CAN IT BE ?

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVII, Issue 8, 18 June 1886, Page 15

CAN IT BE ?

§HE universal opinion appears to be that the land is not sufficiently settled, and that the urban population bears an undue proportion to the members engaged in grazing and agricultural pursuits. It appears to be evident that it is so. Anyone who travels much through this country is forced by the testimony of his eyes to come to the conclusion that the settlement of the land has been greatly neglected. This, it would seem, is also the opinion of our Legislature, as may be gathered from the incessant tinkering of the land laws and the multiplicity of the Acts passed with the view of putting people on the land. Nevertheless, the complaint still continues, the Imd is not settled. May it not be that this very multiplicity of laws is one, and the chief cause of non-settlement ? In the old days of Provincialism, free selection at a fixed pricf, and that a rather high one, prevailed in Canterbury,

and there was more settlement there than elsewhere. Might it not be well to try simplicity once more ? At present the law sanctions various modes of obtaining possession of land, siill settlement is not advancing. Rather, we should say, the contrary is the fact. If what is stated publicly in the newspapers and otherwise be truo, it would appear that a Minister with a fad is able, when willing, to hinder qualified men with means from obtaining land for settlement, although they only ask what the law authorises. If this be the fact, it is very sad and very sickening. The laws allows men to acquire freeholds ; it also enables men to take public land on lease, but it is said the Minister of Land refuses to allow men, willing and able, to acquire freeholds, a thing perfectly legal, and insists on their taking leases under the penalty of not being permitted to settle on land at all . To the lay mind, to the unphilosophical mind, this appears a strange and rather absurd proceeding. Men of common sense cannot understand why a Minister with a fad, and more solicitous for what fancy suggests as best for some generation perhaps a thousand years hence, should be permitted to refuse the present generation the means of living, simply because men desire a tenure which prevails and has prevailed in nearly all civilised countries. And, indeed, we must say we sympathise with these unphilosophical men, these men of mere common sense. It does, indeed, appear strange that any Legislature should authorise a Minister with a fad to so pick and choose amidst a mass of Acts of Parliaments, which are not very creditable to its intelligence, in such wise as to render one portion a a dead letter for the purpose of enforcing another which neither the practice of our ancestors nor the wisdom of the nations at present flourishing in the world recommends. All this confirms us in a conviction long entertained by us that, notwithstanding great show of zeal and great pretence of settling the land, there never has been an honest attempt really made to settle the people on the land. Why allow syndicates or companies to purchase enormous tracts of country in order to dispose of the land to small farmers ? Could not the Government do this itself, without the intervention of these middlemen ? And -what does this practice prove if not a desire either to introduce landlordism or to put large profits into the pockets of capitalists ? In either case there is absent a real desire for genuine and profitable settlement. Great fear is felt, or pretended, of the creation of large estates, but we cannot think many will be deceived by this. Moans have been taken to enable capitalists to become possessed of as much land as they care to have, whereas nothing would be easier than to prevent the accumulation of large estates, if such were really desired. This is done in France, Belgium, Holland, throughout the continent of Europe. It could be done here too, even though every man in the country were a freeholder. Why is it not done ? And why are not efficacious means taken to settle people on the land ? The reason is because the people chiefiy interested will not study and think for themselves, but allow themsem s to be hoodwinked by astute politicians, or captured by the fads and baseless theories of a favourite with an air and pretence of political philosophy. This is a question which it is vain to expect can be satisfactorily met until the people themselves take it in hand, withdrawing it from the region of party politics, and insisting on their representatives in Parliament treating the question in the light of experience, and not in the spirit of wild theorists.