THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, JUNE 27, 1904. THE QUESTION OF THE DAY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 12601, 27 June 1904, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, JUNE 27, 1904. THE QUESTION OF THE DAY.

From the many pro-sessional j j speeches which, have been delivered , by members of Parliament, it is h abundantly evident that " freehold , versus leasehold" has become the , leading,question of the day. Doubt-J ] less there are other questions which i loom as largely in the minds o£ sec-1 ; tions- of our population. Possible I , liquor law amendments will naturally J seem of more immediate importance j to both prohibitionists and brewers. Railway extensions- must' inevitably occupy the leading place in the con- t vernation of: the few herdsmen of ' Central Otago and the roadless settlers of the North'of Auckland. The fear of democratic reforms may ex.- , elude all other questions from the minds of the members of that re- . markable gathering, our Legislative Council But these and other political question* retire into secondary place when, compared with that i great agrarian question which directly concerns the industrial prosperity of the most, important class in the community, and the future of the inI dustry upon which, our entire national life is built. Although some members of Parliament have endeavoured to' pass over it lightly,, and still more have anxiously balanced themselves between the rival parties until they can decide it to be safe to join the stronger ranks, it is plain that the land tenure question is cleaving the colony from end to end, I as only great political questions can. 1 "In the South Island as in the North I It is becoming th© common topio of political discussion, nor will it loag I fa© possible' for any Parliamentary representative to avoid declaring his opinions thereon, even if he is not possessed of oonvi.ctioag. It lias already reached the point where it is recognised as constituting the great rock ahead of the Seddoa Administration, the intense public feeling already exercising a disintegrating influence upon the usually submissiveranks of the party in. power. If it should not com© to the front during ..the session/ it cm, only'be through I should not effort front during the session, it can only be through the determined effort which will probably be made--by the Govern- j ment to avoid contentious business ; 1 in any case it must be the foremost I question at the next general elec- J tions, whenever they happen to be. j Nor is the ■ outcome a very doubtful one, The champions of what Mr. Moss very aptly terms " limited optional purchase" for all Grown leaseholders are certain to sweep the agricultural electorates from, on© end of I the country to the other, and we 1 shall be very much astonished if a I majority of the urban electorates do I not likewise declare in. favour of an J independent yeomanry as against a I notoriously discontented tenantry. J J In fact, the inclination of the national j I mind is already so marked that one J great reason why the subject may be J avoided during the pending- session I is that the- Cabinet may have the I opportunity of executing a, somer--1 sault, and endeavouring to avoid { otherwise inevitable loss of office by 1 flinging the so-called leasehold prim I ciple out of the window. | But when we coin.© to look into the matter, there is no leasehold "principle" and no honest championship of the form in which we know it. Mr. Laurenson, who- came from the j marts of. iLyttelton to instruo* our j Northern settlers* upon, agricultural' land tenures, a question concerning which he has the confident assurance ! which he has the confident assurance of the man who reads books while others do the ploughing, emphatically insisted that periodic revaluations were necessary to make the leaser hold to his taste, while Mr. Fowlds frankly tells us—as he has always told us —that he prefers the freehold to the leasehold system as we have it. These well-known leaders of the - anti-Freehold party make no secret of their objection to any and every -form of tenure which does not give - to the State what they are pleased I to call the " unearned increment," or, in othei words, which does not enable the farmer to be rack-rented by the Government more ruthlessly 1 because more systematically than even Irish tenants -were rack-rented by absentee owners. The Old Country tenant found a certain amount of protection in the fact that the legal ownership of all improvements lay with the landlord. But by one - of those astounding blunders of thought, which so often do more harm than the most deliberate sophis- : try, the well-meaning advocates of all revaluations propose to make the tenant the owner of all improve- , merits. That is to say, the tenant is to be bound hand and foot by the 3 ' bonding of improvements which he j cannot" remove, which he created

with tli6 : lclte' that they would be .his own. or bought anticipating that they j would be hit own, tot which he j would find ■ ■would only be his- provided he keep paying continually " revalidated" rentals for the land upon which his improvements stood and apart from which his improve- j ments would have no market value ■ whatever. This 'm the position" of tilings which the Leasehold party—as far as there is one-— seeks to bring about, nor does any advocate of leasehold, who is frank enough and fearless enough j to speak out his thoughts, hesitate j to admit the fact. It is left for the partisan pare and simple, for the individual who supports the Government, however stupid and unreasonable its position, to defend the leasehold system as it exists by wilful misrepresentation of the case, and by deliberately mis-stating the aims of the Freehold party. The pleas j which are thus brought forward are : ridiculous in the extreme to. any per- ' sob of ordinary intelligence who will take the trouble to examine into the circumstances and conditions of the rival tenures. It is pretended that perpetual leasehold is the only method by which a poor man can obtain land without cash payments, the only way by which holdings can be'*prevented from being aggregated into large estates, and the only way by which, the State can prevent its lands from being ruined by it's ignorant agriculturalists. And this in the face of the Freeholders' contention that "Right of Purchase" is the'only claim of the Crown tenantry, that such holdings should be perpetually limited to the areas already set forth in the Act, and that Board superintendence should continue until the Crown interest, by right of which the tenant is now interfered with, is purchased by the tenant and becomes absorbed in his interest. The reasonableness of the proposition assures its speedy triumph. The utter impracticability of \>h?- leasehold system—which irritates every Crown tenant and satisfies nobody— has made land tenure the question of the day.