SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 9300, 16 December 1891, Page 3

SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND.

TO THE EDITOR.

Sir, —I have no doubt Mr Denniston's advice to the High School boys to push into the country will be highly appreciated by all country residents as heralding the dawn of a feeling in the towns to foster and encourage the country more than has hitherto been done. Had this been resorted to sooner I believe the depression would not have been so great, and the rebound would have come before now. I do not think country youths have any preference to towns — costeris paribus; but when it is remembered ploughmen work for 5s per day, aud tailors and bootmakers get 10s, and farmers get less for their capital and labour than any other class, it is scarcely to be wondered at that there exists a general feeling of discontent and a desire to try other occupations. Fanners can appreciate the situation, although isolated and having no bond of union, and in a way have paid out the towns for putting them through the squeezing process, as they have confined their operations to that requiring the least labour, and as a fact the most successful farmer is the one that limits his operations to what he aud his family can overtake. In politics the farmer is a true Liberal; he wants nothing from the Government but to be left alone, and thinks all classes should be treated alike and a fair field and no favour offered to all; consequently they do not hold with the,present Government's policy of sacrificing producers to non-producers, of persecuting ing squatters and large landed proprietors for the loot there is to be obtained, and their one-man-one-vote, one-man-one-run, and land policy generally, they regard as simply theoretical idiotcy. No doubt small farmers pay less under the new scheme of taxation than uuder the property tax, hut they cannot disguise from themselves the fact that the aim of the Government is to saddle all the taxes on the laud; that when the weapon that is now being pointed at the large landed proprietors has accomplished their ruin, it will be pointed at them. Farmers expect the Government to practise rigid economy, and therefore do not think it is to their benefit to subscribe £40,000 for the purpose of being hounded to kill rabbits; nor do they think settlement is promoted by the stringent conditions sought to he imposed. There is now no such thing as acquiring land for speculative purposes, and everyone should have the opportunity of taking upas much land as he can profitably occupy. Certainly the policy of the present Government in limiting occupants to small areas is simply a delusion and a snare, as no man can find employment for a team of horses and modern implements on the. areas they prescribe, and any attempt to succeed will simply end in utter failure.—l am, &c, December 14. James T. Donaldson.