was to be a revision of the rental.  The settlers, many of whom were quite destitute, were helped at first not only by two years’ postponement of their rent, but by small advances to each to enable them to buy seed, tools, food, and building material.  Ballance was fiercely attacked in 1887 for his experiment, and his opponents triumphantly pointed to the collapse 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 leaps and bounds.  Two clergymen, the Rev. Leonard Isitt and the Rev. Edward Walker, were respectively the voice and the hand of the Prohibitionists.