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 proud, and under which the State educates thirteen-fourteenths of the children of the Colony.  Now, in 1898, out of an estimated population of about 780,000 all told, some 150,000 are at school or college.  Of children between ten and fifteen years of age the proportion unable to read is but o.68.  The annual average of attendance is much higher in New Zealand than in any of the Australian Colonies.  The primary school system is excellent on its literary, not so excellent on its technical side.  Nearly three-fourths of the Roman Catholic children do not take advantage of it.  Their parents prefer to support the schools of their church, though without State aid of any kind.  These, and a proportion of the children of the wealthier, are the only exceptions to the general use made of the public schools.  It is not likely that any change, either in the direction of teaching religion in these, or granting money to church schools, will be made.  Each political party in turn is only too eager to charge the other with tampering with the National system—­a sin, the bare hint of which is like suspicion of witchcraft or heresy in the Middle Ages.

Grey gained office in 1877, but with a majority too small to enable him to carry his measures.  Ballance, his treasurer, did indeed carry a tax upon land values.  But its chief result at the time was to alarm and exasperate owners of land, and to league them against the Radicals, who after a not very brilliant experience of office without power fell in 1879.  Thereafter, so utterly had Grey’s angry followers lost faith in his generalship, that they deposed him—­a humiliation which it could be wished they had seen