and thirty-seven years later, Cook, in the barque “Endeavour,” gained a much fuller knowledge of the coasts, which he circumnavigated, visited again and again, and mapped out with fair accuracy. He annexed the country, but the British government disavowed the act. After him came other navigators, French, Spanish, Russian and American; and, as the 18th century neared its end, came sealers, whalers and trading-schooners in quest of flax and timber. English missionaries, headed by Samuel Marsden, landed in 1814, to make for many years but