A GREAT QUESTION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IX, Issue 452, 9 December 1881, Page 20

A GREAT QUESTION.

A COBREBPONDKNT describing the farm of Mr. Dalrymple, of Dakota, which is " the largest in the world," says* : — " Can yoa imagine a wheat-field of 30,000 acres ? Thirty thousand acres of slender golden stems, each bearing a cluster of yellow beads, bowing and nodding as if ia acknowledgment of admiring glances. If yon cannot fancy such a picture, you perhaps will admit that it must be one of the most sublime and fasci ating scenes the human eye can witness. I stood this morning at the centre of the largest farm in the world ; the largest piece of territory ever cultivated under the direction of a single man. As far as the could reach, north, south, east or west, there was nothing visible but the bluest of blue sky, the reddest of red barns, the great awkwardlooking threshers with their smoke-begrimed engines beside them, the whirring harvesters, and miles after miles of wheat." This is a superb picture ; and so long as it is an industrial enterprise it is a promising and beneficial one, for its outcome adds to the general wealth. It is hard for small farmers to compete with such monster holdings as Mr. Dalrymple's, wbeTe everything is done by wholesale in the most economical way. The expense of sowing, cutting, saving and transporting 10,000 acres of wheat is by no means ten times as great as doing the same for 1.000 acres. The " difference " belongs to the monster-farmer. Still it is his by a right that cannot be questioned. He is a producer on every acre of his land, and therefore enriches the whole people by cheap food, even if his neighbour on ths small farm suffers. But suppose this 30,000 acre farm were owned by a man who would not till the soil himself, like Mr. Dalrymple, but choose to keep idle, for lawns and pleasure-grounds, 25,000 acres of it, as an " estate," while he lived on the " rent " extorted from farmers to whom be " let " the remaining 5,000 acres ? Would that be fair and beneficial 1 Certainly not : the earth, like the air and -sea, should be free to the tiller. The new morality of politics, or rather the primal moral principals so long ignored will read thus : No man has an abstract right to hold good land idle while men are poor and hungry. The source of tbe wealth of nations is the soil. Until the uttermost use has been made of its resources, until no one can starve or want but the idle and undeserving, it is wrong and short-sighted to refuse land to willing farmersIt is true the law at present allows the right to " purchase " land and hold it idle and unproductive. But because this is the law it is not necessarily the right. It is right for tbe people io obey the law while it exists, but it is imperative on them to change it when their sense of equity sees the error. The greatest problem ia the politics of the immediate future, in all countries, will be the ownership or use of the land. Ireland has raised a question that is as universal as the right to fishing in the sea. — Pilot.