ublic office. The Public Trustee never dies, never goes out of
his mind, never leaves the Colony, never becomes disqualified, and
never becomes that extremely disagreeable and unpleasant person--a
trustee whom you do not trust. In addition to his other manifold
duties he holds and administers very large areas of land reserved for
the use of certain Maori tribes. These he leases to working settlers,
paying over the rents to the Maori beneficiaries. Naturally, the class
which has the most cause to be grateful to the Public Trust Office
is that composed of widows and orphans and other unbusinesslike
inheritors of small properties, persons whose little inheritances are
so often mismanaged by private trustees or wasted in law costs.

Another reform carried out by Vogel had been the adoption of the
Torrens system of land transfer. Henceforth under the Land Transfer
Law, Government officers did nearly all the conveyancing business of
the Colony. Land titles were investigated, registered, and guaranteed,
and sales and mortgages then became as simple and almost as cheap as
the transfer of a parcel of shares in a company.

Even earlier the legislature had done a creditable thing in being the
first in the Empire to abolish the scandal of public executions.

1877 may be accounted the birth year of more militant and systematic
reform.

Grey's platform speeches in the summer of 1876-77 brought home the new
Radicalism to the feelings of the mass of the electors, and to the
number, then considerable, who were not electors. For the first time
one of the Colony's leaders appealed to the mass of the colonists
with a policy distinctly and deliberately democratic. The result was
awakening. Then and subsequently Grey advocated triennial parliaments,
one man one vote, a land tax, and a land policy based upon the leasing
of land rather than its sale, and particularly upon a restriction of
the area which any one man might acquire. The definite views of the
Radicals bore fruit at once in the session of 1877. It was necessary
to establish a national system of education to replace the useful, but
ill-jointed work done peacemeal by the Provinces. A bill--and not a
bad bill--was introduced by Mr. Charles Bowen, a gentleman honourably
connected with the founding of education in Canterbury. This measure
the Radicals took hold of and turned it into the free, secular,
compulsory system of primary school-teaching of which the Colony
is to-day justly