Introduction

The provision of work and the minimum wage by the New Zealand Company imparted important dynamics to the relations between the colonisers, the colonial elite, and the colonial workers in the Wakefield settlements in New Zealand in the 1840s and beyond. These dynamics have been subject to some significant work, particularly by Raewyn Dalziel and John Martin. None capture the complete story however.

Dalziel explains the pressures on workers to emigrate, particularly from the English south west, in her journal study, ‘Popular Protest in Early New Plymouth’. She also discusses the popularity of the promises of work and wages made by the Company, but notes that these were based on the English Poor Law. She refers both to the use of ‘classic poor law terminology’ and ‘an amalgam’ appearing in the Wakefield colonies ‘of the principles and practices of the old and new Poor Laws.’1. Despite Dalziel’s account, issues still arise as to why the promises induced poor working class emigrants to travel to New Zealand and the accuracy of characterising the promises as poor law relief rather than minimum wages.

John Martin also provides an interesting view of the legacy of the general experience of the Company’s promises. He suggests in ‘A small nation on the move’ that the Wakefield minimum wages and their surrounding circumstances had a subsequently positive affect on support for the poor in New Zealand. He states in particular that ‘The labourers’ protests and the New Zealand Company’s response were the forerunner of central government-provided unemployment relief in New Zealand that occurred on a scale not experienced in other countries. It became well established that the state had a responsibility for finding relief work for those who could not find work themselves.’2. This is at least misleading because the main legacy of the Company’s work and minimum wages, and the aftermath, appears to have been a political aversion to instituting and paying for any general ongoing system of support for the poor in need.

The following describes the background to the Company’s promises, and clarifies their development and demise. In part this is to give coherence to the story of the Wakefield minimum wages that was for a short while as much a radical triumph as the better known eight hour day also adopted in the early Wakefield settlements. But the account also allows us to better evaluate the particular issues of the character of the Company’s promises, their attractiveness as inducements to emigrate, and the long term legacy of the settlers’ experience of the measures.

British Poverty

The key to the development of the Company’s promises is the intense difficulties faced by many workers in Britain for at least much of the first half of the nineteenth century. This included extreme poverty and distress and the tightening of the government’s ameliorative measures, the latter comprising the rejection of minimum wages and a new level of reluctance to supply poor law relief.

The sense of crisis is evident in various contemporary written sources. These include Wakefield’s A Letter from Sydney, published in 1829, which described and explained his scheme of systematic colonisation as the means of alleviating the crisis. Wakefield used as the preface to his work, comments from the conservative Quarterly Review, possibly written by Robert Southey, the poet laureate. These expressed deep concern with a perceived growth of unemployment particularly since the Napoleonic Wars and stated that ‘Another evil aggravated, though certainly not engendered, by the miserable administration of our poor-laws, is our present redundancy of population. He must have been inattentive to what is visible in almost every town and hamlet throughout the kingdom, who does not perceive that population has, for at least fifteen or twenty years, been increasing at a rate for which no improvement in agriculture or manufactures could afford employment’. The writer added that ‘All trades, pursuits, and professions are becoming more and more overstocked; and multitudes of persons, of all degrees and ages, are moving about, without employment, useless to themselves, and a burden to the public.’ The lives of these subjects were described as ‘abject and hopeless’.3. William Cobbett wrote in his Political Register, also in 1829, that ‘The labouring people, whether in agriculture, handicraft or manufactures, are in a state of half-starvation, from one end of England to the other’.4.

Others made similar comments and implied similar conditions. A committee of Manchester weavers wrote in 1823: ‘We cannot hear, without strong emotions, our Merchants boast their ability to undersell all other Nations, while that ability is acquired by reducing us to the Borders of Starvation, and keeping us but one remove from Slavery’. They claimed average wages of 4s.10d. per week, a glut in labour market which made it impossible to bargain for higher rates, and ‘long endured poverty’.5. A threatening anonymous letter to a rural clergyman in 1830 illustrates rural poverty and anger. The authors complained that ‘For the last 20 years wee have been in a Starving Condition to maintain your Dam Pride’. And, to justify their arson, they added: ‘What we have done now is Soar against our Will but your harts is so hard as the hart of Pharo … So now as for this fire you must not take it as a front …, for if you hadent been Deserving it wee should not dont’.6. John Bezer, a later Chartist, also reflected the feeling and conditions of the time in an abbreviated polemic written in 1851. He wrote that there was nothing much to complain of except: ‘it is the life of millions in this “happy land,” “the admiration of the world, and the envy of surrounding nations” – where glorious Commerce has reached such perfection that everything, even the blood, and sweat, and lives, of white slaves, is bought cheap and sold dear, – so dear that the average lives of the poor in some towns amount to about seventeen years.’7.

Historians have not always been convinced that such opinions necessarily reflected the conditions of their times and there has been considerable debate to determine how the lives of the poor really proceeded during Britain’s industrial revolution.8. The current state of the debate, however, supports the tenor of the negative views. In the main, it appears that not only were the general conditions of the working class difficult during the eighteenth and nineteenth century but they were probably worse than normal for at least much of the period from 1815 to the 1840s for considerable segments of the working classes. Although struggling with considerable variations in different parts of the country and the economy, one summation by Jeremy Black and Donald MacRaild notes the 1830s and 1840s as particularly poor years. They state that, while the changes in the British economy produced great wealth, they also produced victims. These were the economically displaced: the ‘handloom weavers, woolcombers, and those who worked in a bewildering array of trades that were increasingly redundant in a modern economy.’9. While no longer quite ‘current’, E.P.Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class also has a chapter replete with the suffering of the weavers after Waterloo.10. In addition, Black and MacRaild note the chronic underemployment in agriculture and that, if there was a ‘golden age’ for ‘Victorian labour’, this probably did not commence until the mid-1850s.11. Martin Pugh cites the death rate as an indicator of living conditions. This fell from the 1760s to the 1790s, stabilised to 1820, then increased until the 1840s.12. Other evidence of crisis includes the outbursts of protest in the agricultural sector (including the Swing riots in the most depressed southern counties), the widespread unemployment and distress associated with the economic depression commencing in 1837 and continuing into the 1840s, and a drop in average real wages from 1830 to 1840.13.

Several factors underlying the deprivation and suffering of this particular period are evident. These include an unprecedented structural economic adjustment combined with the growing prominence of aggressive capitalist modes of production and supply. Further, there was the continuing episodic appearance of longer standing problems such as bad harvests and cyclical economic downturns. There was therefore a compounding of the usual causes of hardship for the poor.

English Minimum Wages

Also contributing to the intensity of the difficulties of the poor, however, was a reduced willingness on the part of the government to provide assistance.14. This may not have substantially abetted the creation of unemployment and poor wages. But it was significant nonetheless in that it lessened the extent to which the poverty and distress, which flowed from the initial difficulties, were combated.

In the first instance, the government’s reluctance to support the poor included its opposition to the setting of minimum wages. Clearly there had been some application of the concept of the minimum wage in Britain before the nineteenth century, and this had several deep roots in its social conscience and political experience. This depth gave the poor an important sense of entitlement to government assistance that was not easily or quickly changed by the alteration in government policy.

The first of the roots, the moral tradition of the just wage, permeated British society. The tradition was based on the longstanding development and exegesis of biblical teaching. The analysis and elaboration included in particular the parable of vineyard owner and his payment of a silver coin to all his workers regardless of their attendance. In these terms, the payment of fair wages was considered to be a matter of justice and due as a matter of tradition and status, not on the basis of supply and demand.15. The general importance of this community value is also strongly indicated by E.P.Thompson and his work on the related matter of the just price.16.

Second, England had a long tradition of regulation providing for the local annual setting of wage rates that dated back to the middle of the fourteenth century and the horrific experience of the Black Death. This principally involved the establishment of maximum wages to prevent labourers taking advantage of labour shortages. In time, however, the regulations were used to set fair minimum as well as maximum rates. Sidney and Beatrice Webb record an instance in 1728, a year of exceptional distress, where weavers ‘induced’ the local justices ‘to fix a liberal scale of wages’.17. The regulatory practice generally began to fade in the eighteenth century and became what appeared to be a dead letter by 1760.18. As below, however, the old regulations made an unexpected return to life at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The third tradition was one of largely ad hoc regulation, often in response to some worker initiative. The Statute of Artificers of 1563 included as its first object the repeal of its precursors on the basis that, because of rising prices, they could not ‘conveniently, without the greatest grief and burden of the poor labourer and hired man, be put in due execution.’19. A further statute in 1603 provided protective minima to regulate the woollen trades in which there were severe pressure to reduce costs.20. The Webbs also provide two examples of minimum wage legislation in the eighteenth century, both resulting from pressure from discontent workers. A statute of 1756 provided ‘for the fixing of piecework prices by the justices, in order that the practice of cutting down rates and underselling might be stopped.’ The second protected the riotous Spitalfields silk workers. They had initially sought the prohibition of cheaper imported goods that undercut their trade but settled for an Act, in 1773, that allowed the justices to fix their wages and ‘enforce their maintenance.’21.

The decisive reason for the end of this ad hoc legislation was the emerging importance of the philosophy of laissez-faire within government circles.22. The ideas and apparent virtues of the free market had been understood for a great while. William Petty, one hundred years before Adam Smith, had already argued that ‘We must consider in general, that as wiser Physicians, rather observing and complying with the motions of nature, then [sic] contradicting it with vehement Administrations of their own; so in Politicks and Oconomicks the same must be used.’23. Smith gave voice, albeit incomparably, to a direction already pursued.24. The Webbs also saw the influence of the prevailing power of the philosophy even before the Spitalfields Act in the reaction to and repeal in 1757 of the weavers’ minimum wage statute of 1756, after just a single year.25.

Reflecting the dominance of laissez-faire, the government blocked attempts to obtain the minimum wages from the end of the eighteenth century. This included a failed attempt to obtain a minimum wage in 1779, despite receipt of a favourable report from one of the committees of the House of Commons, and a similar reception to a proposal brought to Parliament in the winter of 1795. Reports of similar attempts in the following century have either better survived or were more frequent. In succession, these attempts included Bills in 1800, 1808, 1820, and 1828, and John Fielden’s Bills from 1835 to 1837.26. A sense of the growing futility of these measures is indicated in Parliament’s response to the 1808 Bill. The Common’s committee hearing the measure condemned the proposal as ‘wholly inadmissible in principle, incapable of being reduced to practice by any means which can possibly be devised, and if practicable, would be productive of the most fatal of consequences.’27.

In the face of this parliamentary opposition, some attempted to resurrect the old practice of annual wage setting to the advantage of local workers. Several actions dating from 1804 to 1813 met with success.28. These achievements, however, only provoked and hardened the government’s position and Parliament reiterated its concern of 1808. A House of Commons’ committee reported in 1811 that ‘no interference of the legislature with the freedom of trade, or with the perfect liberty of every individual to dispose of his time and of his labour in the way and on the terms which he may judge most conducive to his own interest, can take place without violating general principles of the first importance to the prosperity and happiness of the community’.29. Another parliamentary report asserted that ‘The Age of Elizabeth … was indeed glorious, but it was one in which the true principles of commerce were not rightly understood’.30. Unwilling to tolerate the sporadic successes, the government finally repealed the wage regulation provisions in 1813.31.

The Poor Law

Developments in the poor law also reflected the new reluctance to ameliorate the conditions of the poor. Again, like the minimum wage, the main aspects of the poor law were well rooted in English history. And similarly, the background gave rise to a sense of entitlement and, in turn, the reduction of the perceived right in the nineteenth century created resentment.

The sources of the law included the development of an ‘elaborate state-regulated provision for the poor’ during the Tudor period.32. This was associated with the inspiration of humanism that, in relation to social welfare, combined three key elements: traditional Christian charity aimed at the elevation of the recipient rather than the donor; the reform of the recipient; and the use of public authority to carry out thoroughgoing reform. Translated into action this included the provision of work and punishment for ‘the idle and able-bodied poor’, payments to the impotent poor, a prohibition of begging, and the administration of relief through a system of local taxes and local parish control.33. Included was a considerable degree of scepticism about the poor and the need to prevent advantage from being taken of the provision of relief; hence the need for discrimination and reform of the poor.34. While including punitive features, a community consensus also emerged during the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries that the poor were entitled to poor law relief in times of need. The statutes required the provision of this relief in the form of work, but in most cases it was provided as a cash dole.35.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the system was under great stress due to cost, which followed from population growth and the incidence of poverty. Cost had been a concern previously and had resulted in, for example, a policy in the 1690s of shaming recipients of relief by requiring them to wear badges, and the Workhouse Test Act of 1723, which sanctioned a developing workhouse movement. The workhouses were envisaged as a means of benefiting the poor through the inculcation of moral behaviour and labour discipline but were always unpopular with the working classes. But even as late as 1782 legislation was passed reinforcing the continuation of established practices in many areas of providing either work or a dole to supplement low wages or support workers without work. Curiously, the legislation was based on a view that this was also the cheapest form of relief.36.

Demands for greater stringency, however, were again attaining ascendancy by the end of the eighteenth century. This included a challenge to the view that the poor had a right to relief, and held that outside relief, as opposed to confinement to the workhouse, was too generous. The outside relief arrangements included the much criticised Speenhamland system, which allowed masters to claim wage subsidies from the parish rather than meet minimum rates of pay themselves. The critics stressed that the poor benefited from an insistence on self-reliance, that friendly societies should provide the poor with insurance against the loss of work or the ability to work, and that the poor needed to adopt more frugal standards of living and delay marriage and hence have smaller families.37.

In addition, fundamental to the effectiveness of the criticism was the population theory developed by Thomas Malthus. This generally argued that improvements in the living conditions of the population, such as an increase in food production, stimulated population growth and that the capacity for population growth was always greater than the capacity of a nation to expand its food production. Thus improvements triggered population growth, produced over time labourers in excess of available employment, led to the reduction of the real wages of labourers, and created great distress and a decline in population.38. The great import of the theory, in terms of its influence on state policy, was that it strongly suggested that little could or should be done to improve the conditions of the labouring poor, and it underlined the importance of laissez-faire. Malthus indeed proposed ‘the abolition of the entire poor law system.’39.

Another key rationale for severe restraint in the application of poor law relief, provided by Jeremy Bentham, was the less-eligibility principle at the heart of the Poor Law Report and the New Poor Law of 1834. The principle included the acceptance that some relief should be provided to prevent starvation ‘while food existed’, but primarily centred on the necessity of ensuring that those without work were not maintained in a condition more favourable than those who did work. Bentham proposed the establishment of great, strictly organised workhouses where paupers were ‘maintained at a standard only slightly above starvation.’ Severe want or the threat of severe want ensured that the unemployed would not neglect any opportunity for work and, by the same token, workmen in employment would anxiously retain their existing employment.40.

The actual results from this body of theory and criticism were mixed. In particular, Parliament moved forward with legislative change. This was marked by parliamentary reports in 1817 and 1818, the establishment of the Poor Law Commission in 1832 and its report of 1834, and the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. The Poor Law Report was particularly crucial, condemning outdoor relief and promoting the tightening up of relief by requiring provision only through workhouses.41. The Poor Law Amendment Act, otherwise know as the New Poor Law, provided a new administrative structure and mechanism for implementing these views. The modern view, however, is that much of the intended and anticipated change did not eventuate. The continuity of local administration tended to preserve old practices and considerable outdoor relief remained. There is also a sense that even the workhouses were not generally as bad as some contemporary critics stated.42.

Nonetheless, there was still enough to cause a huge outcry. The statements of intent, including the use of the loathed workhouses, were in themselves highly provocative. This was ultimately coupled with various scandals, including a ‘notorious’ one at Andover workhouse in 1845-46 where the inmates were described as ‘fighting over the marrow from decaying bones’.43. There was also a 30% reduction in expenditure per capita. In line with the objects of the legislation, this was partly from savings in administration, but also partly in the quantum of relief given at times of need. J.D. Marshall describes the practices of some of the new Poor Law Guardians as ‘near-brutal economies’, and in many cases the poor themselves practised avoidance of the poor law (and the workhouse) even in poverty and distress.44.

A powerful sense of crisis and disadvantage therefore gripped substantial sectors of the working class in Britain throughout much of first half of nineteenth century. Government begrudged and minimised support in times of substantial need and insecurity.45. Distress, fear and outrage were all articulated both before and after the enactment of the New Poor Law.46. The Chartists, representing Britain’s great mass movement of the 1830s and 1840s, were particularly prominent and spoke, for example, of ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ where ‘the people are starving, while a set of idlers usurped all the wealth, and then denied that those who produce it were the people’. The Chartists wanted the full value of wages to go to the workers, and they claimed that in any failure of trade ‘the masters will grind down the wages of those who are now well-paid to the level of the weaver, and the most dreadful consequences must be the result.’47. John Fielden, parliamentarian and ‘Chartist sympathiser’, also assured an audience in 1838 that ‘If Parliament was composed of poor men, they would not have passed the new Poor Law Amendment Act, but would have first secured to the working class fair remunerative wages’.48. On these counts many did not see Britain as a place that provided for all its citizens, nor did it appear that this was an important object of its Parliament. As the Wakefield family’s historian, Philip Temple, has also indicated, general and specific conditions in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century made people susceptible to appeals and encouragements to go elsewhere.49.

The New Zealand Company’s Pledge

In this context, the Company’s promise of work and the minimum wage may already be seen as manna from heaven for the British poor. Some further details are still required to fully explain the development of the Company’s measures however. Certainly, they were not a simple response to need and the pleas for work and wage justice in Britain. In the first instance, they developed out of Wakefield’s scheme of systematic colonisation, which initially gave very little space to the provision of relief and none to minimum wages. The scheme itself was designed to render any idea of relief virtually unthinkable and thus unnecessary. Wakefield’s minimal proposal also developed only slowly and haphazardly for much of the following decade before suddenly emerging in Wellington as ‘the pledge’. At this stage it became most clearly a response to the British context of poverty and insecurity, but as a subordinate consideration to advancing Wakefield’s general scheme and with it bringing into play the self interest of the colonisers.50.

Wakefield laid out the broad scope of his scheme, with its very brief mention of relief, in A Letter from Sydney (1829). In general, Wakefield saw problems for struggling segments of the middle classes as well as the working classes in early nineteenth century Britain. But with particular regard to the latter, he accepted Malthus’ population theory and argued that colonisation offered a temporary respite from the poverty associated with contemporary unemployment and underemployment.51. He argued that this was best achieved by the implementation of his special scheme of systematic colonisation. Simply, the scheme involved the sale of colonial land only at a high price, which he described as the ‘sufficient price’. The price ensured that labourers arriving in a colony would not be able to buy their own land in the short term and that this would prevent shortages of labour. Wakefield argued that labour working in combination for well capitalised landowners was the key to colonial prosperity and success. The high prices also provided money to fund the emigration of the poor workers to the colony. Wakefield further claimed that the sale and the turning of land into productive agricultural units and the funding and emigration of workers would operate in balance, thus ensuring labour supply always matched demand.

The brief reference to relief within Wakefield’s initial presentation of his scheme comprised a promise of only ‘a very moderate provision’ to assist the colonial labourer on his arrival in the colony ‘until hired’. While Wakefield gave no explanation for the proposal in what was otherwise an elaborate discussion of systematic colonisation, the rationale is relatively clear. Given the posited certainty of the prosperity of the Wakefield colony, nothing more was to be required to protect the workers who emigrated to his settlements. At the same time, the statement also forestalled any expectation of other support based perhaps on the English poor law or contemporary relief practices in Australia.52.

While Wakefield revisited his scheme in various publications, the main details remained largely unchanged. One change, some oscillation in his thoughts on the level of the sufficient price, need not concern us here. Another, however, the provision of protection for workers, is central. With regard to this issue, Wakefield’s works after A Letter from Sydney, and the promoters of the South Australian colony, offered various alternatives. In Principles and Objects (1830), Wakefield promised ongoing relief, although this remained at a minimum, now described as ‘mere subsistence’. He underlined the smallness of the minimum by adding his belief that it would be ‘satisfactory to the emigrant, by absolutely insuring them against the risk, however, slight, of perishing for want’. He explained the provision as an incentive for the colonisers to carefully oversee the supply of labour in relation to the colony’s needs.53.

With a more definite view of actually founding a colony in South Australia, Wakefield next promised, in Founding a Colony in Southern Australia (1832), public work for at least a year, supplemented with a plentiful living from hunting and fishing.54. A further variant appeared in 1835 from the Commissioners, who had been appointed to implement the establishment of the South Australian settlement, prior to Wakefield’s disassociation from the project. The Commissioners promised: ‘On the arrival of the emigrants in the colony they will be received by an officer who will supply their immediate wants, assist them in reaching the place of their destination, be ready to advise them in case of difficulty, and at all times give them employment, at reduced wages, on the government works, if from any cause they should be unable to obtain it elsewhere.’55. This was generally repeated for the Wakefield emigrants to New Zealand in 1839, except that the New Zealand Company, created by Wakefield and his colleagues to implement his New Zealand plans, took the important step of removing the reference to reduced wages.56.

Overall, these changes include several important themes. The degree of variation suggests doubt about how much support should be provided. At the same time, the promises tended to provide an increasing certainty of support and this, in turn, was associated with the shift from theory to implementation. The probability is that the development represented an attempt by the colonisers to reassure the migrants they needed to participate in the schemes. The colonisers had to appeal to two main constituencies: men and women with money, who would buy their expensive land; and workers, who would labour and make productive and profitable the precious land. For the potential landowners, given their likely concerns over cost and acceptance of the principle of ‘less eligibility’, the level of support had to be minimised. For the working colonists, support had to be sufficiently comprehensive to minimise the risk that they were going from one distressing situation to another. The promotional promises included important codes for both groups. For the landowners, these included: ‘mere subsistence’ and ‘reduced wages’; for the working migrants, a critical reassurance was the provision of employment ‘at all times’.

The New Zealand Company promise represented the most attractive of the guarantees of support. The underlying reality, however, was that the Company favoured only stringently applied relief measures. Raewyn Dalziel notes that in September 1839 the Company’s emigration agent for Wellington was ‘instructed to take care that no labouring Emigrant falls into a state of Destitution, but that you will at the same time acquaint the Emigrants that they are not to expect more from the Company than a bare subsistence.’57. This was not an isolated reference. A month earlier, the minutes of one of the New Zealand Company’s committees had recorded that ‘Mr Hutt urged the importance of apprizing the laboring emigrants that if employed by the Company their remuneration would be by rations on the smallest scale and not by money.’58. These were views that reflected the prevailing English laissez faire rhetoric in support of the New Poor Law. The difference, in tone and between implication and reality, in private views and public representations, emphasises the falseness of the Company’s public profession of care. The Company was dishonestly advertising to enhance the prospects of successfully establishing its settlements.

Yet the deceit did not unravel at the first sign of unemployment. The Company in fact kept and even oversubscribed its public promise. The Company had intended to provide a settlement ready for work but the first labourers arrived in January and February 1840 to find Wellington grossly ill-prepared. Immediately, William Wakefield, Edward’s brother and leader of the new settlement, provided work with the Company. This was of course consistent with the public promise and the private instruction. What William did not do, though, was provide the work at a stinting rate. Contrary to the internal Company representations, he provided work on wages of ‘£1 per week’, with ‘11s 6d’ ‘kept off … for rations.59. By comparison, average weekly wage rates for agricultural labourers in England at the time were about 11s. varying it appears by county from 7s.6d. to 12s, and with rates indicated as low as 5s. and 6s.60. The £1 less rations was also clearly a good rate by the standard, for example, of 1s. 6d. plus rations provided in South Australia in 1841.61.

Why did William disobey his instructions? As below, it is improbable that he did not believe that relief on good wages corrupted and deterred workers from doing useful work. More likely, he saw the offered work as being necessary and somewhat different from usual poor law relief work, and/or he was better aware than Hutt and his colleagues, in suddenly facing a crisis, of the need to preserve good will and the image and reputation of the settlement. Any sign of problems had the potential of being reported in workers’ letters back home and stopping the flow of labour and private money into the settlement. He also still had no reason not to believe in his brother’s theory, or that the colony would not quickly become busy and prosperous, and he had plenty of initial cash.

At any rate, William had to report the problem and keep the Company in London content. In doing so, he minimised the significance of the relief measure. He reported that ‘The emigrant labourers’ had been ‘obliged to divest themselves of’ the idea of ‘at once receiving high wages’ and had ‘agreed to the reasonableness of my representations on this head and brought their minds to the contemplation of getting only as many shillings a week for their labour as they had anticipated per day.’62.

The final step to the minimum wage took place in late 1840 and was announced without explanation in the New Zealand Journal, the mouthpiece for the Company, in London in January 1841. The basic promise to provide work in times of need remained. The Journal noted that if emigrants to the Company’s New Zealand settlements could not ‘at once get work’ they would ‘always have it’ from the Company. But it now added that the Company rate was ‘at £1 a-week’ and that, as labourers did not currently need its work (given a rise in private construction work), the ‘only office performed by Colonel Wakefield’s notice is to establish a minimum below which wages cannot fall.’63. It seems that William Wakefield, remotely situated, made the decision himself to promise a minimum wage, but the announcement in the New Zealand Journal demonstrated approval by the Company at large, and by Edward in particular at the centre of the Company organisation.

It appears that as news began to filter through that the Wellington settlement had been established successfully, the Company decided to make an even greater effort to match the interest of British workers by promoting a high minimum wage. The settlement and the pending settlements of New Plymouth and Nelson were the most distant on offer and had to compete not only with the Australian colonies, but also much more accessible destinations such as North America. There had to be a special point of difference. The promise appealed strongly to those who felt the hardship and unfairness of the New Poor Law and to those who sought a minimum wage in England. In making the promise, the Company provided a guarantee of support of an almost completely different type to that originally envisaged by Wakefield in A Letter for Sydney. It was a guarantee that went perhaps as far as anyone anywhere could have hoped in the nineteenth century. In fact the Company went even further. In addition, to the adoption of the minimum wage, the Company also increased its rate from £1 less rations to £1 plus rations.64. In part, this may have been because, instead of having to provide assistance, the Company in fact needed workers and wanted to keep pace with general wage movements in the more buoyant local economy.

The account of the emergence of the pledge alongside the outline of conditions in Britain confirms that it was indeed an attractive offer to British workers and, without doubt, to the working colonists who had already arrived in Wellington on the first of the emigrant ships. In addition, however, it enables us to see more clearly the difficulty in pigeon-holing the measure and more precisely how attractive the measure was while it lasted. To look at the development over the whole span of time from 1829 to 1840, the measure progressed through a number of states. Wakefield’s opening gambit was in fact little short of a repudiation of poor law assistance. Later his proposals and those of the South Australian Commissioners reflected, at different times, the old and the new poor laws, depending on whether the emphasis fell on a note of entitlement or on a punitive note. But subsequently, matters entered much more deeply into the territory of multiple identities. The measure as offered in the New Zealand Company regulations was a generous provision of the outdoor relief of the old law; the secret intention of the New Zealand Company was to apply relief with the strictness of the New Poor Law; the actual application was that of an entitlement and was in fact provided at a reasonable rate; and, ultimately, the measure explicitly took on the new function of a wage floor. As such, the last measures were amalgams not just of poor law variants, but of these variants and the minimum wage. As an attraction, the measure was also an inducement of the highest order. The Company uplifted its promise of support by the general reference to the minimum wage rates. It elevated it even further by the promise of minimum wages, not to prevent impoverishment, but to ensure high wages. The pledge reflected conditions in Britain, the hopes of the colonisers, the initial state of the Company’s finances, and the need to trump any possible rivals as a colonial destination.

Some mention also needs to be made of the legal status, and otherwise, of the Company’s pledge as a minimum wage. The colonisers, and especially Wakefield, had a particularly tense relationship with the British Government from the late 1830s, and the Company had no special legal standing in New Zealand before or after the establishment of the British colonial administration in 1840.65. The Company’s pledge, accordingly, had no formal legislative status. The Company’s powerful administrative and economic position in the new Wellington settlement and the Wakefield settlements to follow, however, did lend the pledge a quasi-regulatory status. This was reinforced by the fact that it emanated from the Company’s own self described ‘regulations’. One may also observe that the pledge was not necessarily less of a minimum wage for the lack of formal legislative status. As earlier, the particular stream of wage regulation initiated at the time of the Black Death was designed to provide maximum wages, but late in the piece was used to produce minimum wages. These were minimum wages because of their effect, not because they were the product of formal minimum wage legislation. We also have special regard for the eight hour day in Wellington despite the fact that it appears to have been no more than a developing custom, at least partly based on effective industrial action.66. The Company’s pledge was, with similar latitude, no less a minimum wage.

The Impact of the Company’s Promises and Their Demise

The details of the events after the pledge are also instructive. The account of its actual impact, its subsequent changes, and the end of the Company’s provision of work at any wage rate, add to the picture of character and inducement. But most importantly, what happened to the pledge over the succeeding few years appears crucial in determining its impact on long term attitudes towards support for the poor.

The full emigrant vessels provide a first crude indication that the Company’s inducements worked, even if the Company felt later that the particular types of workers wanted had not been obtained. The appeal is more fully confirmed, however, by comments on the pledge from the working migrants. These include not only reports from the first colonists published by the Company but also the reaction of the workers during the subsequent demise of the pledge. The substance of the comments is also supported by William Wakefield’s own expression of frustration at the prolonged resistance to his reductions in work and wage rates.

The first settlers appear to have enjoyed the initial application of the Company’s promises. Among the first colonists, James Logan confirmed work at the initial payment of £1 less rations, but also noted that ‘there are better wages now’.67. John Pierce wrote that ‘labour is not without its reward’ with the suggestion that this referred to the Company’s work because there had been ‘little encouragement as yet for people of capital to employ labourers’ due to the slow distribution of land.68. Another colonist, R.Stokes, later referred to the ‘liberal and fostering aid of the Company’.69. The reports of rates higher than the Company’s is also consistent with the Company wage acting as a minimum wage.70. From New Plymouth, J.Shaw wrote that the labourers were receiving 4s. to 5s. per day (the Company’s £1 per week and higher) and compared these rates to the ‘agriculturalist earning 8s. or 8s.6d. per week at home’.71. Another confirmed that the Company provided work at £1 per week plus rations, those working for others were paid at a higher rate of 6s. per day’, and provided some urgent advice: ‘Don’t remain in Old England to starve, when you could do better here: such ones that I have mentioned that can work well, are sure to do well.’72. It is difficult to be sure which of the writers from Nelson worked for the Company, but their initial rates were also high and worth recommending. W.Cullen wrote that ‘Labourers are getting good wages, and must find a great change here’.73.

It was not long before circumstances began to change significantly however. Action to weaken the pledge commenced even before some of the settlers had written their letters as above. It is possible that the Company may have tried to begin the work of dismantling the minimum wage at the time of the arrival of the very first emigrants in New Plymouth in March 1841, but the evidence is too vague to be conclusive. What we know of the situation in the new settlement, first, is that the Company officials arrived with instructions, like those issued to William Wakefield, ‘not to “enter into competition with individuals in the labour market” and to provide employment “at a scale of remuneration below the current rate of wage”’. And, second, the Company did provide work at the minimum rate regardless.74.

A much clearer start is evident in Wellington later in the year. The change was driven by deteriorating finances and developmental factors. William Wakefield had already reported to London his concern over the great cost of paying a large number of labourers but, in addition, found his access to credit threatened early in October. He was also under pressure from landowners who wanted to pay lower wages. He responded by reducing the Company rate to 14s plus rations. He also began to put off any labourers who refused offers of private work.75. The local press praised his actions. The Wellington Spectator insisted that while the Company had ‘pledged’ to provide waged work, it had had ‘no intention at any time to become competitors in the labour market.’ The newspaper also claimed ‘a large number’ of the Company’s workers had been unable ‘to do a fair days’ work.’ In addition, the Spectator obliquely revealed the discontent of the workers at the failure of the Company to continue to honour its promises. It reported that the dismissed labourers ‘consider themselves so unfairly dealt with, that they have talked of petitioning the Governor to give them free passage to Auckland.’ Whether a petition did eventuate is unclear, but some did leave.76. The swiftness of William’s response reinforces the view that he was a pragmatist, that he held no abiding commitment to generous relief or a minimum wage, and that his provision of these had been for promotional effect only. Survival of the settlements, more than promotion, had become the primary object.

From thereon, in New Plymouth and Nelson, as well as Wellington, the Company rate was cut repeatedly and more and more workers were denied Company work. This continued until, finally, the Company ceased to operate in 1844 because of a lack of funds. The Company in London also decided in July 1842 to ensure that emigrants leaving England were no longer promised work with the Company.77. The available record shows the Company in Wellington reduced access to relief work in 1842 and twice in 1843, and reduced the wage rate to 18s. without rations in 1843.78. In New Plymouth, the Company reduced the pledge to 16s. plus rations in May 1842 along with access to relief work, and then, later the same year, took away the rations. In 1843, it reduced the rate for single men to 8s and for married men to 12s, introduced a wage subsidy to encourage landowners to employ the labourers on relief (reminiscent of the Speenhamland system of outdoor relief), and reduced access to relief work.79. In Nelson, the initial promise was cut to 14s. plus rations in September 1842. It was further reduced in 1843 to 18s. without rations for men with more than two children and to 16s. without rations for men with less dependants. The Nelson Examiner described the change positively as ‘the minimum price of labour in this settlement’ and ‘a fair if not luxury-providing rate of wages’. The italic emphasis is in the original. The Company also tried to introduce various other changes including different forms of contract work (with some later success) and discharged more workers in 1844.80. The final rate reductions in 1844 were to 8s. in New Plymouth, and to 12s. and 9s. respectively for men with two children and for men with less dependants, in Nelson.81.

In the process of the reductions, William Wakefield and the press made various statements condemning the poor for their misuse of relief. The Spectator denounced the workers who decided to leave and considered it no disadvantage ‘to lose the incompetent and lazy of the working class, who by deception have managed to obtain free passages, but positively a good, for we save the expense of supporting them in idleness.’82. It later described those who stuck with Company despite falling rates as ‘leeches’ and that ‘every honest labourer who is placed in contact with them’ was rendered ‘liable to be affected with the same dishonest practice of shirking their work.’83. William noted the need for ‘vigilant superintendence’ to discourage ‘idlers’ and expressed his exasperation at the continued need to supply relief.84. He reported to London in the spring of 1843 that in spite of his efforts ’nearly all the evils of the Old English Poor Law Systems prevailed in the settlement, the Company representing the parish, and its funds the poor rate.’ He called the Company’s expenditure, ‘artificial and injurious’.85. The incremental nature of the reductions, as well as William’s comments, indicate the difficulty in tearing the support away from resistant workers clinging to a sense of their entitlement based on the Company’s promises. The New Zealand Colonist described William’s action in reducing rates as ‘reasonable’.86. The Nelson Examiner called for the instant dismissal of those who sought improved rates, and for military action should any disturbances arise in the wake of the final removal of relief work.87. Another leading settler, Dillon Bell, labelled the end of the Company’s public works as ‘one of the greatest benefits that could be conferred upon the settlement’ because the settlers could now afford to employ labourers.88. The prevailing view in Britain against all but the most minimal relief had also become the prevailing view in the Wakefield settlements. In fact, the workers by 1844 were worse off that their English counterparts because there were no longer any guarantees of relief.89. Even the prospect of relief in the spirit of the New Poor Law had been vanquished.

The workers protested against the destruction of the promise of work and the minimum wage but only with the effect of slowing the Company’s progress. Their comments are particularly illustrative of how they had seen the pledge however. Workers in each of the settlements presented petitions that referred to the Company’s promise and the need for support to maintain decent lives. In New Plymouth, the protesters explained that they had been persuaded by the pledge to take the difficult step of leaving their ‘native land … with a view of improving our condition and that of our families’. They had hoped ‘to live in credit and respect, rather than penury and want’.90. In Nelson, the labourers went on strike as well as petitioned the Company. Their petition referred to the guarantee of work and ‘one guinea per week with rations’ as their lawful rights. They said the promise and other ‘flattering pretensions’ had ‘seduced’ them into coming to New Zealand. They stressed modest, reasonable goals: they had not come with great expectations of ‘large fortunes or Extraordinary Incomes but to live Comfortably and decently.’ Suffering as well as the infringement of rights also fuelled protest. The Nelson labourers spoke of living in mud huts and of not earning enough for food and clothing for themselves and their families.91. The Colonist admitted that some who had been refused work were in ‘a state of utter destitution.92. The Wellington labourers appealed for assistance ‘to prevent the well disposed and industrious workman from becoming a pauper or felon in this distant land.93. The labourers’ complaints verified that Company’s promotion had worked, even if it had proved to be of little long term substance.

The Spectator and others claimed that the workers were the authors of their own misfortunes. There is very little substantial evidence, however, that the workers refused available jobs because they were lazy or otherwise perverse.94. The core problem for all parties was that the economic development of the settlements was generally very weak and they could not provide enough work. In part this followed because the Company and the settlements struggled to attract sufficient investment. But difficulties of terrain, land title, and the Anglo-Australasian depression also hindered development. Company work was essential in the circumstances but could not last regardless of the rates paid. When workers were turned off, many appear to have been unable to obtain other work. They were commonly forced into subsistence farming, anathema in terms of the theory and objects of Wakefield’s scheme. Otherwise, when their work and wage rates were reduced, they suffered deprivation. Some, as the Spectator indicated, left. Some stayed but only because they were unable to afford the passage away.95.

The Provision of Assistance in Otago

Remarkably, features of this cycle were repeated only a few years later, though on a lesser scale, in the next Wakefield settlement of Otago.96. Unlike the earlier settlements, the Otago promotional material contained no reference to the provision of work on arrival or in the event of unemployment. Quite likely this reflected the experience in Wellington, New Plymouth, and Nelson. But like Wellington, the Otago settlement was completely unready for the first emigrants that arrived in March 1848. Thus again there was little private work and William Cargill, the leader of the new settlement, promised work to those who were unable to find it. This was necessary work, both in the sense that the Company had work that needed to be done and that the colonists needed paid work to support themselves. Cargill also promised work on an ongoing basis. After the initial phase of construction work, ‘public work’ was to ‘be executed by contract … so as to give continuous employment to all.’ Like William Wakefield, he was also probably responding to the need to protect the reputation of the new settlement and on the basis of optimism that the settlement would soon begin to realise the positive objects of Edward’s scheme.97. At the same time, Cargill was less generous than William Wakefield, paying daily rates of 3s. for labourers and 5s. for craftsmen.98.

Support for the provision also began to break down after twelve or so months. In Otago, however, it was the workers who made the first public complaint. This comprised a petition to the Company seeking improvement in relation to their ten hour days, their wages, and the cost of rents and provisions.99. The workers obtained an eight hour day as a result.100. But they made no progress on their wages and costs, and were instead strongly criticised by Cargill and William Fox (the latter having replaced William Wakefield as the Company’s principal agent)101., and in the columns of the Otago News.

Cargill responded by describing ‘many’ of the workers as ‘in reality mere drones’.102. Fox emphasised that the Company was acting generously and provided work because the workers needed employment, not because the Company had any need of their services. He urged upon the labourers the ‘importance of exercising self-reliance to the utmost, and not seeking employment at the hands of the Company if you can possibly find the opportunity of maintaining yourselves by some independent means’. He added that ‘You will not only live better, but preserve that self respect and those habits of independence which are always more or less tarnished and destroyed in those who depend for any length of time on a maintenance provided in the only matter in which the Company can provide it.’103. A letter in the News condemned the labourers for refusing to give a fair day’s work for fair wages’.104.

The responses presented the work provided by the Company as poor law relief. They were also laced with the restrictive ideas of the New Poor Law and, accordingly, the grudging provision of relief. The change from the spirit of Cargill’s initial provision is once more easily explained by the difficult position of the Company. As in the first settlements, poor land sales were resulting in both a lack of income for the Company and too few landowners to provide private employment. Thus, again, there was the difficult combination of too many needy colonists seeking work with the Company and a declining fund from which to pay them.105.

Yet the reactions were not one-dimensional. The Otago News was also keen to emphasise the fairness of what the Company offered and in doing so described the Company daily rates as the ‘minimum rate’ for the settlement.106. Further, despite his criticism, Cargill appears to have been reluctant to react too harshly to the workers’ petition and the general circumstances, and continued to delay implementing his initial plan to place those needing work with contractors. A letter to the Otago News, written perhaps by either Cargill or a close supporter, explained that ‘Almost all the public works have been and are being constructed by contract, excepting the roads, which is a species of eleemosynary employment to prevent wages falling too low, which to hand over to contractors (by no means a charitable body) would defeat its object, for the contractor would reject all the inferior labourers and keep down the price as much as possible.’107. Restraint thus meant a continuing commitment to ensure some support.

But ultimately, further work did go into the hands of contractors in early 1850. The New Zealand Company’s financial position had clearly become extreme, though it is also possible that Cargill had at last lost patience with the men he had described as ‘drones’. Certainly, the News had had enough. It was now vehement in its condemnation of the waste of the ‘land-purchaser’s money’ which had to that point ‘been so shamelessly lavished on pretended road-making’. It saw only good coming from the contracting regime. It stated that ‘To those individuals who have looked upon employment from the Company as merely a step to something better, the new arrangement will be gladly acceded to, and offer a stronger inducement to exertion’. The change was also an end to any encouragement to, or reward for, the indolent or dishonest labourers (as the News saw them), and provided them instead with an incentive to become industrious. For ‘those’, the News said, ‘who have clung from week to week and month to month on the skirts of the Company, and have returned home at the end of every week with a smile on their lips as they thought how easily the money had been earned; never looking or wishing for anything but its continuance; – to such men we are assured the change will not be considered a beneficial one, and will cause no little murmuring. Nevertheless, to them we would say one word: look to the future; awake from your slothful dream, and work for independence.’108.

It is unclear how many labourers were affected by the decision but, regardless, it was only a brief time before Fox instructed Cargill to ‘absolutely discontinue all employment of labour on the roads, and on no account give employment to any merely on the grounds of destitution’. Any who remained, including Cargill, lost their work when news of the Company’s surrender of its charter finally reached Otago in October 1850.109. In a sign of the labourers’ despair, some considered chartering a vessel ‘to convey them to some settlement where there may be better prospects of obtaining an honest livelihood.’ Their extreme difficulties were again underlined by the failure in part to act on the inclination due to the lack of funds.110. It appears that the settlement and its colonists languished in a poor state for the next two years before conditions began to improve. Further progress was made through most of the remainder of the 1850s, particularly as a result of the stimulation of gold discoveries in Australia which created a strong demand for agricultural commodities.111.

One more Wakefield settlement followed, in Canterbury. As with the Otago settlement, no promise of work if no other was available was made in the promotional material for Canterbury. As the Otago Association may have been reticent to make such a promise due to the experience in the first three Wakefield settlements, the Canterbury Association had the Otago experience to add to its reasons for caution. Unlike Otago, however, the promise did not eventuate on arrival either as the migrants to Canterbury were never in the same desperate need of work. The questions of poor relief, minimum rates, and inducement did not arise.

The promise of the Company’s work in the Otago settlement was designed, like the poor law, to provide support for the unemployed. Its initial application does not appear to have been restricted by any concern over the character of the applicant. This concern does become apparent, however, in 1849. But so too does the view that the Company rate might act as a minimum wage for the settlement. In short, the character of the provision changed over time and may never have been simply a measure of relief in the image of either the old poor law or the New Poor Law. Compared to the Wellington pledge, though, there was certainly much less emphasis on the paid rate as a minimum wage. In addition, the measure was not designed as an inducement to bring migrants to Otago. It seems likely that the colonisers avoided making any such promise in Britain because of the difficulties experienced in Wellington, New Plymouth, and Nelson. This also explains why there was no promise made to tempt working colonists to Canterbury. At best, Cargill’s promise sought to calm the workers already in Otago and to avoid expressions of discontent in letters back to Britain or re-emigration to other more promising settlements. Despite the intent, however, the Company in Otago was no more able to keep to its promise than it had been earlier and in both instances the promises were followed in the short to medium term by profound disappointment. In the end, as much as the promises had created some security and even optimism and collegiality, their demise created suffering and recriminatory bitterness.

The Legacy

To look beyond the first years of the Wakefield settlements, what then may be said of the legacy of the Company’s promises? As above, John Martin has provided a positive assessment in highlighting the facts of worker protests and demands and the provision of relief. In itself, this may be regarded as a somewhat unusual sequence. In terms of the British experience, pressure from the Gloucestershire and Spitalfields weavers had resulted in the provision of minimum wages in the eighteenth century, but protests and demands did not result in minimum wages in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, ‘popular hostility’ did limit the application of the New Poor Law in some areas.112. Yet it should also be clear here that protest and provision is too limited a description of what happened in New Zealand in the 1840s and early 1850s. The Company provided work at wages that acted also as minimum wages not merely because of worker protests. It did so initially because it wanted to maintain an enticing image of its settlements in order to encourage immigration. Once this requirement had passed, the Company then began to dismantle its promises. The workers protested vociferously, but only slowed the rate of demise.

It also appears that after the complete demise of the first provision of relief work in 1844, the general provision for the poor in need was very weak. In part, this is evident in the absence of any provisions in the promotional material for the settlement of the Otago and Canterbury settlements. But it is also evident in relation to weak or non-existent provisions later. In the main part, after the demise of the Wakefield promises, the poor had to rely on private charity, and the support for labour in times of unemployment was equivocal.

Both Margaret Tennant and David Thomson confirm this weakness of formal support for those in need in nineteenth century New Zealand. Thomson states that ‘Nineteenth century New Zealand, perhaps even more than the other Australasian colonies, was marked by a deliberate attempt to keep all formal collective welfare activity to a minimum, and to maximise individual, family and informal neighbourly assistance when need arose.’113. This reflected, according to Thomson, the persistent influence of British concerns over the apparent creation of dependency and the need to encourage industry, prudence and thrift.114. The pattern as easily, however, reflects the reaction of the colonisers and leading members of the New Zealand Wakefield settlements to the experiences of providing relief work from 1842 to 1844, and 1849 to 1850.

Tennant emphasises the limited support that came in the form of tightly administered charitable aid aimed at ensuring only deserving cases were assisted within very restricted budgets.115. She notes that while Charles Hasselden, ‘Distributor of Rations and Crown Lands’, acknowledged in a report on pauperism in Auckland in 1866 ‘the effect of localised recession, he was overwhelmingly suspicious of individual imposition and reluctance to work.’ The attitude was the same among his successors.116. Thomson states that the advocates of voluntary charitable aid were opposed in the 1870s by a substantial minority that favoured the establishment of clear rights to assistance. But this was only a temporary phenomenon as opposition diminished again during the 1880s. The falling away of support, he adds, reflected growing concerns over government retrenchment and international opinion against the establishment of such rights.117. Further, Margaret McClure notes the reaffirmation of the principle of the Destitute Persons Ordinance of 1846, which placed the prime responsibility for the support of the destitute on their own families, in a new Destitute Persons Act in 1877.118. The need for reaffirmation reflected the onset of a new crisis following a period largely marked by economic progress, even if in part only because it was fuelled by Vogel’s overseas borrowing in the 1870s.

John Martin, himself, in dealing much more specifically with the issue of unemployment, states in his article, ‘”Waging War on the Labour Market”’, that relief work was grudgingly provided in the late nineteenth century and that ‘This aversion went back to the beginning of government involvement in dealing with unemployment at the end of the 1870s.’ He adds that ‘It was common to restrict relief work to the bare minimum and provide it only at times of dire emergency when social unrest threatened.’119. Martin does suggest a government more interested in aiding the unemployed in ‘Unemployment, Government and the Labour Market’ (which followed ‘Waging War’). But many of his substantial illustrations show that often circumstances had to become dire before the government reluctantly acted to provide support for the unemployed.120.

He notes for example that in 1875 ‘some 1200 in Dunedin petitioned the government to stop further immigration to New Zealand, “already crowded with Unemployed … who are now bordering on Starvation”.’ In 1883, ‘Serious agitation’ over the lack of work broke out in Canterbury and Otago. Later, with the difficulty still unresolved, the Dunedin unemployed sought help from the Victorian government to re-emigrate, noting in their petition that ‘We the undersigned … having been betrayed by false representations of New Zealand by emigration agents, lectures and printed pamphlets, threw up situations, broke up homes and left loving friends, are now facing the bitter reality of parading the streets, hungry and ill-shod, with no prospect of a better future.’121. The examples are consistent with the general positions of Tennant and Thomson on the provision of support to the poor in New Zealand. They are also very reminiscent of the New Zealand Company’s response in the Wakefield settlements to unemployment in 1843 and 1844. The similarity is underscored by the colonial government’s reduction of relief work and relief wages in 1880 and 1887 as it responded to its own difficult financial position.122. In addition, there are echoes of the demise of the Wakefield measures in the proposals of the 1880s to resolve concerns over the poor through the promotion of land settlement.123.

The evidence suggests therefore that the Wakefield promises did not lead on to a pattern of generous relief. Rather, the reverse appears far more plausible. The experience from 1841, underlined by the repetition in Otago, suggests a lesson learned by the colonisers and the emerging colonial elite that promises of support for workers when in need were to be avoided. This may have reinforced or been reinforced by a continuing bias against relief imported from Britain, as identified above by David Thomson. For workers, the general pattern was one of persistence of protest in times of need, but with a relative lack of success. This reflects a number of possible factors. These include the dominance of the colonial elite in social and political affairs, a lack of a specific institutional reference point (such as the workhouse) on which to focus protests, a reduced sense of community compared to Britain coupled with reduced organisation, and an increased sense of other options, such as land settlement and emigration, as practical solutions to unemployment or poverty.

These patterns appear to begin to break down only in the mid-1880s, in the midst of the prolonged and severe economic crisis of the long depression. While prior to this period, the support of private charitable aid, ad hoc public work schemes, and land settlement proposals may have provided a certain sufficiency, their general inadequacy became increasingly exposed as unemployment and poverty reached chronic proportions. The severity of conditions was particularly underlined towards the end of the 1880s, and prior to the advent of the reforming Liberals, by the thousands who disappeared in an exodus to Australia and also, notably, by Rutherford Waddell, who fought for change in his influential sermons and campaigning work in and from Dunedin. Waddell’s work included an insistence on the provision of support and protection for suffering, exploited workers from the competitive market and, as he put it, on the need to give primacy to the law of Christ over the laws of political economy.124. The work helped produce the Sweating Commission of 1890 and was followed by the election of the Liberal Government, which in its turn was notable for its reforming legislation including the introduction of the arbitration system and old age pensions.125.

Conclusion

In general, there was a considerable measure of extremism in the development and demise of the Company’s promise of work and the minimum wages. In the first instance, this reflected the desire of the Company to make a substantial statement of difference and attract migrants to its small distant settlements over all others. The Company promised many workers what they were deprived of in Britain: the security of work at good wages. This was both generous poor law and a generous minimum wage. In doing so, the colonisers, schooled in the standard political economy of Smith and Malthus, placed themselves in the very peculiar situation of satisfying otherwise unrequited Chartist policy. The subsequent change in the Company’s provision was also extreme. As the disadvantage to the colonisers of application of work and the minimum wage replaced the advantage of their promotion, the colonisers rapidly sought to jettison their promises, leading ultimately to circumstances where workers received no support at all. A similar pattern followed in Otago. In both cases, subsequent events suggest that the experience created a special determination not to repeat the errors of generosity, nor to breach the philosophy of laissez faire. There was to be no systematic support, even at the level of the New Poor Law. The new colonial society had rapidly swung from one radical position to its polar opposite. The working colonists, for their part, traded both the reality and threat of distress and poverty for the promise of plenty and security. In reality, their new colonial homes provided fluctuating economic fortunes with no institutional security.

A writer for the International Labour Organisation has claimed that the Liberals’ arbitration system, which commenced in 1894, provided the world’s first minimum wages.126. Clearly, the contentious issues surrounding minimum wages, the wages themselves, and of course relief work, have been with us for far longer. The core welfare issues also remain with us as part of modern economic, social, and political debate. For those who do not work or who have lost jobs, our social security system is designed to provide enough to live, yet not too much to discourage those the government deems capable from seeking paid work. Questions are constantly asked of who should be supported, the mechanisms of support, and the degree of support. Detractors include those who seek the substantial enlargement and those seeking the substantial diminution of current provisions. Separately, we have legislation that is designed to ensure that those who work as employees receive a minimum wage. Again, the measure has its supporters and its strong detractors. Most economists continue to oppose minimum wages on the grounds that they militate against the beneficial operation of the free market.127. The competing views, disagreements, and debates have all proved exceptionally durable. The persistence, in turn, underscores the difficulty in reconciling the predispositions that underlie the differences, one favouring the broad morality of humanism and the other, the literal sharpness of the dismal science.

Thanks are due to Jen Wilson and Rosemary Mercer for their invaluable encouragement and advice.

1. Raewyn Dalziel, ‘Popular Protest in Early New Plymouth’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 20, no. 1, pp.5-6,.13f.

2. John Martin, ‘A “small nation on the move”’, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Colonial Dream, Wellington, 1997, pp. 112-14.

3. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A Letter from Sydney, 1829. in M.F. Lloyd Prichard, The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Auckland, 1969, pp.99-100. All references in this essay to Wakefield’s works are from Lloyd Prichard unless otherwise indicated.

4. George Spaler, William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend, Vol.2, Cambridge, 1982, p.474.

5. J.L.Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Town Labourer, London, 1925, pp.298-9.

6. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, 1980, pp.257-8. For ‘a front’ read affront and for ‘dont’, done it.

7. David Vincent (ed), Testaments of Radicalism, London, 1977, pp.149, 154.

8. J.Black and D.M.MacRaild, Nineteenth-Century Britain, Houndsmills, 2003, pp.110-11; Norman McCord, British History: 1815-1906, Oxford, 1991, pp.113-14.

9. Black and MacRaild, p.110.

10. E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, ch.9 (but particularly p.307f).

11. Black and MacRaild, pp.111-12. Over a third of the working population remained employed in the agricultural sector even in 1831, McCord, p.222.

12. Martin Pugh, Britain Since 1789, New York, 1999, p.34.

13. McCord, pp.190, 223-224. The Swing riots commenced in 1830 and are covered in E.J. Hobswawn and George Rudé, Captain Swing, London, 1969. They are also the subject of Wakefield’s Swing Unmasked, London, 1831.

14. For the longstanding special interest in Britain in regulation compared with other European nations, Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531-1782, Cambridge, 1995, p.5f.

15. M.Fogarty, The Just Wage, London, 1961, pp. 258, 263-7, 270; Roy Richardson, Fair Pay and Work, Heinemann, 1971, p. 6. For the significance of Roman jurisprudence, Steven Epstein, ‘The theory and practice of the just wage’, Journal of Medieval History, vol.17, 1991, pp.58-9, passim.

16. E.P.Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, L (1971).

17. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (revised edition), London, 1935, p.50; Slack, p.19.

18. W.E. Minchinton (ed), Wage Regulation in Pre-Industrial England, Newton Abbot, 1972, pp.22-27; Keith Kelsall, ‘Wage Regulation under the Statute of Artificers’ in Minchinton op. cit., pp.193-5; Alan Fox, History and Heritage, London, 1985, p.45.

19. R.H.Tawney, ‘The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices of the Peace’ in Minchinton op. cit., p.42; Fox, p.9.

20. J.T.Ward and W. Hamish Fraser, Workers and Employers, London, 1980, pp.3-4; cf. Minchinton, p.13.

21. Webbs, pp.50-51, 54-55.

22. Richard Price, Labour in British Society, London, 1986, pp.30, 33.

23. Alfred F.Chalk, ‘Natural Law and the Rise of Economic Individualism in England’ in Ingrid Rima (ed.), The History of Economic Thought, New York, 1970, p.43. Petty also indicates the importance of the just wage tradition, noting in 1662: ‘Besides it is unjust to let any starve, when we think it just to limit the wages of the poor, so as they can lay up nothing against the time of their impotency and want of work’, Tawney, p.58.

24. Pugh, p.41.

25. Webbs, pp. 54-55.

26. Price, pp. 30-31; Webbs, p.56; J.L.Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, London 1927, pp.115-21; Ward and Fraser, p.13.

27. Webbs, p.56.

28. Ibid, pp.57-60; Fox, p.70.

29. Webbs, p.60.

30. Tawney, p.39.

31. Ward and Fraser, p.18.

32. Slack, p.5.

33. Ibid, pp.6-13; also see Steve Hindle, On the Parish?, Oxford, 2004, pp.2-3.

34. For the mercantilists, as ‘workers were … depraved people’, payment of a rate greater than subsistence would merely ‘encourage depravity and laziness’, rather than increased industry, and ‘thus reduce the labour supply’ (clearly as the same workers needed time to recover from their excesses), E.Scepanti and S.Zamagni, An Outline of the History of Economic Thought, Oxford, 1993, pp.23, 27.

35. John Knott, Popular Opposition to the 1834 Poor Law, London, 1986, pp.20, 22, 30-31; J.D.Marshall, The Old Poor Law, 1795-1834, London, 1985, pp.10, 12-15; Michael Rose, The English Poor Law, Newton Abbot, 1971, pp.11-12; Slack, pp.19, 21, 27, 30.

36. Marshall, p.16; Rose, pp. 13, 18-21; Slack, pp.32-6.

37. Marshall, p.16; Rose, pp.20-21; Slack p.26; G.M.Trevellyan, English Social History, Penguin 1967, pp. 482-83.

38. William Barber, A History of Economic Thought, Harmondsworth, 1967, pp.59-61.

39. Knott, p.41.

40. Ibid, pp.45-47.

41. Marshall, pp.16f, 22, 26.

42. Black and MacRaild, p.3; McCord, pp.115, 191-93, 195; Pugh, p.56f; K.D.M.Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, Cambridge, 1985,p. 131.

43. McCord, p.195; Pugh, p.58; Snell, p.137.

44. Marshall, p.49; Colin Matthew, The Nineteenth Century, Oxford, 2000, pp.71-73; Pugh, pp.57-58.

45. Tryvge Tholfsen, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England, London, 1976, p.190.

46. Andrew Pyle (ed), Contemporary Responses to Thomas Malthus, Bristol, 1994, p.250; John Derry (ed), Cobbett’s England, London, 1968, pp.195-201, 203; Dorothy Thompson, The Early Chartists, London, 1971, 80, 102, 110; Gregory Claeys (ed), The Chartist Movement in Britain, 1838-1850, London 2001, Vol.1, p. 98.

47. ‘Account of Chartist Rally in Manchester to welcome Peter McDouall and John Collins on their release from Gaol’, Northern Star, 22 August 1840, in Thompson, The Early Chartists, pp.152, 159, 172-3, 184.

48. Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists, London, 1984, pp. 12, 15, 35.

49. Philip Temple, A Sort of Conscience, Auckland, 2002, p.232.

50. Helen Taft Manning, ‘Lord Durham and the New Zealand Company’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol.6, no.1, April 1972, p.2f; Temple, p.127.

51. Erik Olssen, ‘Wakefield and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Colonial Dream, Wellington, 1997, p.47 and passim, also notes that Wakefield owed much of his ‘grasp’ of political economics to Adam Smith. Indeed Wakefield produced his own edition of Wealth of Nations.

52. Wakefield, A Letter from Sydney, p.180.

53. E.G.Wakefield, A Statement of the Principles and Objects of a Proposed National Society for the Cure and Prevention of Pauperism by means of Systematic Colonization, London, 1830, pp.31, 55-6.

54. E.G.Wakefield, Founding a Colony in Southern Australia, pp.301-02.

55. (Rowland Hill), Proof of Notice, ‘New Colony in South Australia’, 1835, p.3. The Commissioners also offered assistance from their stores ‘for the security of the poorer class of emigrants’. See British Parliamentary Papers, ‘First Annual Report of the Colonization Commissioners of South Australia’, 1836, p.11. Further, newly arriving emigrants had the benefit of being ‘met by the Emigration Agent who presented each couple with a cock and hen and offered his assistance in finding suitable employment.’ John Cashen, ‘Social Foundations of South Australia, II, “Owners of Labour”’, in Eric Richards (ed), The Flinders History of South Australia: Social History, Adelaide, 1986, p.106.

56. John Ward, Information Relative to New Zealand, London, 1840, p.159.

57. Dalziel, p. 14.

58. Shipping and Emigration Committee, 21 August 1839, C.O. 208/185.

59. New Zealand Journal, 2 January 1841.

60. Snell, pp.126,128,130; McCord, p.114. For another point of comparison, Black and MacRaild note that the take home pay for most workers in England was about £1 at the end of the nineteenth century, p.112. Chris Cook, Britain in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1999, p.207, indicates that this represented a very substantial upward movement in real wages from the middle of the century.

61. Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent, London, 1957, p.190.

62. William Wakefield’s Journal, 2 February 1840, C.O. 215/196.

63. New Zealand Journal, vol. 2, p.311.

64. The increase is demonstrated by the Wellington Spectator, 16 October 1841, and by the sequence of subsequent adjustments in the Company rate from 1841 to 1844. Also note William Wakefield to Company Secretary, 19 January 1843, C.O. 208/101.

65. J.Henning, ‘ A Rejection of Bondage’, M.A. thesis, Otago, 2004, pp.222-3 and notes.

66. Herbert Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand, Wellington, 1973, p.3; Henning, pp.230-1, 235-6, 275-8, 323-5.

67. New Zealand Journal, vol. 2, p.311.

68. New Zealand Journal, vol. 2, p.93.

69. R.Stokes to unknown, 3 October 1842, Letters from Settlers, London, 1843, p.44.

70. New Zealand Journal, vol. 1, pp.217-8.

71. J.Shaw to friend, 16 February 1842, Letters from New Plymouth, London, 1843, p.6.

72. J. & A. French to parents, 28 February 1842, Letters from Settlers, pp.141-2.

73. W.Cullen to Turner, 10 April 1842, Letters from Settlers, p.79; also see G.Dodson to unknown, February 1842, Letters from Settlers, p.66.

74. Dalziel, p.16.

75. William Wakefield to Secretary, New Zealand Company, 15 July 1841; Union Bank of Australia to William Wakefield, 8 October 1841; William Wakefield to New Zealand Company, 12 October 1841: William Wakefield to New Zealand Company, 5 November 1841: all C.O. 208/99; Wellington Spectator, 16 October 1841.

76. Wellington Spectator, 16 October 1841.

77. Ruth Allan, Nelson: A History of Early Settlement, Wellington, 1965, p.189; Minutes of Meetings of the Special Committee on the State of the Company’s Expenditure, 21 December 1842 and 11 May 1843, C.O. 208/186; William Wakefield to Secretary, New Zealand Company, 19 January 1843, C.O. 208/101. It appears from William Wakefield to Secretary, New Zealand Company, 31 March 1843, C.O. 208/101, that news that the Company had stopped promising waged work did not arrive until at least a couple of months into 1843, presumably with the first settlers so affected.

78. William Wakefield to Secretary, New Zealand Company, 8 March 1843, 15 April 1843: both CO 208/101; William Wakefield to Secretary, New Zealand Company, 28 May 1842, CO 208/99; Wellington Spectator, 10 May 1843.

79. Dalziel, pp.17, 21, 23-4; B.Wells, The History of Taranaki, New Plymouth, 1878, pp.83, 95, 98; ‘Journal of Dr Henry Weekes’, in J.Rutherford and W.Skinner, The Establishment of the New Plymouth Settlement in New Zealand, 1841-43, New Plymouth, 1969, pp.46-50, 75; William Wakefield to Secretary, New Zealand Company, 31 March 1843, C.O. 208/101.

80. Jim McAloon, Nelson: A Regional History, Cape Catley, 1997, p.28, 37-8; Allan, pp.191-2, 277-80, 355-57; John Miller, Early Victorian New Zealand, London, 1958, pp.123-24; Nelson Examiner, 22 and 29 April, 9 September 1843.

81. Wicksteed to William Wakefield, 31 July 1844, N.Z.C. 105/3; Allan, p.356-57.

82. Wellington Spectator, 16 October 1841.

83. Ibid, 10 May 1843.

84. William Wakefield to Secretary, New Zealand Company, 28 January 1843, C.O. 208/101; Wakefield to Secretary, New Zealand Company, and the Brees Report, both in the despatch of 21 December 1842, C.O. 208/100.

85. Allan, pp. 192, 363.

86. New Zealand Colonist, 28 October 1842.

87. Nelson Examiner, 13 July 1844 and 31 August 1844.

88. Allan, p.363.

89. Henning, pp.209-10.

90. Petition to Wicksteed, 14 May 1842, N.Z.C. 308/1.

91. Nelson Examiner, 7 and 21 January 1843; Miller, pp.121-2; Allan, pp187-8.

92. New Zealand Colonist, 3 February 1843.

93. Wellington Spectator, 18 October 1843.

94. To the contrary, see Allan, pp.355-7.

95. J.S.Marais, The Colonisation of New Zealand, Oxford, 1927, p.246.

96. The Otago Association managed the promotion of the new settlement and land sales while the New Zealand Company managed the development work in the settlement, A.H.McLintock, The History of Otago, Dunedin, 1949, pp. 206-07.

97. Otago Journal, November 1848, pp.38-39.

98. Otago News, 7 February 1849.

99. Otago News, 24 January 1849.

100. J.D.Salmond (ed. D.Crowley) , New Zealand Labour’s Pioneering Days, Auckland, 1950, pp.7, 9. McLintock, pp. 250-51, 288.

101. Fox had taken overall control of the Company’s affairs in New Zealand on the death of William Wakefield in September 1848 and was visiting the new settlement as part of his new responsibilities, Temple, p.469.

102 Otago News, 10 January 1849.

103. Ibid, 24 January 1849.

104. Ibid, 7 February 1849.

105. Henning, p.264f.

106. Otago News, 7 February 1849.

107. Ibid, 7 February 1849.

108. Ibid, 12 January 1850.

109. A.H.Reed, The Story of Early Dunedin, p.58; Otago News, 18 May 1850; Erik Olssen, A History of Otago, Dunedin, 1984, p.36.

110. McLintock, p.251; Tom Brooking, And Captain of Their Souls, Dunedin, 1984, p.76.

111. Otago Witness, 20 September and 13 December 1851, 3 January and 3 April 1852, and 3, 10, 31 July 1852; Ruth Gow, ‘George Matthews’, in G.J.Griffiths (ed), The Advance Guard, series 1, Dunedin, 1973, p.101.

112. Pugh, p.57.

113. David Thomson, A World Without Welfare, Auckland, 1998, p.19.

114. Ibid, pp.13-14, 17-18.

115. Margaret Tennant, Paupers and Providers, Wellington, 1989, ch.1. Thomson, pp.28, 84, notes that charitable aid began to make a substantial appearance in New Zealand during the 1860s and its ‘abiding principles’ were ‘voluntary assistance rather than compulsory support, minimal formality rather than statutory structures, charitable donation rather than tax funding, individualised assistance rather than relief to whole groups or classes, and rigid discrimination between the worthy and deserving, and the unworthy and undeserving.’ Also see Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land, Wellington, 1981, pp.249, 252f.

116. Tennant, p.18. Also see p.23.

117. Thomson, pp. 29-32.

118. Margaret McClure, A Civilised Community, Auckland 1998, p.12.

119. John Martin, ‘”Waging War on the Labour Market”: the State and Wage Labour in Late Nineteenth Century New Zealand’, Turnbull Library Record, vol.26, nos 1-2, 1993, p.46.

120. John Martin, ‘Unemployment, Government and the Labour Market, 1860-1890’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol.29, no.2, October 1995, pp.178-82, 187-89, 191-95. Also see Martin, ‘A “small nation on the move”’, pp.113-14.

121. Martin, ‘Unemployment, Government and the Labour Market, 1860-1890’, pp. 176-185, 189-95.

122. Ibid, pp.190, 194.

123. Tim McIvor, The Rainmaker, Auckland, 1989, pp.129-32; David Hamer, The New Zealand Liberals, Auckland, 1988, pp.64-67.

124. J.Collie (ed), Rutherford Waddell: Memoir and Addresses, Dunedin, 1933, passim; Waddell to Synod, ‘Scrap Book’ (Hewitson Library), undated.

125. James Holt, Compulsory Arbitration System, Auckland, 1986, p.15; Hamer, pp.147-9; Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, 1894; Old-age Pensions Act, 1898; Employment of Boys or Girls Without Payment Prevention Act, 1899.

126. Gerald Starr, Minimum Wage Fixing, Geneva, 1981, p.1.

127. Keith B. Leffler, ‘The Unanswered Question: Why Are Minimum Wages Popular with the Poor?’, in Simon Rottenberg (ed.), The Economics of Legal Minimum Wages, Washington, 1981, pp.531f; ANCIL Economics and Policy Pty Ltd, ‘What Future For New Zealand’s Minimum Wage Law’, 1994, pp.32f.

Copyright Jon Henning - 2007.