have been a great outcry from all parts of the colony, and the House would very soon have been compelled to make a reduction.
The position he assigned to the miners in the scheme of colonization is shown by the fact that he regarded them as the real pioneers. Would New Zealand, he asked, be in its present position if it had not been for the miners? He spoke of their intelligence, and said that in a district in which he had lived for some years there was a population of from 6000 to 7000, and it required only three policemen. He affirmed his readiness to pit the ordinary miner against the working man in any of the neighbouring districts. There were traits in the character of the miner, he said, as he continued his eulogium, which must at all times commend themselves to all who had lived among miners for many years, as he had done. As to charitable institutions, miners gave one pound for every shilling contributed by other sections of the community in the same position. He had been on the goldfields for nearly a sixth of a century, and he had never known a person who was allowed to go without a meal or a cup of tea. In the miner’s hut there was always a pannikin of tea and a loaf of bread for any person in want. Miners were not the class of men they had been represented to be in the days gone by. They were, indeed, a most desirable class of colonists. Their average wages were thirty shillings a week, and out of that they had to pay £2 10s. a year as a special tax.
At that time about nine-tenths of the county revenue of the goldfields district was derived from the gold duty, and it was feared that the abolution of the duty would cause serious financial trouble. His Bill was opposed strongly by the different Governments, but he introduced it session after session, and finally succeeded in having it passed in 1887.
He turned his attention to the colony’s divorce laws. He believed that habitual drunkenness was a good ground for separation, as there was nothing so deplorable to his mind as “a good soul, a good wife, having to struggle and to provide for herself and her family and then be abused by a drunken husband.”
