This book is a political biography of Henry Edmund Holland, who led the New Zealand Labour Party until his death in 1933, two years before the Party came to power for the first time.
In this finely objective and sympathetic interpretation of Holland's political career - which was his whole life - Dr O'Farrell has presented the interplay of politics, personality, and history in Australia and New Zealand in the early twentieth century, allowing the man to emerge in all his complexity.
Holland, with little formal education, sought, as a doctrinaire socialist, to transform the entire existing social order. Yet he commanded the regard of men as diverse as his colleagues Peter Fraser and Walter Nash (later to be Labour Prime Ministers), Sir Francis Bell (Attorney General in the Reform government of W. F. Massey), and Sir Robert Stout, who in 1913 had sentence Holland to imprisonment; and the virulence of his opponents' attacks is a measure of their respect for him.
At one stage he advocated violence as a means of achieving social revolution, 'whether it be a stern battle on the industrial field where men starve while they fight, or on a sterner battle field where rifles crack and machine guns rattle and shot screams and red blood flows - the victory will be with the Working Class'. Later, in the midst of economic depression, he was prepared to support his political opponents if this would relieve the 'awful distress' that existed. The 'collapse of capitalism' lots its attraction as he came to know what it meant in terms of human anguish.
It may fairly be said that Holland the politician, the Militant Socialist, failed; but Holland, the frail man, austere, reserved, and formidable, dedicated to the service of the people, the man of tremendous compassion, has succeeded far beyond the ephemera of politics.