So much for State socialism in Germany. To find a democracy which is really government of the people by the people for the people, we must go to our colonies at the antipodes. It is a democracy which both in theory and practice has most fully recognised that the State is an association for the promotion of the well-being of the whole people. New Zealand, one of the youngest of the English colonies, is the finest example of such a State. The State in New Zealand owns and works railways, telegraphs, and telephones. When the Bank of New Zealand was on the point of stopping payment, with the most disastrous results to the country, the government came to its help with a guarantee of £4,000,000 and made it a State institution. It made advances of cheap money to settlers and passed legislation to break up large estates. The laws for the protection of labour are of the most advanced type. It settles labour disputes by compulsory arbitration, and has in operation an old-age pension scheme by which persons over 65 years of age receive an annual pension. At first fixed at £18, this has been raised to £26, or 10s. a week. It has introduced women’s suffrage, graduated taxation, a complete system of local option in the drink trade, a public system of life insurance and of medical care, and a public trustee with very wide and beneficent powers. All these measures and others which we need not name are the outcome in New Zealand of a great wave of agrarian labour and socialistic feeling which spread over the world about twenty years ago. It has been well described as socialism without dogma. Every measure has been examined and approved on its merits. The policy therefore is all the more valuable as a mass of testimony to the beneficent tendency of a reasonable socialism. The conditions have no doubt been exceptionally favourable. New Zealand is a young country with great natural advantages and a small population which has a very high average of intelligence, initiative, and energy. It is an example, however, which should be most encouraging to the world, as it shows what may be done in a true democracy, where the government is in entire sympathy with the people and responsive to their wishes. The high honour of carrying out this model legislation belongs to Richard Seddon and his associates. Seddon was Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1893 to his death in 1906.