Sewing Freedom. Jared Davidson

      Yet despite such factors (or because of them), there existed an anti-authoritarian instinct that Eldred-Grigg insists came close to the spirit of anarchism:

      Anarchism was deeply rooted in the instincts of working people. Bureaucracy, the state, the whole business of government, seemed alien and inimical. Dislike of government was linked with a strong preference for a world of ease, a world where people chin-wagged rather than hectored, where spaces were small and relationships close. Working people frequently felt contempt for what a union leader described as ‘that political box of tricks called Parliament’… anarchism was not so much a political movement as a feeling that the state and big business represented the world of ‘them’ not ‘us’.18

      Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s slogan ‘Property is Theft’ was so popular in 1890, writes Eldred-Grigg, “that one wealthy landowner took pains to repudiate it as ‘cant’ [mere jargon].”19 Whether it was used in full sincerity is open to debate, but at the very least, the men and women whose lives revolved around labour, or who did not own property, knew that New Zealand was far from a workingman’s (or woman’s) paradise.

      Those who owned the country’s newspapers certainly strove to portray the harmony of capitalist social relations in the colony, and despite a few exceptions, anarchist thought was either reported negatively or overwhelmingly denounced. As early as 1840, the seemingly delayed colonization of New Zealand was said to be promoting ‘anarchy’ by some commentators: “unless immediate steps be taken to establish the complete administration of British law in New Zealand, it is greatly to be feared that the large and respectable body of Her Majesty’s subjects who have lately proceeded thither will be placed in a state of anarchy, and subjected to great evils accordingly.”20 Reports of the 1848 French Revolution carried the exploits of ‘anarchist leaders’, and as well as tirades on the Paris Commune, the year 1871 featured a local letter in the Evening Post titled “Revolutionary Anarchism” that confusedly advocated the ideas of Italian Republican Giuseppe Mazzini.21 Sensationalist articles in the early 1880s, such as “Anarchism, Socialism, and Nihilism,” “Nihilism: What is It?,” and “Socialists in London,” painted the ideas of Bakunin, Johann Most, and other “extreme anarchists” in a negative light, warning the good citizens of New Zealand that “the quarrel of the Anarchist is with human society itself, and that is a quarrel that may be prosecuted as fitly in New Zealand as in Paris or Chicago.”22

      Anarchism as a scourge against society was a reoccurring theme. In 1894, Wellington audiences enjoyed a public lecture on “Anarchism: Its Origin and Aim” by Liberal politician and lawyer, Sir John George Findlay. Although he shared Proudhon quotes with his listeners and mentioned anarchist “writers of such ability in literature and science as Kropotkin and Reclus,” Findlay peppered his presentation with rhetoric designed to darken the imagination. Anarchists were part of “the horde of idle loafers who form the dregs of every State… whose degradation and poverty are but the wages of their own intemperance and idleness”; while anarchism itself “aims at annihilation of all external authority and is avowedly a declaration of war against every social institution… to destroy by every possible means this cursed growth we call society.” “The blind enthusiasts,” concluded Findlay, “would hasten on the wheels of human progress by the bomb, the pistol, and the dagger.” In their growth, “the death of society” drew near.23