The Ashburton Guardian. Magna Est Veritas et Prevalebit THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 1885. Village Settlements.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume V, Issue 1528, 30 April 1885, Page 2

The Ashburton Guardian. Magna Est Veritas et Prevalebit THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 1885. Village Settlements.

So far as we know, no political writer, great or small, has ever admitted to the full the really secondary position that politicians fill in moulding the destinies of mankind. We owe much to our greatest statesmen, but the progress of society and the developments of civilisation have been far more effected by our engineers and inventors. Watt and Stevenson did more for their race than even Cobden and Peel, Arkwright more than Bright, and McCormick more than 1 Lincoln. The small politicians that from time to time have tried to guide the destinies of New Zealand have been singularly slow to see the great changes that are resulting from improved implements, and how completely those changes have left behind the methods that fifty years ago might have been patent for the improvement of the condition of the least wealthy and prosperous members of society. Grev, Rolleston and Ballance are now and have been parading remedies for poverty that would have worked wonders when the spade and single-furrow plough and sickle were the most expeditious means of securing the people’s food, but are now as much antiquated and as much out of place as if they were to propose to relieve the unemployed of Christchurch, who turn up their noses at 4s a day, by setting them to work at spinning wool with the Roman spinning wheel. The more servile imitators of the more able, if not more honest patriots, who were at work a century before them, will accomplish little in the present day. To be of any service to the poor they must keep pace with the inventions and improvements of the present time. When Cobcett told the laborers of England how to keep a cow on a quarter-acre of land by incessant spade work he was not writing for men wh 0 bad learned the old song of Eight hours’ work and eight hours’ play. Eight hours’ sleep and eight bob a day, and Mr Ballance will find that in order'to improve the condition of such men, he will have to think of some far brighter idea than that of placing them on small allotments of land to work without any of the improved tools used by their competitors. The treble furrow plough, the mower, but above all, the reaper and binder have now become indispensable implements on a farm, and if very sm?ll farms are to be made profitable at all it must be by some system of co-operation or hiring the best tools for the agricultural work. To attempt to work a farm profitably without such implements, in the present day, would be as hopeless as to attempt to convert wheat into flour by mere hand labor, or to make cloth without using the inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright, or Crampton. This one fact is quite sufficient to account for the future of all attempts to found settlements of small farmers, just as the sawmills have done away with the communities of hand sawyers, and the power loom with the cottage wheels. There is a good deal in this fact that the poet and the moralists lament, or the philanthropist wish otherwise; but the statesman must deal with facts as they are, and a man is not a statesman who vainly resorts to the processes that were available during the last eentury, without seeing that they are not applicable to the present time. There is yec another obstacle which eyery practical man has seen to be entirely fatal to small land settlements in the circumstances by which we are surrounded. The Chinaman carries his soil to rock terraces; the Dutchman houses his cattle; the Englishman cuts up all his straw and feeds it and returns it to his land with oil cake, bone dust or guano. None of these processes will pay here. The futility of the land must be slowly recovered by rest, by sheep, and by pasture, with from three to seven years to complete the process. So that whilst the improved and expensive machinery demands some hundred of acres to keep even one efficient man employed to cultivate it in cereals, three tjmet that quantity

should be available to keep up the necessary rotation. In growing for exportation, or to compete in the markets of the world, everything is cut so fine that no system but the best can succeed. Working half time, or without the best tools, must be a failure; and hence every year brings complaints that our deferred payment settlers have not been abje to meet their small engigements,at)d the House is asked to give them further indulgence. Fifty years ago there were, even in England, thousands of able, frugal down trodden men, who would have thought themselves happy and independent for life, in possession of a single acre of good land; but there are no such persons in New Zealand. For generations yet to come there will be no difficulty about securing land —the real difficulty is how to get wages out of it when you have it.