Is It Overcrowded ?

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXIII, Issue 6927, 9 October 1889, Page 2

Is It Overcrowded ?

(Auckland Star.) One would imagine, from reading of ths thousands of unemployed, and destitute, and starving in various parU of the world, that our planet wa3 getting overcrowded. A French scientist has, however, presented the world with the following calculation. That allowing five acres for each inhabitant, Europe has room for 115,000,000 more people ; Africa, 1,236,000,000 ; Asia, 1,402,000,000; Oceania, 315,000,000; and America, 2,000,000,000. The population of New Zealand is about six to the square mile, and yet there are many with us who are willing to work, but are unable to find a permanent and certain home and cannot ba sure of certain remuneration for their labour ; and why ? Simply because, although New Zealand is capable of carrying 60 or 600 to the square mile, and would do so if tho Cherokee system of land tenure were in force with us, yet we have foolishly allowed all the best and most accessible of our lands to be monopolised by a few individuals, who positively make no use of it themselves, but by then selfish, action debar thousands of" others from making a comfortable living upon it. In glancing over a return recently laid before our Parliament, we notice that some half dozen land companies in New Zealand own no less between them than one million acres of land, which according to the return has an unimproved value of £21,126,644, and the total value of all the improvements made on this land is only £150,000. In connection with this return we may remark that whenever a question has been raised in the House concerning the value of unimproved land for the purpose of estimating a land tax, the Government have invariably thrown duat in the eyes of the inquiring members, by saying there were no data to. go upon, it would bring in, less than the property tax, etc. Now, in tho above instance at all events, we have clear data to go upon. These half-dozen companies own land the unimproved value of which they acknowledge to be £21,126,644. Supposing a land tax of one per cent were imposed, these Bix would contributebotween them £21, 660 to the national revenue. The return from which those figures have been collected contains eleven closely-printed folio pages, giving the names of all New Zealand land-owners who own over 5000 acres of land, together with the unimproved value in each oase, and the amounts spent in improvements. No one can stndy this marvellous record without at once becoming alive to the fact that it is land monopoly on this gigantic scale in a country with such a limited nrea as ours, that is entirely responsible for the stagnation of business, commercial depression, and absence of bonafide settlement from which we are suffering, and indeed likely to continue to Buffer until we insist upon making beneficial occupation the sine quanon to land-holding. This can bo done without any revolutionary measure simply by imposing an equitable tax on the unimproved value of all land, and abolishing the present destructive tax on improvements.