A BACK-BLOCKER'S VIEWS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXXI, Issue 7934, 16 December 1909, Page 4

A BACK-BLOCKER'S VIEWS.

"There is no unearned increment," said a Main Trunk line farmer to a Dominion representative. " I came here eighteen years ago, when this place was a wilderness, and the chances of a through, railway a remote possibility to be placed on almost level terms with the millennium. 1 lived m a whare for years, imprisoned by Nature and miles from anywhere. I would sometimes never see a human being for six months. When I eventually built this house, the timber for it had to bo packed from Pipiriki on horseback, a distance of over forty miles. The freight of sugar was 15s per bag'; flour, 25s per 100; to get my wool into Huntervillo cost mo £6 per ton. In the face of all my difficulties I have married, and brought up a family, who even now have no school to go to, and I am forced to employ a teacher on my own account. Would I have gone through all the drudgery and worry of the past eighteen years if I had not thought that there was a good possibility of making this land my very own? Let the land nationalisation theorists come to me and thousands of farmers who have toiled like me m INew Zealand, and they will hear some truths that will do them good.