The Weak Points in the System

This brings us to the weak points in the New Zealand system.

The English method of governing by a responsible Ministry has many disadvantages. What are esteemed to be its merits have long been heralded to an admiring world. For the moment take a look at the other side of the ledger, seldom noted but still the more informing.

New Zealand is governed by Wise and Good gentlemen whose function is to hand out Government ready made like so much pie. They are not selected by the people, but chosen by a [unclear: mothod mos] undemocratic, on the strength their superior gifts, goodness and wisdom. Yet while they are not chosen by the people, they are liable to lose their jobs by reason of a change the popular majority. As a rest of this [unclear: wkward] and lop-sided arrangement, the Ministers continue to hold office by reason of incessant skill in walking the page 25 slack wire. They do not know what the people want and have only an indirect and clumsy way of guessing at it; so they balance and juggle on the slack wire between a gust of alleged public opinion on this side and a gust on the other, until they fall off.

For instance (and here is a good story), come to the rather pathetic struggles of this Government with the always overshadowing land question,

In the beginning, or thereabouts, great areas of New Zealand's fertile lands were grabbed off by rich men, in or from England, who made up great estates with the intention of bequeathing them to their descendants forever intact, after the approved English fashion. This was fine for the descendants but tough on the country, the grand estates being devoted chiefly to virgin forest or game preserves without any game. To give settlement and progress a chance the progressive Government, when it came to the helm, adopted an extremely radical policy. It borrowed money, bought up some of the estates on a practically compulsory purchase, cut them into small farms and offered them to settlers on terms of unparalleled generosity. In no other region of the world, I think, could a penniless man fare so well, for the Government not only rented the land to the settler on nominal terms but it advanced money to him and did almost everything else except to plant his crops and comb his hair.

But while the leases were made for long terms and at wonderfully low rates, the nation still owned the land. Now so strong in man (under [unclear: present] conditions) is the impulse to gamble in land, that the tenants resented this arrangement. What they wanted was land that they could sell or mortgage or trade with or get unearned increment from. In a few years there arose from the tenants (or most of them) a clamor on this subject, followed by their wholesale movement into the ranks of the Opposition. When I was here before, I wrote the remarkable story of the great Cheviot estate of 84,755 acres which the Government wrested from its owners and cut into hundreds of small farms. Every tenant on that estate promptly joined the Opposition and demanded ownership of the farm with which he had been so easily endowed.

Here was a case where a Ministry that did not care for slack-wire walking or a Government that was really democratic would have had neither difficulty nor perplexity. The issue was plain. To yield to the tenants' demands would be a surrender of every good thing gained by the Government's radical policy. If a tenant could sell his land, a few years would see the return of the great estates and of the exact conditions that the Government at such heavy cost had destroyed. Besides all of which, the Government's policy was a step towards that nationalization of the land that is the only way out of the land problem; so that what the tenants demanded was a retrograde movement.

In a genuine democracy like Switzerland the question would have been submitted to the people, who would have settled it on the side of progress and the Government's policy. In the kind of abortive and thumb-handed democracy that obtains in the British Empire wherein government is not by the people but by the Wise and Good, the situation was very different. The Wise and Good Ministry was confronted with the clamor of the tenants which threatened to cost somebody his precious job. So the Wise and Good gentlemen, being rattled, began to shilly-shally with the question and have been shilly-shallying with it ever since.

They are afraid that the tenants' vote added to other disaffected votes may produce some day an adverse majority in Parliament. Whereupon out they will go without a particle of real reference to the merit of the land question; for this is the vice of responsible Ministerial Government and Government by the Wise and Good generally.

Meantime the Good Gentlemen Afraid of Their Jobs have made in another way a certain concession to the agitation for freehold or ownership. Among the broad benevolences of the progressive idea in New Zealand is a plan by which conjestion of population is to be prevented in the towns and cities. If a workingman in New Zealand wishes a home he has but to deposit $50 with the Government, which thereupon builds him a house on the land it owns adjacent to his city, or if such land be unavailable it may buy a lot specially for him. The Government is so generous that he can even submit his own ideas, plans or preferences for his home, and so far as possible the Government will follow these. When the house is done the man gets it on extremely pleasant terms. Or if he does not care for this arrangement, he can rent at low rates one of the workingmen's houses that the Government has already built.

The rental or leasehold was the original device. Since the freehold has been agitated, the badly rattled Government has conceded to persons housed in this manner the right to purchase. This, of course, only increases the dissatisfaction of the farm tenants, and about their case the Government evidently does not know what to do. None of the Wise and Good Gentlemen that compose it seem to have any convictions on the subject, but about one thing they are unanimous. They want to hold their jobs, so that to disarm a part of the Opposition they are quite likely to make still further concessions backward.

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I ought to add that in the cases of the workingmen's houses an attempt is made to guard against the abuse of landlordism by providing that the property can be sold only to a workingman with an income of no more than $875 a year; and it seems fondly to be imagined that in some way this safeguard will avail. Hut New Zealand, of course, lacks as yet our long and lugubrious experience in trying to regulate things that cannot be regulated.