THE LAND LAWS AND THE ELECTIONS.

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXII, Issue 4806, 8 November 1902, Page 4

THE LAND LAWS AND THE ELECTIONS.

In every country that has a history the land laws have heen from the earliest times the subject of public discussion and the equitable occupation of the lands the object of popular effort. History, therefore, supplies us with all the information required for the study of one of the most interesting subjects that can occupy the attention of. mankind. For'example, do we want the ideas of tlie sturdy Republicans who made Rome great, upon the subject of the lease-in-perpetuity, and the limitation of the acreage permitted to the individual for occupation on terms, wo have but to turn to the laws they left behind them. There are, moreover, the records of the struggles, victories and defeats of the reformers from before the days of the popular tribunes to after the times of the Gracchi. The leading idea was that the land was national property. So it was in later times and other countries, in which it is to bo found at the root of the feudal system. Nevertheless, from the earliest date through the whole of the ages to the present time, one feature is common to the history of all the world’s lands. It is their monopoly by the classes, who, in return for their advantage, gave serfdom to vhe masses.

These are the facts of history. In the face of them, it is painful to hear the had old times, in which monopoly laid the foundations for its centuries of vampire life, appealed to for political help. One candidate in this city, for example, the other day actually asked the electors to believe that if King Alfred or William the Conqueror had done something to prevent for all time all possibility of the monopoly so notorious after their time, very dreadful things would have happened. We agree with certain Conservative candidates in believing that the consequences of what these people did not do would make an interesting study. Nevertheless, it will be better first to study the consequences of what one of them actually did. The Norman Conqueror established a land system which in course of time developed into the thing which has left some awful traces in history. One of these was a Parliament of land-owners, whoso labour legislation was an outrage on human nature and a defiance of Christianity—legislation the baleful effect of which is still felt by the nation. Serfdom, enforced by the gibbet and the whip, was another of the consequences of the system established by the Conqueror. The game laws were due directly to this contemner of the people’s rights in the public land, and of those laws the scaffold and the grave can be left to speak. The'deer forests of;the North are a poor reflection of the things done by the landowners of the Conqueror’s time and their successors; but, poor as they are in that respect, the evil sometimes done in them cries even in our time to heaven for vengeance. The descendants of many of the Conqueror’s men still hold the land that his system put into the hands of their ancestors, and they hold it for ever, though their class is the greatest supporter of the slums in the cities, and though their peasantry is the most wretched upon earth, with, on one side, starvation wages, and, ,on the other, the workhouse waiting to ex-

tinguish the flickering flame of laborious life in the degradation of pauperism.

It is a relief to turn from the actual to that which might have been. ' We are invited to believo that the 1 case-in-perpetuity, had it been established in the Conqueror’s time, would have been unendurable, because it would still have had nearly two centuries to run. We might well ask what about the freeholds which keep the slums up and the peasantry down, and have centuries of wrong behind them, as well as a tenure guaranteed till the Day of Judgment. In Ireland the system is more unendurable than elsewhere, because it has fewer redeeming features in the conduct of the large holders of land. But, beside the lease-in-perpetuity, how does the system compare anywhere ? We have the consequences of the system of monopoly in the pages of history—consequences developed by the selfishness of the power which it created. Had the lease-in-perpetuity been established, it would have been established with safeguards against such an evil development. That is what our system possesses; and the supposition of early establishment relates to that system, not to any other. Monopoly of land would have been impossible had the Conqueror established the loase-in-perpetuity as wo possess it here. There could, not, therefore, have boon any of the effects of monopoly. The statutes of labour would never have been passed; the gibbet would not have been required to cheek begging and discourage vagrancy; comfort and independence would have flourished, in the place of serfdom; and just Jaws, passed by the representatives of a self-re-specting people, would have found in a just taxation a remedy against the private appropriation of the . unearned • Increment. Had the Conqueror, or any one else having power in that far-off time, established the lease-in-perpetuity, he would have changed the face of history. Not to recognise tliis is to have read history in vain.