FREE SELECTION.

Auckland Star, Volume XIX, Issue 161, 9 July 1888, Page 2

FREE SELECTION.

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —Your leader on the high rate of interest is so expressive of the hard times our settlers have to face that I cannot resist stating my opinion that any such assistance as you suggest can only be of very slight use to the lamer who has the misfortune to have his farm'mortgaged, and certainly none to the colony. Any permanent remedy must come from our legislators in the form of free selection. All the good land of the colony has been taken up, and that remaining is certainly, from a monetary point of view, valueless. Now, instead of Government holding out for 10s or 20s per acre for this land, and not selling it, would it not be far better to institute a system of free selection governed by simpli and attractive conditions, say, limiting the area for one selector to 610 acres or so, and allowing .such selector only to bake up one acre lor every £1 of capital he possesses.

Would it not be far better to induce settlement by somo such means as this rather than allow the colony to become depopulated? The settler is of more value to the colony than a little waste land. I must admit that in a House of Representatives so largely composed of men more or less coining under the heading of Land Sharks, it requires some pluck to advance any scheme approaching free selection in land, as such a scheme, although only directly affecting Crown lands, must indirectly absolutely destroy the artificial value of all rural land in New Zealand, and the prospect of such an effect will at once bring down the enmity of every land-jobber in the House.

Until something in this way is done, I fear New Zealand must remain a vei'y " one horse " little colony, a3 the farmer must be the backbone of such a colony as ours, and without him every little " boom " will be followed by its big depression. So long as our representatives try to remedy the evil by commencing at the wrong end, and increasing taxation, we are likely to be "protected" from any great influx of settlers ; arid I fear, so long as we are governed by that " national insurance " fad, things won't improve.—Yours, etc., New Chum.