The Daily Telegraph WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1881.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3009, 16 February 1881, Page 2

The Daily Telegraph WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1881.

Somebody one remarked that if a printed falsehood was given a start of twentyfour hours it was ten to one against it ever being overtaken. A thoroughly plausible lie, if applied to a distinguished personage, or to a political party, goes from mouth to mouth, and becomes a popular piece of public property, and. as a rule, people do not willingly relinquish what they have acquired in that way. Everybody now knows, for instance, that the Duke of Wellington never said on the field of Waterloo "Up Guards, and at them," but it took years after his own contradiction before tbe statement was abandoned as apocryphal. There are other cases of tbe 9ame sort " too numerous to mention," and in the colony we are not without our popular errors. Amongst other mistaken notions is the idea that political parties are divided in New Zealand into Liberals and Conservatives. W?) ehould almost have forgotton these terras as they were applied at the last general elections were it not that every now and again they are used by one or two journals who still believe in Sir George Grey. Ot these papers the Wanganui Herald may be cited as the most devoted to the ex-Premier. There is a subdued raournfulness about its tone that is irresistibly remindful of a widowed v.'-..."nan, „nd makes one think that the old lady is daily sighing to be at rest in tbat retirement which so well becomes the late blatant stump orator. But though she sits in darkness, the light of her life gone out, she still clings to the belief that binds her mind to the past. She can no more change her belief that she is a "Liberal" thau can an Ethiopian -his skin. She believes sir George Grey was a Liberal and his followers Liberals, and that everybody else must necessarily be Conservative. Hence, in a late leading article, she characterises the Napier Dailt Telegraph as the organ of the Hawke's Bay Conservatives, and calls us a " doubtful champion " for the settlement of land on the deferred payment system. Now, it may so happen that the Wanganui Herald reads the Telegraph as often as tbe Telegraph reads tbe Herald, certainly is not every day of our lives. But if the Herald is sufficiently acquainted with us as to call us names, she ought to be aware thst we have ever advocated the deferred payment system of settlement. Aud, further, we agree with the Herald that the land so taken up ought not to be sold at auction, but left open for free selection at a moderate upset price. We object, indeed, entirely to any description of Crown land being sold at auction, as that mode of its disposal offers a direct bonus to the speculator and to the shark, and gives no encouragement to the bona fide intending settler. The officers of the Crown ought to know the value of the waste lands, and ehould he able so to appraise them that they would find buyers. On occasions when the country happens to be suffering from land fever, an auction sale of Crown lands invariably draws the ppeculator, and as often as not keeps a wouldbe buyer from becoming a settler. It is only after an expenditure of much time in patient search and investigation that the intending settler will buy land ; but at the auction sale he finds himself outbid by the speculator, who has never Been the land, and never intends to see it, and whose bids are prompted by the belief tbat he will sell at a profit to a bona fide settler. The speculator, looked at from any point of view, is an unmitigated curse to settlement, for he either forces the settler to pay more for the land than what he ought to have got it for, or else the land lies idle. The only time in our opinion, when Crown lands should be put up to auction is in the case of two or more applying simultaneously for tbe same block, and the sale should then be restricted to the original applicants.