The New Zealand Times. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1926. THE DELUSION OF THE LAND NATIONALISER

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12363, 5 February 1926, Page 6

The New Zealand Times. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1926. THE DELUSION OF THE LAND NATIONALISER

It is a truism to say that the Great War made man more gregarious than ever. In camp, in the trenches, in the open field, he was one of a multitude, and he liked the companionship so much that he is unable to forget it. The war also gave men in the mass a distaste for life isolated from the bright lights and the flesh-pots of the big centres of population. The result is that drift to the towns which the political economists and sociologists so vehemently deplore. Which brings us to some pertinent observations of a British Parliamentarian, Mr R. G. Ellis, who is now in the Dominion, on Mr Lloyd George’s much-advertised land policy. It may be said in passing that that policy, though heralded by the Liberal Press as a scheme of agricultural reform almost millennial in its possibilities, contains little or nothing new. It is merely a form of nationalisation with which most students of politics are familiar. Mr Ellis holds out no hope for the Lloyd George land proposals. The trouble, as he puts it, is not the labourer’s inability to get land —he can do so readily enough now—but to his rooted disinclination to leave the town and carve out a living for himself in the country. That problem is not confined to England; the complaint is general. A similar tendency to congregate in the cities can be noted in Australia and New Zealand. The great bulk of the population of the Commonwealth is to be found in the south-east corner. Sydney has swollen to surprising proportions in the last decade. Melbourne suburban red roofs are spreading farther and farther on every side. Apart from the factors quoted, the growth of secondary industries in the two foremost capitals in Australia is assisting to draw more and more people from the rural districts to feed an already gorged metropolis. The thrall of the amenities of the average city, is too strong for the average wage-earner to shatter. Rather than take his chance on a small holding in the country, he prefers to eke out a frequently ' precarious existence on the asphalt. There are tens of thousands of such men at Home who would not exchange the dole (and city life) for half a dozen allotments away from the heart of things. It may be human nature, but it is human nature of a particularly ambitionless and empty kind. A few score years ago, it was a characteristic of the British-speaking races to pack up and set about hacking and hewing a. home for themselves in the wilderness. That trait has almost disappeared, partly because the fruitful wildernesses are few and far between and partly because the spirit of -man has changed—and not for the better. The Lloyd Georges of our day refuse, or are incapable of realising that fact. They persist in talking as though you had only to break up large estates indefinitely, offer the subdivisions to the workers (or the workless), and the drift to the cities would be stemmed. It is all a pretty delusion. To your citv-bred artisan, farming is not only a puzzle but a drudgery, and he will have none of it.