In truth the Provinces had been charged with important functions.  The management and sale of Crown lands, education, police, immigration, laws relating to live-stock and timber, harbours, the making of roads and bridges—­almost the entire work of colonization—­came within their scope.  By a “compact” arrived at in the session of 1856 each Province was in effect given the entire control of its public lands—­an immense advantage to those of the South Island, where these were neither forest-covered nor in Maori hands.  On the other hand, it would have been grossly unfair to confiscate them for general purposes.  The Wakefield system in Canterbury would have been unbearable had the L2 paid by the settlers for each acre been sent away to be spent elsewhere.  The Wakefield price was a local tax, charged and submitted to to get a revenue to develop the lands for which it was paid.  As it was, half a crown an acre was handed over by each Province to the Central Treasury as a contribution for national purposes.  Loans were also raised by Parliament 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