Confiscation.

Wairarapa Standard, Volume XX, Issue 2099, 1 August 1887, Page 2

Confiscation.

The elephant, it is said, falls in Io?e once every three yean. Then he is excessively amatory and gallant, and attends the objects of hu affections with tenderest solicitude, tempting their appetites with the choicest and most succulent vegetation he can find in the forests. The love fit soon passes, however, and then be as shamefully neglects as he once seduously courted his friends. Three yean afterwards, the wily creature begins again the same tactics, and no doubt many of those to whom he then deyotes himself forget his previous inconstancy and negligence. Doubtless, also, he presents, to those be seeks to capti* vate,a change of vegetable temptation. If, in 1884, he allured them with plantain stalks, he would, in 1887, bewitch them with tamarind leaves and other novel delicacies.

We have a class of politicians in New Zealand whose affection for “ the people " —as they patronizingly call them—is of a similar spasmodic and intermittent nature to that of the elephant. Tennyson sings

"In the spring a livelier irii ohaagee on the burnish'd dove, In the spring a young man’i tansy -lightly tana to thoughts ol love.

Bat these politicians of ours, like the elephant, only hare a triennial spring—at general election time. Then, they dote upon “ the people ” —the people with votea. Thtn, they spend restless days in propounding beautiful schemes for the good of “ the people with votes. If the people will only return them to parliament, they vow to bring on the millennium, and that the people shall have all they want and something over. Even in young New Zealand, promises like this have been made for the past twenty years by gentlemen who are still “ wooing ” the electors. Some of these same gallants have been returned to Parliament over and over again, but that promised millennium is as far down our political horizon as ever. Truth is, the moment the returning officer declares them elected, the love fit for “ the people ” dies, and until next election time they permit the people to forage for themselves. But, immediately the three years are up, these politicians trot around as faith* ful and loving as ever ; offering their “ beloved people ” the temptation of all manner of fresh political greenmeats.

The vegetables most in fashion in the election time of 1884 were leaves from the Property Tax tree, with a mouthful or so of dead sea apples from the Land Nationalization bush. Now, in 1887, our wily politicians allure “ the people ” with leaves from the Income Tax tree, with graduated Land Tax grass ; the Protection weed and similar trash.

In a previous article we bad something to say about Income Tax; we will now consider some matters con nected with this graduated land tax, which is being flourished in the faces of electors by persons like Sir Robert Stout, whose acquaintance with land is confined to pocketing fees and drawing deeds for its transfer; or Mr Ballance who knows as much about practical settlement as a cow about Chocktaw; or, by that Masterton gentleman whose experience of real estate is the real estate he carries about with him ; or by others, who have proved their competence ,to deal with other person’s property by completely mismanaging and muddling their own.

The theory of a graduated land tax is that it will have the effect of “ bursting up " large estates by placing such excessive taxation upon them that the holders thereof will either be forced to part with their laud, which will thus become opened out tm smaller producers and to population ; or that the owners will be compelled to make their large holdings more productive in order to enable them to defray, without gravest loss, the additional taxation. In a future article we will deal with these suppositions ; in this we only propose to take a glance at the bona tides of the supposers. The graduated land tax is simply an off shoot or a developement of Land Nationalisation, of whioh we have all heard so much. Mr Henry George, the American, is so to speak, the natural father of Land Nationalization. In bis work,“ Progress and Poverty,” be sought to show that land was like no other property, that qo such thing as freehold or private property in laud should exist; and though Mr George has never, in so many words, advocated confiscation of freeholds, he has repeatedly declared in his several books on the subject that the State has a perfect right to dispossess individuals of their private property in land. We do not here intend to argue Mr George’s theories, which were addressed, however, far more to the land tenure in England—where land has been freely obtained by despicable court favorites, by war, and by confiscation—than to a young country like New Zealand, a country wherein there are still enormous quantities of land held by the State on which no settlement has yet been attempted. Nearly everyone, however, has read “ Progress and Poverty.” Among others it was perused by Sir (then Mr) Robert Stoat, who was so delighted with its leading theory that beactu ally imagined and boasted that be had invented it—we are not certain that he is not under the impression that he actually wrote the book. It was quite sufficient, for such an admirer of Brand-Newness as Sir Robert Stout, that Mr George’s ideas were novel

md startling, for Sir Bobert_bas kopt himself before the public simply by propounding or fathering every new Fad that presented itself. How far he truly believes in Land JJTatxonali— Elation (and the graduated land tax is limply a specious attempt that way) may best be judged by the facts that Bir Robert Stout has made his fortune ny legal business connected with the safe, transfer and mortgage of land ; that tie is himself a large landowner; and that he, when Minister of Lands in 1878, alienated millions of the country’s acres—those were the palmy days of the land revenue, when so many unfortunates over-bought themHelves. Moreover, quite recently, Sir Robert Stout’s Government bought the Stark estate at Auckland for an iniquitously excessive price, and his Government also has lately alienated millions of acres to the Midland Bailway Company. If we add to these facts thatnirJulius Vogel is chairman, Mr Lacnach a director, and Sir Bobt. Stout solicitor to an agricultural company, a part of whose business it is to acquire land, we ray form a pretty good conception whether Sir Robert Stout's professed desue and the professions of his followers in eete and in foue for reform in our land laws is the honest expression of these gentlemen’s patriotic opinions, or whether they are only assuming a virtue they have not for the purpose of clutching for another term the good things which the country affords to patriots in office.

Having now cleared away some of the fog by which the matter of a laud* tax haa been unrounded, we will in a subsequent article, treat the subject of the tax itself.