ANTI-TITHE CAMPAIGN

Taranaki Daily News, 22 January 1935, Page 3

ANTI-TITHE CAMPAIGN

AGE-OLD IMPOSITION. ENGLISH FARMERS LOSE HOLDINGS The cabled news that distraint orders or unpaid tithes are driving farmers to desperation in the Ashford district, Kent, that the tithe problem is “emptying the churches and ruining agriculture,” and that 1,000,000 acres of land have been vacated through this cause, will seem incomprehensibe to the average land-holder in New Zealand, to whom tithes mean nothing, even though rates and taxes keep his ingenuity working overtime. Tithes enter into the English taxation system in the earliest histories, dating to the period when the monasteries, controlling all the agricultural land surrounding them, exacted levies from the farmers, this levy being one of the Church’s main sources of revenue. Changes in religion and regulation) by statute have modified the tithe system till its application is far from general in Britain, but there are some districts in which the Church still exists, financially, from the extraction of tithes. INCREASING AGITATION. Little was heard of their modern application till the depression hit the English agricultural community, and the farmers had not the money to live, let alone meet their rates, taxes, and tithes as well. From that time there has been news of increasing agitation against the payment of tithes. The farmers have showed every form of passive resistance, and several forms of active resentment. When farms have been sold up, farmers from miles around have dominated the sale, buying land and implements and stocks for trifling sums and handing them back to their dispossessed fellows. The “Blackshirts” have taken a hand in tithe resistance. A little while ago news was cabled that several members of this organisation had received gaol terms for resisting the police in the execution of their duty, all a result of active protest against the dispossession of farmers who could not meet the tithe demands. Now apparently, farmers are “living in terror, behind locked doors.”

In New Zealand the churches are supported by the congregations, and by endowments, and the income derived from property held since their inception. The Anglican Church, for instance, holds thousands of acres of country property and some valuable town sites.