When in the second generation of settlement native writers began to appear there was a marked tendency even for imaginative work to take a crusading form. Edith Searle Grossman published novels in the nineties which broke a lance in favour of women's political rights and conveyed horror at male brutality and drunkenness. Even the poems about the same time of Jessie Mackay when they descended from themes of heroic or historical origin, became protests against abuses, Jessie Mackay had an integrity which commands respect. The mood of moral indignation came easily to the generation which spawned Seddonian liberalism, though the writer most closely associated with the regime, William Pember Reeves, has the calm of more completely developed intellectual powers. His poetry, like Jessie Mackay's, preferred public themes to private emotion. Reeves' The Long White Cloud (1898), still the best general account of our history, has an easy flow and little trace of partisanship: later editions added to its quality.

The strongest contribution to the literature of protest, John A. Lee's novel The Children of the Poor, appeared in 1934 when a new slump gave it even more emphatic point. Even today this tradition (which inspired the periodical Tomorrow and had its effect even on the poetry of the nineteen thirties) is unextinguished, though its latest product, Noel Hilliard's novel Maori Girl (1960), has a higher status as a work of art, though it lacks Lee's passion. In the same vein are the narratives of pacifist experience in two world wars, Archibald Baxter's We Will Not Cease (1939) and Ian Hamilton's Till Human Voices Wake Us (1953).