MISSION LAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 80, 5 April 1939, Page 15

MISSION LAND.

PURCHASE JUSTIFIED.

EARLY ACTIVITIES IN NORTH. i .

Purchase of large tracts of land by early missionaries is justified in a short review of missionary land purchases issued by the National Historical Committee in view of the approach of the Centennial.

Reference is made to the old quarrel of the New Zealand Association and the Church Missionary Society and to the publication by Edward Gibbon Wakcfteld of an accusation that the missionaries owned large tracts of land and devoted more time to farming than spiritual duties. This, states the review, is a travesty of facts.

The review explains that the northern peninsula, where most of the inhabitants lived before 1840, was magnificent timber land, but unproductive. Missionaries were allowed to purchase 200 acres for each of their children ae they reached the age of 15 years. This was inadequate for a farming livelihood, especially for grazing cattle. Further circumstance that seemed to justify purchase of further land by the missionaries for their children was that under the regulations in force in New South Wales, each child would have been entitled to select 1200 acres free of all payment. Allegations that the early missionary body had motives less pure than providing for its children are discounted by the review, which points out that the missionaries opposed tooth and nail projects for the colonisation of the country. Colonisation, the writer declares, would have increased the value of their holdings, as it afterwards did.