MR G. M. REED AS AN EMIGRATION AGENT.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 5545, 24 November 1879, Page 3

MR G. M. REED AS AN EMIGRATION AGENT.

("evening post.") Whatever may be said about the political circumstances attending the appointment of Mr G. M. Reed as an emigration agent, there can be no doubt that he is I proving himself an energetic and useful representative of the colony in the Home Country. His lectures delivered throughout the north of Ireland are attracting considerable attention, and are likely to result in the emigration of a most desirable class of settlers, small tenant farmers possessed of sufficient capital to give them a good start in the colony. We have now before us copies ef the Fermanagh Mail and the Tyrone Constitution, each containing a report of lectures delivered by Mr Reed in Ennislrillen and Omagh. respectively, and we must say that while 1 avoiding all undue exaggeration, Mr Reed presents a most attractive picture of the advantages offered by New [ Zealand as a placo of settlement. At Omagh we read that l< speaking of the system of special settlements he referred particularly to that of Ksitikati. The lecturer said he found that in this country, which v.'as so to say the cradle of the Kutikati settlement, very strong and very different sentiments were entertained with respect to that enterprise. Ho had recently been to Katikati, gone ovor it all, and conversed with many of the settlers. He described the district as one of the loveliest in New Zealand, an un-

dulating plain, bounded on one side by a fine harbor, oil the other by; a. picturesque range of serrated mountains. ~r With regard to those who llad settled there, the members of the first party had every reason to be satisfied. They had got the land a few years ago for nothing, and there was ndt ait acre of it but would sell six months agti, when thfc' lecturer was there, for eight or ten pounds per acre* With regard to tlie second party he aware that there was! some dissatisfaction, and it seemed to be the letters of some of these that had produced the strong feelings which were sometimes expressed „ in the north of Ireland with reference to Katikati. The land for the' seb'ond seitlenieiit had been sold to Mr Stewart for a certaiii price, and he had sold it to his settlers at a certain price, and if there had been any misunderstanding or misrepresentation as alleged, that was a matter between Mr Stewart and his settlers with which the Government had nothing whatever to do. It was entirely a matter of private arrangement, and any failure or disappointment in this matter could reflect blame in no way either on the Government or on the colony as a field of emigration. But he believed the amount of disappointment had been a good deal exaggerated. The land was not so accessible, and in many cases not so good as that obtained gratuitously by the first settlers, but he believed there was not any of it which would not in a few years be worth many times the amount which had been paid by the settlers for it." At all his lectures Mr. Reed announces the suspension of free emigration, but states that "assisted passages were granted at present to an extent of one-half the^ cost to farmers and their families taking with them sufficient means to commence farming for themselves, and ' special ships' had been set apart for them, conveying only one class of passengers." In the People's Journal, a paper published in Dundee, and enjoying an enormous circulation in Scotland, there appeared on the lGth of August a long and able letter from Mr Reed in reply to a communication previously published by that journal from a Mr P. Pleming warning persons with means from emigrating to New Zealand, as owing to its enormous debt and recldess' expenditure on railways, " which may be remunerative and useful to the next generation, but which are certain to prove an insurmountable barrier to the ]3rogress of the colony for many years to come," it was "the one colony of all others which ought under existing circumstances to be avoided by intending emigrants." Mr Reed goes carefully into the matter, and fairly demolishes the assailant of the colony he represents, exposing most completely the utter fallacy of the arguments used to damage New Zealand in the eyes of small capitalists.