free education should end with the Fourth Standard. This scheme was not adopted.
The artizans and the working classes, tired of appealing in vain to Government after Government, and of being bluntly told that nothing could be done for them, prepared to carry out their threat to forsake New Zealand and go to other countries, where they could at least obtain sufficient work to keep them from starvation and abject poverty.
They went to Sir Harry Atkinson for the last time, and once again asked him to help them. “No Government,” he replied, “can do more than give effect to the will of the people. The movement must go upwards, not downwards. You must depend upon yourselves and look to yourselves more than you do.”
He told them that he had worked for low wages in pioneering days, and that when his wages rose from 2s. 6d. to 4s. a day it had been said that he was making his fortune. He had made his own house, he informed them, and had carried his provisions on his back, and he was as happy then as ever he had been in his life. When he met the Knights of Labour in Christchurch he lectured them on their moral obligations, and they lectured him on political economy and the duties of the State. After that, the people gave themselves up to the inevitable. They no longer placed their hope in the Government. They began to leave the colony in swarms, like migratory rats that are starved out of one district and pass on irresistibly to another in search of food.
This movement is known in the colony’s history as “The Exodus.”
At first it was depressing. Then it became alarming; and finally those who had a real interest in the colony’s welfare felt that if steps were not taken to stop the migration, New Zealand must indeed sink under the great burden of its sorrows. With “The Exodus” the colony lost a great deal of its vitality. It had suffered for nine years from a long drawn-out depression. This last strain was too much for its strength. Victoria, which was enjoying a “boom” that made New Zealand’s depression all the harder to bear, was the country to
