lapse
of certain of his settlements. Others, however, turned out to be
successes, and by last accounts the village settlers and their
families now number nearly five thousand human beings, occupying
35,000 acres in allotments of an average size of twenty-four acres.
Most of them divide their time between tilling their land and working
for wages as shearers, harvesters, or occasionally mechanics. Some
L27,000 has been lent them, of which they still owe about L24,000.
As against this the Government has been paid L27,000 in rent and
interest, and the improvements made by the settlers on their
allotments are valued at about L110,000, and form very good security
for their debts to the Treasury. Of late years Mr. McKenzie has been
aiding the poorer class of would-be farmers by employing them at wages
to clear the land of which they afterwards become tenants. The money
paid them is, of course, added to the capital value of the land.

For the last five years Liquor has disputed with Land the chief place
in the public interest. It has introduced an element of picturesque
enthusiasm and, here and there, a passion of hatred rarely seen before
in New Zealand politics. It brought division into the Liberal Party
in 1893, at the moment when the Progressive movement seemed to have
reached its high-water mark, and the feeling it roused was found
typified in the curious five years' duel between Mr. Seddon and Sir
Robert Stout, which began in 1893 and ended only with Sir Robert's
retirement at the beginning of the present year. It has strangely
complicated New Zealand politics, is still doing so, and is the key to
much political manoeuvring with which it might seem to have nothing
whatever to do.

For many years total abstainers in New Zealand have grown in numbers.
Though for the last thirty years drinking and drunkenness have been on
the decline among all classes of colonists, and though New Zealanders
have for a long time consumed much less alcohol per head than Britons
do, that has not checked the growth of an agitation for total
prohibition, which has absorbed within itself probably the larger,
certainly the more active, section of temperance reformers.[1] In 1882
a mild form of local option went on to the statute-book, while the
granting of licenses was handed over to boards elected by ratepayers.
For the next ten years no marked result roused attention. Then, almost
suddenly, the Prohibition movement was seen to be advancing by l