WAKEFIELD'S LAND POLICY

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 150, 26 June 1915, Page 9

WAKEFIELD'S LAND POLICY

Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his colonisation and land policy formed the subject of an address by Mr. P. J. O'Regan before the Land Values League last evening. Wakefield, the lecturer held, drew a distinction between a colony and a dependency, relying on the historic precedent that the colonies of ancient Greece had no political connection with the parent state. It was, then, no matter for surprise that, when Great Britain refused a charter to the NewZealand Company, Wakefield proceeded to colonise the country on his own account. The first settlers landed at Wellington, before British sovereignty was proclaimed. The New Zealand Company treated the Treaty of Waitangi with contemptj but once it was made it was both policy and justice to adhere to it. The entire history of the company showed the folly of allowing questions of colonisation and government to be handled by private persons, whose primary object was aggrandisement. Wakefield's land policy was first expounded in " a. letter from Sydney " in 1836. Wakfefield realised that the labour question was at the bottom of the land question, but he took it for granted that the mass of mankind should be compelled to work for the few who could monopolise what was rightfully the common inheritance of all men. Although they might to-day laugh at Wakefield's scheme for the enslavement pf labour, yet the very land system he contemplated was in existence to-day. Dear land was a predominant evil m New Zealand after seventy-five years of colonisation, and if working men only understood the land question as Wakeneld did, they would realise that no schema of social regeneration was possible that did not provide for cheap and easy access to land. The lecturer was thanked for his address.