THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1904. ME. SEDDON ON FBEEHOLDING

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 12661, 15 September 1904, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1904. ME. SEDDON ON FBEEHOLDING

The attack made by Mr. Seddon at Petono upon the Freehold Party is but another instance of " no case, abuse the other side." The Premier is shrewd enough to perceive that if he confines himself to a comparison between the relative merits of the limited freehold and the leasehold systems, and if he asks the public to judge impartially between the advantages of the existing system and the advantages of the reform proposed by Mr. Massey and the Farmers' Union, there could be but one verdict- For it is quite impossible to convince any audience that is in the least sympathetic with the agricultural industry that a system which while giving the farmer practically perpetual tenure at a fixed rent keeps him as perpetually in the same relation to the Land Board officials as an English tenant farmer occupies in relation to the English landlord's agents and stewards is in itself a desirable one. And it is equally impossible to advance any good reason why a rentcharge which i 3 calculated upon an interest rate levied upon an agreed capitalised value— protection of which rent-charge is the sole cause of the interference of the Land Board officials with agricultural operationsshould not be redeemable by the tenant. This is all that the Freehold Party demands. There is no suggestion that the lands which have been resumed by the State from the owners of great estates should be permitted to drift back into similar conglomerations; on the contrary, it is specifically and definitely proposed that the freehold conditions to be allowed to Crown tenants who may choose to redeem their leaseholds from rent-charges and Land Board interferences, should render this impossible. The Farmers' Union has proposed that the same residence-condition which now attaches to leaseholds should attach to such holdings when they are converted by redemption into freeholds. Mr. Massey, with a statesmanlike grasp of the situation, has proposed a general condition, applying to all converted lands, by which the area which might at any time be held by any one individual would be limited to the area which can. now be held by any individual at the time he applies foi a Crown

lease.- Further, it is an integral part of the Freehold Party policy that all moneys paid by Crown tenants for the conversion of their leases into titles should go into a Land Purchase Fund by which the good work of the resumption of great estates and their cuttiag-up into suitably small holdings shall be continuously and systematically earned on. It must be plain to every man and every woman who understand common English and are of ordinary intelligence that the purpose of the Freehold Party, as consistently and invariably expounded by every individual who has ever been recognised as speaking for it, either by friend or foe, is reformative and not reactionary. Yet Mr. Seddon, who certainly understands common English and is certainly of more than ordinary intelligence, deliberately and wilfully asserts that the Freehold movement is a plot " to deprive the people of their heritage." He pretends to think that its aim is to wrong the poor man in the interest of the rich man. He implores his party to stand by the 999-year lease "in the interest of their children and their children's children-" Was there ever a more ridiculous attempt to mislead and deceive the public? It is so ridiculous that we can pass on one side the political immorality of Mr. Seddon's despairing tactics.

The Lands for Settlement Act contains as its fundamental principle that which empowers the Crown to resume large holdings, upon a valuation, for the purpose of cutting up and opening them to small farmers. That the tenure under the Act is leasehold is a mere incidence, which was thought desirable at the time by many good and public-spirited men, but which has undoubtedly failed to give satisfaction. The objections born of experience have been repeated over and over again and have never been refuted; even Mr. Seddon has been compelled to so far acknowledge them as to invent a Royal Commission for the alleged purpose of investigating them. It is notorious that lease-conditions which deal with agricultural methods are only tolerable where the landlord's interest is permanent, and the tenant's only temporary, yet we have saddled our 999-year leases with conditions which are more suited to quarterly tenants than to settlers who are told that their perpetual leasehold is "as good as the freehold." In the rent-charge the colony draws neither more nor less than interest upon the. capital which it has invested, and to change this charge without the tenant's consent would be a violation of the agreement. The necessity of paying this rent, the impossibility of buying it out, the constant fear that in the future some failure to pay may lead to forfeiture and eviction, prevent the Crown tenant from ever feeling that his homestead is "as good as freehold." As the law stands, forfeiture may follow a single failure to pay half-yearly rent, however many years of hard work, self-denial, and investment of capital the lease may represent. Can it be regarded as destructive of the fundamental principle of the Lands for Settlement Act to give to the tenant the option of escaping this rent-charge when he becomes able to pay to the Crown the value upon which it is based and fixed or some greater value if this should not be considered sufficient compensation 1 The kernel of the whole question is: Are we to have landlordry or yeomanry Are "our children and our children's children" to be the heirs of freeholders who are not afraid of any Land Boards nor subject to the interference of any Departmental officials, or is agriculture to be brought under the yoke of a bureaucracy and the 999-years' lease finally violated by periodic revaluation? To harp on the greed of the " select few.," who have cash at their bankers, is a mere political trick, performed to please the ignorant, seeing that the Freehold Party is against all landlordry—Crown Maori, or private—and is ready to make still more secure the provisions of the Lands for Settlement Act against the amalgamating of resumed areas into new estates. "It would be wrong," says Mr- Seddon, whose conscience is a peculiar one, "to take the freehold from one man simply to give to others the freehold." Why would it, if fair value is paid? Is ii wrong in Ireland, as arranged by the Balfour Government'] ' Will it be wrong in Australia? Can it be wrong whenever the public wishes to turn large holdings into small find is awake to the superiority of freeholding to leaseholding, and to the fact that either tenure may be limited or unlimited, conditional or unconditional, as the law may direct? Mr. Seddon knows well that it is only wrong now, in a Pickwickian or Seddonian sense, because he can find no other argument and because Mr. Massey echoes the voice of the colony when he declares it to be right,