SMALL HOLDINGS

Evening Post, Volume XCII, Issue 74, 25 September 1916, Page 6

SMALL HOLDINGS

The principle of establishing smallholders, whose living shall be earned partly from their sections and partly by labour in the neighbourhood, is, receiving increased attention because of the number of land-hungry soldiers, and because of the unfitness of many of them to undertake farming on the ordinary scale. The outstanding feature of this principle is its duality, and its success will depend mainly on tlie successful blending of the cultivating and wageearning occupations; for if the latter is not an. auxiliary to the former, the small-holder's hold upon the land will speedily diminish, and the experiment will lose its main purpose, which is the attachment of the man and his family to the soil. As far as local experience goes, it tends to show that such attachment is best effected by making the settler entirely dependent on his land— tlie ordinary method —or alternatively by holding out a reasonable prospect that his small section will oiie day, by intensive culture, provide his whole subsistence or at least the major part of it. The alternative is represented by the small-holdings (part cultivation, part wages) scheme, but in either case the root-idea is to make a soil-living, and not a wage-living, the main or ultimate motive. To get the best results, the small-holder's best property must bein his holding. ■ This essential property sense—which is not necessarily, a matter of tenure—will be destroyed unless the small-holders — whether military or civilian—are very wisely planted and carefully tended, in their earlier years. While the whole plan is still in the -stage of experiment, a Christchurch gentleman has advanced the still more experimental idea of a collectivism village garden, to be worked by single men, living in hutments, sharing a common dining-room, and dividing results on a profit-sharing basis. Though profit-sharing is likely to play an increasing part in the social equation,, there is some doubt as to whether agriculture is the best sphere for-it. To draw on local experience, communistic cultivation has been a great failure with the Maoris, and with the Chinese appears to be a considerable success. But in character and habits the ordinary white New Zealander is immensely removed from both. We have no desire to discourage communistic optimism— what are the Empire citizen armies but a huge communism?—yet the Christchurch idea is not convincing. The main attachment of a man to the soil is not only a sense of property, but a sense of individual property; and that is the spring which communism might weaken.