with the working classes, but who believed that industrial warfare would wreck the colony’s future.
Late in 1889 hopeful people preferred to believe that the colony had turned the corner, and had commenced to make its way towards the old prosperity that it had lost for many years.
The signs of progress, however, were not very marked. In all parts of the colony, wherever the traveller inquired in respect to general conditions, he received the same answer: “There is no life; no trade, no speculation, no confidence.”
There had been two good harvests, and prices had improved in some directions, but business remained dull in several places and stagnant in many. A proof of the presence of the deep depression is found in the banking returns. The banks were slow to make advances. They tightened their purse-strings, and gave little credit. Instead of increasing their advances, in fact, they made determined attempts to draw in advances that had been made already. From July, 1888, to June 20th, 1889, for instance, the banks called in moneys advanced to their customers to the amount of £1,269,845. It was an enormous contraction of credit in a small community, and was felt in all parts of the colony and by all classes. In this way the depression acted upon the banking institutions, and the banking institutions acted upon the depression, making conditions pass from bad to worse.
The most galling aspect of the case was that nearly the whole of Australia was going through a “boom” of unprecedented prosperity. The banks’ advances in Victoria had increased in two years by no less than £10,500,000, in New South Wales by £6,920,000, and in Queensland by £5,590,000, making a total of nearly £23,000,000 of increased advances in a population of two millions and a quarter in two years.
There seemed, indeed, to be no hope for New Zealand, which was beginning to resign itself to its despair.
A feature of the session, which had a far-reaching effect on the future of the Liberal Party, was Sir George Grey’s success in having the one-man-one-vote principle affirmed by Parliament and recorded on the Statute Book. He had introduced the
