TORY LEGISLATION.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXX, Issue 10216, 9 December 1893, Page 6

TORY LEGISLATION.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir,—We are willing to give the Tories all due credit for any good they may have done or intended to do, but this has been infinitesimal, and they might with propriety have used the parson’s confession " We have done tho things we ought not to have done, and left undone things we ought to have done.” Tho Acts that they passed in Parliament which they called good and for the benefit of the labourer were quite the reverse of good. It is a matter to cause ua to rejoice that a change has come over the spirit of their dreams, and the working man has at last shaken off hia apathy. Ha has found out who are his real friends, and has discovered that the squatter and tho capitalist, whom ha had Bent to Parliament to represent him, were sslSfih in the extreme, and that their greatsst deStra was self-aggrandisement and love of power to enable then to ploy into the hands of the rich and acquire large tracts of lands. I often wonder why men are so anxious to obtain largo tracts of land in this country, as if 100 acres were not enough for one man to keep a family in comfort. I often think of the position of the Canadian farmer. How snugly and contentedly he oits on his one hundred acre farm; he would not call a king his cousin. With respect to labouring men, during tho fifteen years I lived there I did not see so many idle men walking about the streets as are to bo eeen here daily. Bat enough on that subject. Coining back to New Zealand and the land monopoly, we have a case in point fully exemplified in the conduct and character of a bankrupt in the Southbridge district, who has 960 acres of land and could not make it pay. Now on this farm ten families could have found a living. We cannot, I think, animadvert too strongly on the injudicious acta of Tory administration.—l am, &e., • ANDREW DAVIDSON.