ANTI-LANDLORD CAMPAIGN

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 7302, 5 December 1910, Page 5

ANTI-LANDLORD CAMPAIGN

AN OFFER TO MB LLOYD GEORGE. LECTURES IN NEW YORK. By. Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright. LONDON. December 2. Messrs Cohen and Harris, music-hall proprietors, of New York, offer Mr Lloyd George ,£IOOO weekly to promote a campaign, speaking twice daily bn the lines of his Limehouse speech. The original cable message states that Mr Lloyd George is invited to speak, "against the House pf Lords,” but this is manifestly an error, as there is no House of Lords in the American cosmogony; but for a long time past there has been a very strong feeling against the exactions of the landlords in the tenement quarters of New York, and other cities.

Mr Lloyd Goerge’s Limehouse speech was directed not so much against, the House of Lords politically as against landlords, several peers coming particularly into the Tine of fire. The Chancellor justified his Budget policy of placing an additional burden, upon the landlords in return for the value added to their land by the industry of the community at large. "The ownership of land,” he said, "is not merely an enjoyment, it is a, stewardship. If the landlords cease to discharge the functions —provision as to the security of the country, care for the poor—those functions which aro part of the traditional duties attached to the ownership of land, and which have given to it its title, the time will come for reconsideration of the conditions under which land! is held in this country. No country, however rich, can permanently‘afford to have quartered upon its revenue a class which declines to do the duty which it was called upon to perform in the community, and; therefore, it 'would be one of the prime duties of statesmanship to investigate the conditions.”