The White Ribbon: FOR GOD AND HOME AND HUMANITY Monday, February 15, 1905. Land Tenure.

White Ribbon, Volume 10, Issue 115, 15 February 1905, Page 6

The White Ribbon: FOR GOD AND HOME AND HUMANITY Monday, February 15, 1905. Land Tenure.

Among the many questions meriting the serious consideration of New Zealand women, that concerning land tenure is not ot least importance. And by way of bringing it before the readers of the White Ribbon, the Editor has asked Mrs S. Saunders Page to give her views on the subject. As is well known to many, Mrs Page is the daughter of New Zealand’s oldest statesman, Mr Alfred Saunders, and may, therefore, through this relationship alone, he expected to have a better grasp of all that is involved in such a question than would be possible to many women. We are fully aware that as yet, in the eyes of the majority of women, the problem of land tenure does not present the aspect of a question of ethics. A little reflection, however, will, we think, serve to convince that anything in- ! volving the matter of the livelihood of human beings ought not lightly to he passed over. Nor must we lose sight of the fact that present day dwellers in New Zealand are laying the foundations of a nation, and that they have the j privilege of seeing that these founda- | tions are based on the principles o( | equity and justice.

Hitter experience has proved that the land laws of Great Britain and Ireland do not tend to the moral or material well-being of either the classes or the masses. The land laws have not made it easy to do right and hard to do wrong. They have encouraged the worship of self, of pleasure, of luxury, ot mammon, among the classes. They have, with the masses, helped to drag manhood and womanhood into such dire depths of poverty and destitution, of physical degradation and weakness that none but the veriest saint could withstand a corresponding sinking into moral mire. With the stories of those ousted from cot and field to make room—not for human beings, but for the following of a more than questionable sport, we are all familiar, and our hearts burn within us as we think of the wrong. Knowing, then, these things, is it not a manifest duty to see, as far as in us lies, that the land laws ot this new country shall be such as to make impossible a repetition of similar iniquities here.