ment to buy native land for the North Island
Provinces.

On the other hand, the Provinces enjoyed their land revenue--when
there was any--their pastoral rents, a dog tax, and such fag-ends of
customs revenue as the central Government could spare them. Their
condition was quite unequal. Canterbury, with plenty of high-priced
land, could more than dispense with aid from the centre. Other
Provinces, with little or no land revenue, were mortified by having
to appear at Wellington as suppliants for special grants. When the
Provinces borrowed money for the work of development, they had to pay
higher rates of interest than the Colony would have had. Finally, the
colonial treasurer had not only to finance for one large Colony, but
for half a dozen smaller governments, and ultimately to guarantee
their debts. No wonder that one of her premiers has said that New
Zealand was a severe school of statesmanship.

Yet for many years the ordinary dissensions of Liberal and Tory, of
classes and the parties of change and conservatism, were hardly seen
in the Parliament which sat at Auckland until 1864 and thereafter at
Wellington. Throughout the settlements labour as a rule was in
demand, often able to dictate its own terms, nomadic, and careless of
politics. The land question was relegated to the Provincial councils,
where round it contending classes and rival theories were grouped.
It was in some of the councils, notably that of Otago, that the
mutterings of Radicalism began first to be heard. The rapid change
which bred a parliamentary Radical party after the fall of the
Provinces in 1876 was the inevitable consequence of the transfer of
the land problem to the central legislature and the destruction of
those local safety-valves--the councils. Meanwhile, the ordinary lines
of division were not found in the central legislature. According as
this or that question came into the foreground, parties and groups in
the House of Representatives shifted and changed like the cloud shown
to Polonius. Politics made strange bedfellows; Cabinets were sometimes
the oddest hybrids. One serviceably industrious lawyer, Mr. Henry
Sewell, was something or other in nine different Ministries between
1854 and 1872. The premier of one year might be a subordinate minister
the next; or some subtle and persistent nature, like that of Sir
Frederick Whitaker, might manage chiefs whom he appeared to follow,
and be the guiding mind of parties which he did not prof