346 The National Geographic Magazine 



sailants of animal and vegetable life. 

 But the worst of pests came to them — 

 the social kind. When the New Zea- 

 lander talks of social pests he means the 

 plutocrats and the paupers, and in 

 order to remove them he removed the 

 false credit system of government. In 

 the construction of their public works 

 the directors have been abolished to as 

 great extent as possible. The New 

 Zealand public works, the New Zealand 

 railways, bridges, and school-houses are 

 constructed by the government, which 

 makes contracts with its own laborers 

 without the intervention of the director. 



Then the land system was changed 

 by means still more thoroughgoing than 

 this: the government began to take back 

 the land, in order to break up the land 

 monopoly. It did this in two ways : 

 one was purchase by negotiation ; the 

 second was purchase by condemnation, 

 if owners were not willing to sell. 



The land itself was then cut up into 

 smaller tracts for the benefit of the 

 farmers ; and they especially recognized 

 in their distribution the young men and 

 women whom we saw leaving during 

 the exodus, by giving garden and subur- 

 ban spots to such as wished to live in the 

 country. For such there are special 

 trains to take them to and from their 

 work ; they have a road which makes 

 special rates and runs special trains. 

 That is what the government has done 

 for them ; but in New Zealand the " gov- 

 ernment ' ' and ' ' the people ' ' are inter- 

 changeable terms, and the people in the 

 cities have clothed themselves with 

 power to take by the same methods of 

 condemnation any new tracts of land, 

 which are then subdivided and sold to 

 the inhabitants in small tracts. 



To describe this system fully at this 

 moment would not be possible, but 

 briefly it may be stated that when the 

 land with all its advantages goes to its 

 new owner it can never again be rolled 

 up into great estates and never again be 

 allowed to lie idle. This land must 



always be kept in use and can never 

 again be consolidated into the great 

 tracts held by the land monopolists, 

 who made the revolution. 



The railroads are also the property of 

 the people in New Zealand. The first 

 thing the revolution did was to place 

 them in the hands of a minister for rail- 

 ways, with a seat in Parliament, for the 

 express purpose of making the railroads 

 responsive to popular pressure, which 

 has been the result. 



They have adopted a system of fac- 

 tory laws more minute, more advanced, 

 and more progressive than those found 

 anywhere else in the world. One of 

 them forbids any woman to work in a 

 factory until her new-born child is at 

 least four weeks old. 



They worked out their great method 

 of dealing with the labor problem of the 

 world, an experiment the success of 

 which has been phenomenal, by means 

 of compulsory arbitration of labor dis- 

 putes. And so today New Zealand is a 

 country without strikes, and for the 

 past six 3'ears has been the only coun- 

 try in Christendom which has presented 

 the spectacle of a country without 

 strikes. 



There cannot be a panic in one coun- 

 try of the world that does not show it- 

 self in the others. The panic of 1893, 

 traveling on its path of destruction, 

 reached Australia on time, and struck it, 

 and struck it hard, on the first of May, 

 1894. There were then in Australia, in 

 full and flourishing operation, nine hun- 

 dred million dollars of capital. Six 

 weeks later there were only four hun- 

 dred and fifty million ; all the rest had 

 been swept out of existence in six weeks 

 in consequence of the panic. 



This monster started for New Zea- 

 land, but it never arrived there. The 

 people took possession of the principal 

 bank, took it with the full consent and 

 approval of the owners. The govern- 

 ment said to the people of New Zealand 

 and to all the world, " This bank has 



