of a Premier have now and then added to the number of apparently new Cabinets.  Of the seven or eight Ministers who make up a Cabinet, four or five are usually able and overworked men.  The stress of New Zealand public life has told on many of her statesmen.  Beside Governor Hobson, McLean, Featherston, Crosbie Ward, Atkinson and Ballance died in harness, and Hall had to save his life by resigning.  Most of the Colony’s leaders have lived and died poor men.  Parliaments are triennial, and about one-third of the constituencies are pretty certain to return new members at a general election.  All the elections take place on one day, and if a member—­even the leader of a party—­loses his seat, he may be cut out for years.  This is a misfortune, as experience is a quality of which the House is apt to run short.  Block votes frequently prevent elections from being fought on the practical questions of the hour.  The contests are inexpensive, and there is very little of the cynical blackmailing of candidates and open subsidising by members which jar so unpleasantly on the observer of English constituencies.  Indeed, cynicism is by no means a fault of New Zealand political life.  The most marked failings are, perhaps, the savagely personal character of some of its conflicts, and a general over-strained earnestness and lack of sense of proportion or humour.  Newspapers and speeches teem with denunciations which might have been in place if hurled at the corruption of Walpole, the bureaucracy of Prussia, the finance of the Ancien Regime, or the treatment of native races by the Spanish conquerors of the New World.  Nor is bitterness confined to wild language in or out of parliament.  The terrible saying of Gibbon Wakefield, fifty years ago, that in Colonial politics “every one strikes at his opponent’s heart,” has still unhappily some truth in it.  The man who would serve New Zealand in any more brilliant fashion than by silent voting or anonymous writing must tread a path set with the thorns of malice, and be satisfied to find a few friends loyal and a few foes chivalrous.

Chapter XXI

SOME BONES OF CONTENTION

  “Now who shall arbitrate? 
   Ten men love what I hate,
   Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;
   Ten who in ears and eyes
   Match me; we all surmise,
   They this thing, and I that; whom shall my soul believe?”

During the ten years beginning in 1879 New Zealand finance was little more than a series of attempts to avert deficits.  In their endeavours to raise the revenue required for interest payments on the still swelling public debt, and the inevitably growing departmental expenditure, various treasurers turned to the Customs.  In raising money by duties they received support both from those who wished to protect local industries and from those who wished to postpone the putting of heavy taxation upon land.  Sir Harry Atkinson,