represented by the government, for landlord. Under
these conditions it is easy to understand how the doctrine of the
single tax found a peculiarly congenial home in the minds of New
Zealand public men. It is true that large areas of the lands of the
country had been disposed of in freehold to settlers. It is true that
the freehold tenure of the native inhabitants had in a certain sense
been guaranteed to them by treaty, at least in so far that it should
never be taken from them without compensation. It is true that the
mass of the people were very fully possessed by the apparently almost
universal preference for the idea of a freehold over every other
tenure of lands so far as they were personally concerned. But, on the
other hand, they had grown accustomed to the practice of holding areas
of land on lease both from the government and from the native owners,
whose tenure was not individual, but tribal, and they had learned the
lesson that there was no intolerable hardship in the system.

The attempt to introduce a system which should give effect to the
principle underlying the economic theory of Henry George in New
Zealand was not hastily made, nor was it attempted on a scale that
could be fairly open to the charge of being revolutionary in its
incidence. The first step taken by the legislature was in the
direction of so dealing with the public estate of the country as to
encourage settlers to lease rather than to purchase the freehold. With
this in view a system of leases in perpetuity was established, and
areas of the best and most accessible of the land still unsold were
set apart to be dealt with under the new plan. Any person, not already
the holder of land in freehold, which, together with the land applied
for under perpetual lease, would make an area of more than six hundred
and forty acres, or one square mile, could apply for a lease of not
more than three hundred and forty acres on perpetual lease. Five
dollars per acre was fixed as the price of the land, such being the
average price of first-class freehold land unimproved in the country,
and the applicant was entitled to a lease for 999 years of the land
applied for, subject to the conditions that he resided upon the land
during the first ten years of the tenancy; that he improved it to the
extent of thirty per cent of its upset value within six years; and
that he paid as annual rental interest at the rate of five per cent on
the price or value of the land.