LAND SETTLEMENT

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1533, 18 July 1901, Page 49

LAND SETTLEMENT

SQUATTER-RIDDEN HAWKE’S BAY. Special to the “Times.” NAPIER, July 12. Land settlement continues to be an absorbing topic here. Probably at no period of the province’s history ha\'e the people so grasped the importance and urgency of this question as at the present time. It is discussed in raihvay carriages, at public meetings and in private conversation, to say nothing of the flood of correspondence which pours into the columns of the press. It has been asked if this agitation for land is sincere. Th© sincerity of the people need not be doubted. The only cause of complaint is that the land is not being cut up half quickly enough to satisfy th© hunger. It is felt that if Hawke’s Bay is to go ahead like other parts of the colony, Government aid must be invoked to put human beings where sheep noAV leisurely browse. And the necessity is urgent, for Hawke’s Bay is going back instead of progressing, and ive also want to know what we are getting in return for electing Messrs Hall and Fraser to support Mr Seddon’s policy. Captain E. S. Grogan’s advocacy of the uitra-Conservative view of the hind question having been strongly combated, and bis algebraical equations twisted out of shape, the gallant Cape toCairo explorer now returns to th e attack, this time with his elephant gun loadeu in both barrels. The -alleged anarchical tendency, imperceptibly, yet swiftly, drifting toAvards the “ slimy abyss,” is repulsive to him ; and be sees the people of this country already dazed by an ever-increasing debt, watching the issues with a tolerance bred of reckless disregard for the future. The compulsory clause of the Land Act is villainy to him, and he contends that ther® is no more “ devilish form of \dllainy than legislative rapine.” The creeping tide has, h e Avildly says, absorbed the absentee landlord, and in one short year has clutched the widow’s portion and the citizen’s back yard. “Finally, if God is not to be invoked in a question cf right or wrong, and the policeman slumbers, who is to be inv'oked ; for afar off I hear the swelling cry, ‘We want, and will have,’ and anon comes the faint echo, ‘When you have got all, we i too, shall want.’ Thus the mocking cycles of man’s adjustment.” To which might be added that to stem the tide of popular clamour for close settlement Avould be like trying to driv e back the Pacific Ocean. Meantime, the people want both the Land Purchase Board and th© Government to hurry up.