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Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 6081, 23 February 1891, Page 2

We are constantly hearing that there are so many millions of acres in the hands of the Maoris lying unused, paying no taxes, and which, if acquired by the Government, would add to the wealth of the colony. This is all very true ; but at the same time it may well be asked what the colony could do with these millions of acres if they belonged to the Crown ? There are not three quarters of a million of inhabitants in New Zealand, Maoris included, and, with tbe debt of the colony and the taxation that has to be borne I by the people, there is little prospect of any rapid increase of the population from outside. Our goldfields offer no attraction to the nomadics of the world, and the compulsory c es&atiou of public works from the exhaustion of our credit, drives away t.uch of our population that only came here for the picking to bo made out of a scatter cash policy. It is no evidence of the decadence of the colony, through the imposition of the property tax, that the sum total of tbe, departures exceeds the arrivals of population, but rather the other way. Mr. Ballance speaks of the introduction of a policy to bring back those who havo gone away ; but what sort of a policy would it be that would accomplish such a feat ? Colonial credit, and the absence of a rich alluvial golrifield, forbid the realisation of his dream. Nothing short of a big loan, which now happily cannot be borrowed, or the discovery of another Gabriel's Gully, would bring back the itinerants who are here to-day and gone to-morrow.