Landed Aristocrats

Manawatu Times, Volume 68, Issue 222, 18 September 1943, Page 4

Landed Aristocrats

(To the Editor.) Sir, —Mr. J. Ilodgens, Labour candidate for Palmerston North, in an address on Tuesday night, said: “We will demonstrate to the landed aristocracy of this country that nothing is too good for the soldier. We are not asking our soldiers to fight to entrench the landed people of this country. Not many land owners would have had much interest in their land if the Japanese had come further south than the Solomons.”

Could J paint a picture of four of these I was in contact with 35 years ago. They held adjoining blocks of bush country -10 miles inland from Gisborne.. Two days’ ride in winter with a river to ford and seven miles uphill by narrow* clay tracks the last part of the journey. The man I stayed with lived with his men in a slab shanty. His block was 2000 acres of virgin bush with not one-quarter acre of flat to build a house on; no telephone, no electric light, the nearest post office Seven miles away across the river and no bridge. His nearest neighbour had no access to his holding but a cage on a wire rope.

These men all made good and l»y their vision and grit helped to build New Zealand as it is to-day, along with thousands of men of similar type. Many a landed aristocrat of to-day was a ploughman, shepherd or bnshman thirty or forty years ago. All honour to them.—l am, etc.,