THE LAND BILL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13497, 25 May 1907, Page 3

THE LAND BILL.

Sir,—Permit mo to commend your correspondent, Mr. Thomas. Allan. lor his timely, if somewhat unsophisticated, exposure of the freeholding system by means of which (as ho plainly shows) hardworking', industrious settlers are banished to the back blocks to earn a precarious livelihood and live an isolated life, while thousands of acres of the best farm land* in easily accessible localities aro held unused by speculators. Tho painful _ condition of things related by Mr. Allan in the story of his Tasuiauian friend, should not be tolerated for a single day by any class of men who daro to call their souis -their own. I could cite a hundred similar eases. They are familiar to anyone who knows the country districts. Yet, with cool impudence, tho very men who are "responsible for this rotten state of affairs, and strive to perpetuate it (the money-lenders and big landowners), with their political mouthpieces of the Opposition), seek to discredit the reformers who gave the farmer advances to settlers and lands for settlement, and curry favour with their victim by turning on crocodile tears and hypocritically deploring the sad fate they inflict upon him. They raise tho battle-cry of "Freehold," and try to bluff the farmer into thinking that his interest as a tiller of the soil is identical with theirs as farmers of tho unearned increment. They call on him to rally round their raj; and shed his blood in defence of their oldfashioned privilege of levying tribute on the produce, of his toil. They endeavour t® bamboozle him with the tale that "freehold" (the speculating tenure) is his only guarantee for security of occupation, while the Year Book shown £60,000,000 worth of it in this little country being operated by struggling settlers (from daylight to dark, as Mr. Allan says) for tho benefit of financial institutions. I paid a visit recently to the Northern Wairoa district, where at present land gambling by means of tho freehold system is the order of the day, and where the land grabber has plundered the struggling settler most successfully for many years. One could hardly find a more effective illustration of the eurso of landlordism outsido of Ireland. Local and city speculators hold idle thousands of acres of tho finest dairying country, while the farmers' co-operative butter factory, from which the struggling settler hoped great things, languishes for want of suppliers. One of tho leading speculators advertises for sale "two sheop to the acre country" unimproved, by the thousand acres, right on the banks of the finest river in New Zealand, with a twice daily steam service to the factory door. Yet there aro bOna'-fide farmers' sons chasing land ballots all over tho country in tho vain attempt to find a place where the speculator has not forestalled them, and others have to bo content with barren lands that tho Almighty never meant for farms, far removed from conveniences and facilities for putting on the market ' the Scanty produce their hard toil wrests from tho unwilling soil. It is just about, time that Mr. McNab came to the rescue. Fortunately the system of rating tho unimproved value was recently introduced in one county with tho beneficial result that at least one £20,000 "farmer" disgorged. , Literal.