THE WORLD UNREST

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21363, 17 June 1931, Page 10

THE WORLD UNREST

*Vo rnr F.nrrnK. Sib,—Your very fine and thoughtful leader in Saturday’s issue can well repay a careful study. It would help us to understand our own political, religious, and economio struggles in the past, the hoped-for success of those struggles, and how far those successes have been beneficial or otherwise. It is more than 5U years since I first began to take an interest in the politics of this country. , At that time I belonged to the ranks of Labour. We had no labour unions to make our voices heard, but we had some very hne Liberal leaders whose Liberalism meant justice to all and equality of opportunity to earn our living so far as the class privileges of the time would permit it. The land was locked up from the wouldbe email farmer, not by over-capitalisation as it is to-day, but by the freehold and squatting systems which then obtained. Henry George’s, book, “ Progress .and Poverty,” with its condemnation of freehold in land, had fired the minds of the voung students of the time —notably that of my ideal Liberal leader. Sir Robert Stout—and the political struggles of the day centred in the land question. We were successful and prosperous as long as we were true to the principles upon which our prosperity depended—i.e., justice and equality of opportunity —but that very success brought out the latent selfishness which is in us all, and is always the chiei article in the stock-in-trade of the pseudoLiberal. Our leases were so profitable that they acquired a goodwill value which sometimes made it more profitable for the leasehold farmer to sell out and become the mortgagee of hie farm than to hire labour and farm it himself. lo enable him to do this the freehold system simplified matters, and it was reinstated as a result of the clamour of professional sentimentalists that it wae man’s inborn desire to own his own home. This would be amusing if the sequel were not so tragic Then followed inflated land values and gambling in land, and many of the working leasehold farmers became privileged capitalists. The Labour Party is well aware of this, just as all the other parties presumably are, but those who hold the inflated freehold “baby ’’ .have got to the end of their tether so far as this selling out method of farming goes, with the result that labour of some other kind must be found for a number of men who might have been employers of labour themselves if they had been encouraged to remain on their leasehold farms instead of being bribed to sell out by pseudo-Liberal politicians. The point then is. What are we going to do about it? That point, I submif, interests Labour more than it does any-, one else. I suggest that the cure is not in supplanting one privileged class of mortgagees by another privileged class of labour monopolists or unionists, consuming more than they are producing. The return to justice is going to be slow and gradual, and we need our old type of; Liberal leaders to guide us—leaders of the Abraham Lincoln type, well exemplified by a picture now being shown in Dunedin. I suggest, therefore, that Reform candidates. United candidates, and Labour candidates be given a short shrift at the coming elections, and that we rally under the old banner of Liberalism with a leader who knows the meaning ,of the term. Surely such a leader can be found in some of the parties; Mr Forbes did not go far enough in his offer of fusion. He overlooked the Labour Party, and he should know, if anyone does, that our last successful reforms sprang from the ranks of Labour, as reforms mostly do, with the help of true Liberal leaders.

With the collapse of the army of Labour lions led by assel in Australia, and the failure of our local Labour Party to make good in our municipal elections, the futility of class legislation should be very clear. Fear of class legislation by the Labour Party is the bond of cohesion that combines all other parties against The composition or the City Council is proof of that. Why, then, should Labour fight a losing battle any longer? Why not be : content with Liberal principles and justice, and let the country have the services of its able men, of whom, I am sure, there are many—l am, etc., June 15. A Retired FARMER.