Henry Demarest Lloyd, a reform journalist discouraged by populism’s defeat in the United States, toured New Zealand in 1899. Lloyd wanted to study New Zealand’s sudden burst of reform legislation stemming from a great industrial strike in 1890 and, in its wake, a Labor Party election victory that precipitated dramatic change.

Lloyd was one of many reformers who looked overseas for progressive ideas. The urban settlement movement in the United States was inspired by British examples. Municipal, state, and federal officials borrowed innovative policies from other parts of the industrializing world — from scientific forest management to workmen’s compensation laws.

New Zealand democracy is the talk of the world to-day. It has made itself the policeman and partner of industry to an extent unknown elsewhere. It is the “experiment station” of advanced legislation. …

Instead of escaping from the evils of the social order by going to a new country, the Englishmen who settled New Zealand found that they had brought all its problems with them. … The best acres were in the hands of monopolists. … The little farmer, forced by unjust and deliberately contrived laws to pay his own and his rich neighbor’s taxes, had to sell out his little homestead to that neighbor for what he could get. The workingman, able to get neither land nor work, had to become a tramp. … The blood of the people was the vintage of the rich.

Here is the record of ten years [of progressive legislation]:. … The rich man, because rich, is made to pay more. …

By compulsory arbitration the public gets for the guidance of public opinion all the facts as to disputes between labor and capital, [and] puts an end to strikes and lock-outs. … For the unemployed the nation makes itself a labor bureau. It brings them and the employers together. It reorganizes its public works and land system so as to give land to the landless and work to the workless. … The state itself insures the working people against accident.

… The nation’s railroads are used to redistribute unemployed labour, to rebuild industry shattered by calamity, to stimulate production by special rates to and from farms and factories, to give health and education to the school and factory population and the people generally by cheap excursions.

… Women are enfranchised. … On election day one can see the baby-carriage standing in front of the polls while the father and mother go in and vote — against each other if they choose.

Last of all, pensions are given to the aged poor.

… We are exhorted to take “one step at a time” [but] this theory does not fit the New Zealand evolution. … It was not merely a change in parties; it was a change in principles and institutions that amounted to nothing less than a social right-about-face. It was a New Zealand revolution, one which without destruction passed at once to the tasks of construction.

Source: Henry Demarest Lloyd, Newest England (New York: Doubleday, 1901), 1, 364–374.