UNIMPORTANT as New Zealand is today in world affairs only million and half people sharing less than one percent of the world's trade ? there was time when sociologists came to investigate our institutions. For quarter of century New Zealand prided itself on leading the world in extending state social services and giving equality of opportunity by means of legislative action; today New Zealand has not merely retrenched and economized, but has lost much of her faith in the govern mental institutions and social services which so amazed Andr? Siegfried, H. D. Lloyd, the Webbs, Ramsay MacDonald, and many other foreign observers. New Zealand was the first country to attempt to settle indus trial disputes by the legal processes of Compulsory Court; the present Coalition Government, part descendant of the Liberal Party which made New Zealand a land without strikes, has scrapped the compulsory arbitration system in industrial rela tions. The Liberal Party rose in the eighties of the last century as revolt against the Skinflints, whose one remedy for an eco nomic crisis was to economize and reduce wages; the Liberal Party in the next great depression has set up National Expendi ture Commission, which has peered into every pigeonhole of state assistance to the people and has proposed to settle the crisis by discontinuing, among other things, free books to primary school children in necessitous cases, abolishing local administration boards, making more difficult the training of teachers, raising the minimum age of admission to primary schools, abolishing all grants for adult education, abolishing family allowances, cutting down old age pensions, and so on. Except for protests from the interests concerned, such economies are being accepted willingly, sometimes almost joyously, as proof of the determination of New Zealand to adjust herself to the depression by doing without frills and luxuries. The government set up committee of economists who found that the national income had fallen from ?150,000,000 in 1928-29 to ?110,000,000 at the beginning of 1932. They advocated second cut of 10 percent in wages and salaries of civil servants, lowering of interest and rents, and special impost on the rentier class. The government adopted