Mr. W. P. Reeves, who died in London in 1932 at the age of seventy-five years, was the first native-born New Zealander to rise to eminence in the fields of literature and statesmanship. He was a pioneer in advanced industrial legislation, and was the first Minister of Labour in the New Zealand Cabinet. He has been described as the foremost writer this country has produced; his reputation rests chiefly on his book “The Long White Cloud.” Nearly half of his life was spent in England, many years of it as High Commissioner for New Zealand.

To be born clever, though poor; that is a good thing. To be born clever and with the proverbial silver spoon in mouth; that is better. For the spoon, or what it symbolises, permits to natural ability the educational advantages and varnish of the schools. If a young man is not only clever but possesses what, in the vernacular, is called 'the gift of gab'; if he possesses a tongue not only voluble but quick to answer back, and waspish in the answering, added to a disposition with more aloes than honey in it, who shall say where, nowadays, that young man is going to stop?”

That rather tart prologue to a character sketch is from “Political Portraits,” by “Quiz,” a pamphlet in which many New Zealand Parliamentary figures of over forty years ago were described, often in unflattering and sarcastic fashion. “Quiz” was Joseph Eyison, a journalist of the day in Wellington, who plied a skilful and mordant pen. The young man was the Hon. William Pember Reeves, Minister for Justice, and soon to be first Minister of the Department of Labour. He had been five years in Parliament when “Political Portraits” appeared, and had given his fellow-members such a taste of his quality that “Quiz” had adequate warrant for his wonder where so clever a young man was likely to stop. Indeed, Mr. Reeves, who was then thirty-five, went far since his early years in Parliament, and achieved even greater fame than the writer of 1892 was destined to hear. Politics absorbed all his energies then; it was later that he took pains to develop a literary style and an historical sense that brought him a wider celebrity than a lifetime of Parliamentary warfare would have won.