THE THEORY OF COLONIZATION 263
to all. Four successive premiers of New Zealand were, respec- tively, butcher, schoolmaster, commercial traveler, and engine- driver. Two farm-laborers have risen to the still higher position of premier of the mother-state of New South Wales, and many of the cabinet ministers are illiterate men. The Commonwealth and also Western Australia have witnessed the original phenom- enon of a labor ministry; Queensland has a mixed liberal and labor ministry ; and New South Wales rejoices in a parliamentary opposition that consists mainly of labor members and is led by their leader. Tolerance is unlimited, and avowed freethinkers are premiers and ministers, chief justices and judges. But it is in their governmental socialism that the lineaments of a new social type are most palpable. Hardly had they been planted when the young colonies varied in this direction. Governments began to do for them what had been done in the motherland by private enterprise. They built the railways, and this has led to the establishment of state manufactures and the purchase of state coal-mines. They owned the waste lands, and their ownership of them has grown into laws for the nationalization of the land. They pensioned their employees, and out of this have come gov- ernment fire- and life-insurance departments. Nowhere else have the workmen more completely succeeded in asserting for them- selves a position of equality with the masters by means of state courts of arbitration. Old-age pensions secure them against want in the sunset of their days. The artisan and the laborer are being raised as much above the oppressed workman of last generation as he was above the serf and the serf above the slave. A pro- tected laboring class in a semi-socialist state is doubtless the new social type that is being generated in Australia and New Zealand. The new departures taken in colonies are often projected in the mother-country or in older countries. The political constitu- tions of the American colonies sprang in part from the Puritan ideals of the English commonwealth. "The Agreement of the People" drawn up in 1648-49 contains all that is distinctive of the earlier phases of American public life. The sovereignty of " the people " (the term is notable) is clearly stated. A represen- tative assembly (the word became American and is now Aus-
