LAND FOR THE PEOPLE.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 70, 21 March 1908, Page 5

LAND FOR THE PEOPLE.

SPEECH BY DR. FINDLAT. PROBLEMS OF THE TOWNS. CHRISTCHUECH, this day. Dr. Findlay, Minister Interior and Attorney-General, arrived at Cheviot on Thursday evening, and was entertained at a banquet by members of the A. and P. Association. Responding to the toast of his health, he referred to the settlement of Cheviot, and said that the acquisition of the estate was a national event, and the beginning of a social movement which was itself the beginning of another movement based on the principle that it was the duty of every progressive State to find the material and means which would enable the greatest number of its people to make headway in the world. He did not wish to accentuate the old feud between the large landowner and the settler. He thought that every intelligent large owner in New Zealand recognised that it was in the paramount interest of the country that small settlements should proceed. Generous large owners, continued the Minister, were no longer setting themselves strenuously to arrest the progress of small settlement, and those who were would have to meet the agencies brought into existence in the last session of Parliament. He predicted that small settlement would go on faster in the years to come than it had ever gone on in the past. Referring to the prospective opening I up of native lands in the North Island for European settlement Dr. Findlay advised the people of the South Island to keep their eyes on the reports of the Native Land Commission. The people of the South Island had as much right to land in the North as anyone, and they would find an increasing and fever more profitable field for their enterprise and activities there. The great areas of the North, continued the speaker, lay calling for the good judgment and the hard work of the European settler, and that must be the field for a great many of the people of the South. In. the course of a reference to Government advances to workmen, he said that , the line of cleavage between the country and the city must continue, or it would spell disaster. The workers in the city, with their wives, numbered something like 300,000 or 70 per cent of the total number of the Dominion. Unless there was amity between town and country it would spell something like revolutionary Socialism. To give the worker in the city the same advantages that had been afforded to the small settler, to giv.e him the means to put a house over his head and make a home would be the best answer to make to those who preached jevolutxDnary Socialism,