LAND SETTLEMENT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20823, 16 March 1931, Page 12

LAND SETTLEMENT.

Sir, —Mr. A. E. Brace asks the fundamental questiou, "Is it really beyond our wit to formulats a tenure by which, with full enjoyment of the fruit of industry, a national possession is retained ?" Avoiding the irrelevant question of national possession, I would put the matter. Is it beyond our wit to find a tenure by which (he settler could have full, power to use (he land for himself without having any power to ruin the use of it for his successors by inflation? I can see no perfect solution of the problem, for freehold includes free right to sell and that includes free right to inflate. But there is a way which will, in practice, obviate need of legal restrictions and yet keep land at a fair price. Abolish the mortgage. It is an invention of the devil; send it back where he lives. It is immoral, uneconomic in character and utterly disastrous in results. No one occupier has a right to encumber what belongs to a thousand future generations equally with himself. No man has a right to pledge his own means of .living, his wife's home, his children's rearing and future hopes. A farmer should sell what he produces, not what God gave him, free, wherewith to produce. The mortgage is a sale. A carpenter does not sell his chisel and saw to buy bread. It is not so many years since, in old lands, a mortgage was a discreditable secret, a skeleton in the cupboard, a kind of scandal in the neighbourhood, to be spoken of, if at all. only in whispers. When a farm is sold the purchase money should only be calculated on the unexhausted value of the improvements. They cost money and can be valued in money. Sometimes extra money may be lawfully charged for goodwill. Invisible benefit, & profitable condition, a profitable reputation, may have been built up by the seller by years of labour and expense. . M'any things claim consideration in the sale of a farm. But the fundamental principle remains that it is a ruinous fallacy to buy, sell or mortgage the soil. A fee to register the transfer in the Deeds Office of the licence to occupy, and a payment in hard cash for unexhausted, improvements will put land sale and settlement on Hi sound basis. A. F. Wallace. Raupo.