He believed that it was in him to grapple with the subject, to overcome the difficulties, and be successful. Looking backward, he remembered that the colony had not hesitated to pledge itself to the extent of a million and a half sterling in order to give cheap money to the settlers. It had not hesitated to commit itself to a direct liability of two millions and a half, and also a contingent liability, at the time of the banking crisis. Early in the colony’s history, its war with the Maori race cost between ten and eleven millions, and the people bore that burden also without demur. In these circumstances, he had no doubt that it would accept his new scheme, and pay the money that would help to make the lives of the destitute poor less miserable.
He had another way of looking at the question. The money borrowed for advancing to settlers, the fifteen millions spent on building railways, and the large sums expended on other public works, had benefited chiefly the land owners and the well-to-do classes, while it was the masses who supplied the money to pay the interest on these sums and the sinking funds. The colony had been committed to large liabilities for public works, and it did not seem to him unreasonable to ask the colony, in the hey-day of its prosperity, to commit itself to the payment of a sum of money that would give an annual pension to insure old colonists against pressing want.
At the time of the Maori war, the colony passed a Military Claims and Land Settlements Act, giving land-grants to those who fought in the war, although they may have been engaged in it for only a few months. To attract military men, land-grants were given to them if they would come and settle in the colony, even if they took no part in the war, and many old soldiers came from India and England and other countries in the Empire, and settled under those conditions. He pointed out that that was really a system of pensions, which sometimes proved to be very valuable ones, and he used the regulations under the Act as further arguments in favour of granting pensions to old people.
He knew that the difficulties which had surrounded Old Age Pensions schemes in the Old Country did not exist in New
