been carried to extreme lengths in New Zealand, where the hundreds of petty local bodies, each with its functions, officers, and circle of friends and enemies, are so many stumbling-blocks to thorough—­going amalgamation and rearrangement.  In New Zealand the English conditions are reversed; the municipal lags far behind the central authority on the path of experiment.  This is no doubt due, at least in part, to the difference in the respective franchises.  The New Zealand ratepayers’ franchise is more restricted than that under which the English councils are elected.

A few words will be in place here about the continuance and outcome of the Public Works policy.  Sir Julius Vogel quitted the Colony in 1876, but borrowing for public works did not cease.  It has not yet ceased, though it has slackened at times.  In 1879 a commercial depression overtook the Colony.  The good prices of wool and wheat sank lower and lower; the output of gold, too, had greatly gone down.  There had been far too much private borrowing to buy land or to set up or extend commercial enterprises.  The rates of interest had often been exorbitant.  Then there happened on a small scale what happened in Victoria on a larger scale twelve years later.  The boom burst amid much suffering and repentance.  In some districts three-fourths of the prominent colonists were ruined, for the price of rural produce continued on the whole to fall relentlessly year after year until 1894.  The men who had burdened themselves with land, bought wholly or largely with borrowed money, nearly all went down.  Some were ruined quickly, others struggled on in financial agony for a decade or more.  Then when the individual debtors had been squeezed dry the turn of their mortgagees came.  Some of these were left with masses of unsalable property on their hands.  At last, in 1894, the directors of the bank which was the greatest of the mortgagees—­the Bank of New Zealand—­had to come to the Government of the day to be saved from instant bankruptcy.  In 1895 an Act was passed which, while guaranteeing the bank, virtually placed it beneath State control, under which it seems likely gradually to get clear of its entanglements.  This was the last episode in the long drama of inflation and depression which was played out in New Zealand between 1870 and 1895.  No story of the Colony, however brief, can pretend to be complete which does not refer to this.  The blame of it is usually laid upon the public works policy.  The money borrowed and spent by the Treasury is often spoken of as having been wasted in political jobs, and as having led to nothing except parliamentary corruption and an eternal burden of indebtedness and taxation.  This is but true to a very limited extent.  It was not the public borrowing of the Colony, but the private debts of the colonists, which, following the extraordinary fall in the prices of their raw products between 1873 and 1895, plunged so many thousands into disaster.  Nine-tenths of