From what has gone before, readers will readily understand that the New Zealand Government has usually in its employ several thousand labourers engaged in road-making, bridge-building, draining, and in erecting and repairing public buildings.  To avoid the faults of both the ordinary contract and the day-wage system, a plan, clumsily called The Co-operative Contract System, has been adopted by the present Premier, Mr. Seddon.  The work is cut up into small sections, the workmen group themselves in little parties of from four to eight men, and each party is offered a section at a fair price estimated by the Government’s engineers.  Material, when wanted, is furnished by the Government, and the tax-payer thus escapes the frauds and adulteration of old contract days.  The result of the system in practice is that where workmen are of, at any rate, average industry and capacity, they make good, sometimes excellent, wages.  In effect they are groups of piece-workers, whose relation with each other is that of partners.  Each band elects a trustee, with whom the Government officials deal.  They are to a large extent their own masters, and work without being driven by the contractor’s foreman.  They are not encouraged to work more than eight hours a day; but as what they get depends on what they do, they do not dawdle during those hours, and if one man in a group should prove a loafer, his comrades, who have to suffer for his laziness, soon get rid of him.  The tendency is for first-class men to join together, and for second-class men to similarly arrange themselves.  Sometimes, of course, the officers, in making estimates of the price to be paid for work, make mistakes, and men will earn extravagantly high wages, or get very poor returns.  But as the sections are small, this does not last for long, and the balance is redressed.  After some years’ experience, it seems fairly proved that the average of earnings is not extravagant, and that the taxpayer loses nothing by the arrangement as compared with the old contract system, while the change is highly popular with workmen throughout the Colony.

Those who know anything of politics anywhere, will not need to be told that the changes and experiments here sketched have been viewed with suspicion, alarm, contempt, or anger, by a large class of wealthy and influential New Zealanders.  It is but fair that, in a sketch like this, some emphasis should be laid upon their dissent and protests.  Into the personal attacks of which very much of their criticism has consisted this is not the place to enter.  A summary of the Conservative view of the progressive work ought, however, to have a place.  Disqualified as I might be thought to be from attempting it, I prefer to make use of an account written and published in 1896 by an English barrister, who, in the years 1894-95, spent many months in the Colony studying with attention its politics and public temper.  As his social acquaintanceships lay chiefly among the Conservatives, he had no difficulty in getting frank expressions of their views.  In the following sentences he sums up the more moderate and impersonal of these, as he heard and analysed them:—­