In the first place, it is only this recent social reform movement that has begun to put New Zealand and Australia under real democratic government, and this democratization is scarcely yet complete, since the constitutions of some of the separate Australian States and Tasmania contain extremely undemocratic elements; while the federal government is dominated by a Supreme Court, as in the United States.

Consequently it is only a few years in some of the States since such elementary democratic institutions as free schools were instituted.
It is evident, on the other hand, that countries establishing democratic or semidemocratic institutions under the conditions prevailing in the world as late as 1890, when the great change took place in New Zealand, or during the decade, 1900-1910, when the political overturn gave Australia to the Labour Party, should be more advanced than France, Germany, Great Britain, or the United States, where the latest great overturn in the democratic direction occurred in each instance a generation or more ago.
So also Australia and New Zealand which, on the one hand, are still suffering from the disadvantage of having lived until recently under a system of large landed estates, on the other hand have the advantage of dealing with the land question in a period when the governments of these new countries are becoming rich enough, through their own enterprises, to exist independently of land sales, and when farmers are more willing to increase the power of their governments, both in order to protect themselves from the encroachments of capital and of labor, and directly to advance the interests of agriculture.

The campaign to break up the large estates has kept the farmers engrossed in politics, and this has occurred in a period when industrial organization has made possible a whole program of "Constructive State Socialism." By taking up this program the farmers and those who wished to become farmers have at once looked to their own interests and secured the political support of other small capitalists and even of a large part of the workingmen.
But working against the nationalization of the unearned increment, against the policy of leasing instead of selling the public land, central features of every advanced "State Socialist" policy, is the fact that the small farmers, daily becoming more numerous, hope that they might themselves reap this increment through private ownership.

In no national legislation is it proposed to tax away this increment in _agricultural_ land, which preponderates both in New Zealand and Australia.

But, while in other countries the agricultural population is decreasing relatively to the whole, in New Zealand the settlement of the country by the small farmers has hitherto led it to increase, and the new legislation in Australia must soon have the same result.