The Lyttelton Times. WEDNESDAY, JAN. 8, 1894.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXXI, Issue 10236, 3 January 1894, Page 4

The Lyttelton Times. WEDNESDAY, JAN. 8, 1894.

A cable message received from Melbourne the other day informed us that the Leongatha Labour Oolony, established by the Victorian Government with a view or relieving the industrial congestion in that colony, had proved a failure. The fact ought to ba noted, not as a discouragement, but as a warning. All success worth having is built upon experience, and frequently upon failure. The breaks down of any particularexperiment does not by any means, prove that the basic idea is erroneous. In the Victorian instance under notice, it is stated that the failure was duo to the unsuitable nature of the land chosen for the “colony.” That is, of course, an error in detail which due foresight and knowledge would have averted; but because that mistake was made, unthinking people will be ready to declare that the principle is vitiated, and' that such efforts or the State to regulate economic conditions are altogether lacking in the elements necessary to success. The fact is that the Victorian Government has, under the spur of necessity, been hastily applying heroic remedies, and the wonder is not that there has been one failure, but that the successes have been so many. Aa in the case of panic legislation, which sometimes produces worse evils than those it is intended to neutralise, hasty measures of administrative reform often fail to achieve their object because some factor has been left out of the calculation or some safeguard omittedIt is evident that in Victoria, during the past year, the placing of people upon the* land baa been forced at a perilously rapid rate. The Minister of Lands for that colony, while in New Zealand recently, stated that over 20,000 people had settled upon the land of Victoria during 1893. These were, to a large extent, village and homestead settlers, who were assisted by Government grants of money, and given a twenty years’ lease of the land, the tenure being then convertible into a freehold on certain conditions being complied with. The village settlers, it was calculated, would be able to support themselves by obtaining work from other settlers in the districts where they wore placed, until their own farms were able to yield thorn sustenance. As it happened, this calculation proved fallacious, and more than one village settlement scheme has proved abortive in consequence. Then the agricultural industry is as badly “ depressed ” aa any other, and the effect of suddenly placing so many thousands of new settlers on the soil could not be other than to aggravate that depression. Already, we learn, the Crown tenants of Victoria —the old leasees, who took up land at comparatively high rents —are £600,000 in arrears, and there has been an agitation for remission of rents, with a threat of wholesale abandonment of farms i£ the request should not ho complied with. The radical mistake in Victoria has been hasty and ill-considered action. Ministers seemed to proceed on the theory that nothing more was necessary than to place people ou land, give them a few pounds in their pockets, and toll them to make a livelihood forthwith for themselves and their families. What else could bo expected iu these circumstances of men who had no knowledge of country pursuits than that they should drift back to town as soon as their money grants were exhausted ? Tbe Victorians must have learnt by experience that all men are not “ ready-made ” farmers ; that experience is no less essential thau land and capital ; and that, iu order to permit of that experience being acquired, village settlements should be planted in close proximity to town, so that tbe settlors might eke out a livelihood by occasionally working at other callings. Hundreds of London EastEndora have developed into successful Canadian farmers, and there is no reason wby Colonial citizens should not become prosperous agriculturists ou the virgin lauds lying at their doors; but the hasty and haphazard way of placing them on the land must bo abandoned if success is to be secured.