MANAWATU EVENING STANDARD POHANGINA GAZETTE. Circulation, 2,800 Copies Daily. WEDNESDAY, MAY 6TH, 1903. THE WORST CLASS OF SETTLERS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XL, Issue 7533, 6 May 1903, Page 4

MANAWATU EVENING STANDARD POHANGINA GAZETTE. Circulation, 2,800 Copies Daily. WEDNESDAY, MAY 6TH, 1903. THE WORST CLASS OF SETTLERS.

" Pe_.3iane>-t employees in the Road and Railway Department are the worst class of settlers to get on the land," so runs the dictum of the Wellington Commissioner of Crown Lands, and we must say that tho action of the Land Board in the past has been to discourage as much as possible this class of settlement on our Crowr Lands. And why? The men referred to are, as a rule, steady, reliable, and intelligent, and from the very arduous nature of their occupation should prove equal to the strain imposed upon them. But the idea of good land settlement, in the brains of the officials, is not so much prosperous settlement and contented occupiers of the soil, as the fact that the selector and his family are living upon the land. It does not matter how great the hardships the unfortunate ppople have to endure—by the absence oi decent means of communication, by the want of schools at which to educate their children, by the enormously euchanced cost of living due to their remoteness from a business centre and the heavy cost of conveying goods to the bank blocks—the land has been taken up on certain conditions, and if communication has to be maintained per balloon post, go there they must. Of course it will be said that tho Land Act gives plenty of kttitude to dispense with residence conditions for a time if the interest of thorough settlement warrants such a course, but the Wellington Land Board has been actually afraid to exercise even the lattitude the law allows them, with the result that the man who wants land for a home, where he can take his family to after he has had it thoroughly improved and made fit for occupation, is at a discount, and the only person who is supposed to take up bush land is the man who is callous enough to undergo years of dreadful hardships and privatum, to say nothing of the sufferings of his wife and family, aud when ho is broken dowu in health and strength, he will have the consolation of knowing that he has made a good home for those who come after him—that is, if they are content to live on the land, which is not often the case. The idea of allowing a man to continue at work he understands, the while paying experts to get his section into good order, is quite foreign to the policy of tho Department, but we say that the sooner that policy is altered the bettsr. The best class of settler is tho one who can turn the natural opportuni'ies to the best account for the community, and if he does that hy personal effort on the laud, or by the employment of others better able to attain that end than himself, it matters little, and the sooner that is I understood by those responsible for the i failure or success of our land policy the : better it will be for the colony.