After its great bust in the 1880s, New Zealand ceased to see itself as an embryonic replica of Britain, an 'Infant Hercules', and accepted a more modest role as an exemplary paradise, 'the world's social laboratory', a title also claimed by South Australia.
James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939 (2009)