MR BUCHANAN AS A SPECIAL PLEADER.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CI, Issue 11921, 19 June 1899, Page 4

MR BUCHANAN AS A SPECIAL PLEADER.

The, Opposition must be bard pressed indeed when it has to send Mr W. C. Buchanan to Gisborne to reply to the Hon J. Carroll. The member for Wairarapa has many excellent qualities as a private gentleman, but he has very few as a politician that would appeal to the constituency represented by the Colonial Secretary. The best thing he could say for his party on Saturday evening was that the famous trip of a few of his political friend# up the Wanganui River did not cost so much as Mr Carroll’s journey. through the ITriwera Country. The point of the statement is not very obvious, but perhaps Mr Buchanan wished to show that it was cheaper for Ministers to travel by water than by land. But if this was his object he ought to have mentioned that it would have been impossible for a steamer to make its way through the Uriwera Country. The fact that the trip up the Wanganui River was a mere pleasure jaunt, with no public purpose in view, is a detail which the member for Wairarapa could not be expected to remember. The rest of his speech seems to have contained nothing which even the isolated electors of Gisborne might not have heard many times before. He did not pretend to share Captain Russell’s confidence that the Conservatives would he restored to power at the approaching general election, but he promised that if, by any chance they were, they would neither “ interfere with the present land legislation ” nor “ upset the old age pensions.” He may have been perfectly sincere, according to his lights, in making! this promise, but his subsequent qualifications that the Opposition • would give the holders of Crown leases the right to acquire the freehold, and would improve the old age pensions system “in the direction of encouraging thrift,” show that he has very little sympathy with the measures that have been placed upon the Statute Book by the present Government. The resumption of the freehold would be the beginning of the end of the Liberal land policy, and the “ encouragement of thrift,” on the lines suggested by Mr Buchanan and his friends, would reduce the old age pensions to a cruel system of compulsory insurance. If the Conservatives’ only object in seeking to amend the land laws of the colony Were to give the Crown, tenants greater security in -the possession of their holdings they would adopt Major. Steward’s suggestion to allow the tenants to reduce the capital value of their holdings until the rental stood at a merely nominal figure. If the occupier of 200 acres of first-class land had to pay only £lO a year by way of rent he would be in very little danger of losing his farm through any unforeseen calamity. But of course their main object is to remove the obstacle that has been placed in the way of the aggregation of large estates, and to restore to all its former glory the profitable business of land speculation. Mr Buchanan’s claim that the Conservatives have been the exponents of economy in the past is not altogether without foundation. They have, to do them justice, always been ready to practise the art at other people’s expense. But they have never economised when thp' sacrifice had to be made, by themselves. The working man has usually been the victim of their experiments. He Was in 1880, and again in 1890, and is probably kept steadily in view for 1900. But the electors are not quite so gullible as Mr Buchanan seems to imagine. They are not at all likely to be misled by a few specious promises into entrusting the administration of a Liberal policy to a Conservative Government. Until the Opposition can invent a policy of its own it must be content with the discharge of the very useful functions which at present fall to its share.