PRIME MINISTER AND FARMERS.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XI, Issue 238, 12 October 1921, Page 4

PRIME MINISTER AND FARMERS.

The vigorous rebuke which, according to a telegraphic message to-day irom our Parliamentary correspondent. Mr. Massey has administered to his friends the farmers, for whom he has done so much, shows, at least, that he is in fine fighting form, and gives earnest of a good, lively session. It would probably come as something like a cold douche for them to be read so severe a homily, especially from tho mouth of one who has all along shown so much solicitude for country interests that he has incurred no little resentment from the town-dwellers. The farmers., as a body, have in truth, acquired a reputation as persistent grumblers. Even during the good times of the war and the year or two immediately following it there were not a few of them who were wont to complain that, hail they been given a free market for their produce they would have done very much better out of it than they really did. This, of course, was in complete forgetfulness that the British taxpayer was helping very materially, out of his own pocket, to pay the handsome prices they wore actually being paid in order that tho war might be fought to a successfu issue. Nor have they borne in mip J that the British Government accepted all the risks—risks for which it is now paying in the course of its efforts at realisation of surplus stocks accumulated against the possibility of still more protracted hostilities, and efforts which are greatly hampered, so far as wool at any rate is concerned, by a regard for the farmers’ need to sell their new clips. Nor is Mr. Massey’s reproach with regard to a neglect to lay by against a rainy day altogether undeserved, aithougn we at oncei recognise that forced loans and heavy taxation have played their part in bringing about the present position. As against that, however, there cannot but recur to mind tho mad orgy of speculation m laud which took possession of the rural community, and which, wo venture to think, is to a very appreciable extent accountable lor the present situation, h.verybudy regrets the lean times that have la lien upon the farmers, both as the outcome of a natural human sympathy with fellow men fallen on evil times and irom a recognition of tho fact that hard times for them mean hard times tor the great majority of us. But, at the same time, we should most ol us like them better, as a body, did they but admit a little more openly that they have had a long succession of really goqd years, and that there aro others feeling the pinch at least as acutely as themselves.