LAND TENURE AND RACENURTURE.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 832, 2 June 1910, Page 4

LAND TENURE AND RACENURTURE.

Those people who follow the interesting, if not always convincing, speeches of the Attorney-General may have recalled after reading his recent speech on the Native land question his statement of a few months ago upon the folly of "making a fetish" of land tenure. According to him, we bothered too much about the rival claims of the leasehold and the freehold: the system of tenure was of no account. This rather startling statement may or may not disqualify Dr. Findlay from propounding the official Government view on tho land question, but at any rate it enables us to consider his speech on the Native land problem as the unofficial speech of a private gentleman. It is much more convenient to -treat it so than to treat it as a statement, of Ministerial policy. There is only ono point in it that -we dosiro to noticci al-

though it is a very important point indeed. It is contained in this passaga:

Tho Native Land Commission .... had resulted iu the advantage of impressing deeply upon the Maori mind that our law'looked beyond mere ownership to the use the owner was making of his estate, and that if the Maori would not use his land then, so far as ho had more than ho could properly cultivate, he must allow the European tc come iu, get it, and cultivate it. He pointed out that those who strenuously insisted that Maori owners should not be permitted to continue the economic waste resulting from misuse or non-use of their land were apt to forget that if this principle was sound and sliould be enforced against the Maori it should also be enforced against thi, Kurou«,n.

Dr. Findlay does not state the position quite fairly. There is no likeness between the large Maori landowner and the large European landowner : the' former is practically untaxed, and he is denied the right of free exchange that the European— as yet —is allowed to nnjoy. But that may pass. De. Find'lay evidently shares the belief of those "leasehold" enthusiasts who urge that the Maori land problem should be approached less as a problem in land settlement than as a problem in race-nurture. Some of those who oppose the extension to the Maori of liberty to , buy and sell land freely are sincere in their belief that free exchange would lead to the impoverishment and decay of the Maori race. Many of them, however, care nothing for the Maori race: they are anxjous only to defend tho "leasehold" policy.

It is time that we had a definite agreement as to the principles which must govern our dealings with the lands of the Maori. Should land settlement or race-nurture be the objective 1 What result the policy of free exchange would have upon the Maori race nobody can say; but it is undoubted that the leasehold system would keep the race alive for a long time as an interesting uational invalid. If the Maoris are a weak and inferior race, as our leasehold friends imply, the. leasehold system is tho only system that will protect them against themselves: Y/hat our leasehold friends do not sec is that this very, suitability of the leasehold system to a weak native race is a strong .argument against its suitability to the vigorous Caucasian. We have before us the recommendations of a British Parliamentary Committee that lately reported on ■tho land problem, in Northern Nigeria. This committee finds that in order to help the natives "a declaratory proclamation should be passed to the effect that the whole,of the land of the Protectorate is under the control and dominion of the Government, and that no title to the occupation, use, or enjoyment of any land is valid without tho assent of the Government." This policy of land nationalisation—as it was called by Sir Percy Girouard, until lately the Governor of the Protectorate—may be very good for the blacks of Nigeria; but does it follow that it is good for the Europeans in this country? The denial of free exchange in land can be defended, only when the object of the prohibition is the nurture and education of an inferior race. In the case of the Maoris, it cannot be denied that if tho policy of spoonfeeding could make the Maoris selfreliant agriculturists it should have had its effect long ago. But our leasehold friends urge that the nursing policy must bo continued. In other words, the Maori, "trained to totter," to quote Lord Eosebeky's phrase, must not be permitted to show us whether he can get about on his own legs: he must be kept in bandages and on crutches. Difficult to defend as the wisest policy to apply to the Maori, the leasehold policy is manifestly indefensible as the policy for progressive whites. If the New Zealandcr were only the equal, intellectual'y and socially, of the Nigerian, or of the Maori as the leaseholder sees him, the State might with advantage adopt the attitude of tho dry-nurse in respect to the holders of land. But we have- all been trained to believe that the New Zealander is capable and selfreliant. That being the case, the problem of land tenure should be clearly defined as a problem in agrarian economics and not as a problem in spoon-feeding.