The Dominion. MONDAY, MARCH 10, 1913. GOVERNMENT'S CRITICS CONFOUNDED.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1694, 10 March 1913, Page 4

The Dominion. MONDAY, MARCH 10, 1913. GOVERNMENT'S CRITICS CONFOUNDED.

The judgment of Mr. Justice Williams in what has become known as the Southland Lease Case may perhaps serve a useful purpose in bringing home to the auti-Heform press the unwisdom of hasty and unfair criticism. It is really quite remarkable that the section of the newspapers of the country opposed to the Massey Government should havo blundered bo frequently and so lamentably in their efforts to prejudice the Government during the brief term the present party has held ofhee. So eager have they been to place the Ministry at a disadvantage that they have grasped greedily at every suggested impropriety, however biased the source of their information, and have bombarded Ministers day, after day with a recklessness, and at times a bitterness, that is impossible to justify. Straightforward and vigorous press criticism is an admirable thing, livery Government and every body of public men at times make mistakes, and if it is impressed on them that they cannot fall into error without risking exposure, a'nd perhaps public opprobrium, they are less likely, to be caught at fault than would-be the case if shortcomings were overlooked. . But there is criticism and criticism, and the porsistently unfair and oftentimes petty manner in which a section of the anti-Reform .press has of late laid itself out to attack, the Massey Government must in the end result in the critics discrediting themselves.' The method so far followed has been curiously alike in practically all cases, and bears the appearance of a systematic effort to injure the Reform party as often as not by suggestion rather than by any definite assertions of fact. One paper in the coterie_ starts a story going ; and the rest seize on it and pass it along, sometimes with embellishments and sometimes without, and with very little concern as to the original source of the information or of the injustice they may be doing. In the ease of the Southland lease transaction, the story originated with an anti-Reform Invercargill paper, and was repeated with more or less offensive comments from one end of the country to the other. The Government were attacked for having sqiiandorod the public estate, for sacrificing the State s interest in the

minerals, and all the rest of it. Ministers had blundered, or, worse still, had played into the hands of the capitalist, and, if these anti-Hc-form journals were to be believed, had proved themselves utterly incompetent and unworthy of the confidence of the country. The facts as piesenocd by these reckless writers were that a Southland settler, who, under the Act of last session, had converted his lease-in-perpetuitv holding into a freehold, had been enabled thereby to secure the right to minerals valued at from £IO,UCO to £15,000, and this at a cost of something under £50. All this had been made possible by the Massey Government s legislation. It was useless for the Government to deny that the man had acquired the right to anything more than the surface of the land—that the minerals still remained the property of the Crown, ihe purchaser of the land claimed that the law gave him the right to the minerals, and this was sufficient for the anti-Reform journals to start with. Later they unearthed certain legal opinions to support them, and would not.permit themselves to think that the Attorney-General (the Hon A. L. Hebdman) and the Law Officers, of the Crown could be correct in their interpretation of the law. And so the tirade against the Government went on in one form tor another almost up to the time that the case was actually argued in tho law courts; for the Government were forced into tho Supreme Court over the matter. The case, as put by the Attorney-General, before Me. Justice Williams, appeared even to the lay mind quite unanswerable, and his Honour, in his judgment, delivered on Saturday, bears out that view. Ho made it clear that he had no doubt whatever on the point of the right retained by the Crown to the minerals. To quote the actual words of the judgment:

The lease was granted under Section 121 of the Act of 1592, and must be construed in conionnity with tho terms of that section. It was therefore a lease of the surface only. The lesseo litis 110 right to any minerals, and they are expressly excepted from the demise. The right of purchase given to tho lessee is the fee simpio of tho land comprised in the lease. 1 lie price to be paid is based upon the capital viluo upon which the rent wns assessed, that is, the capital value of tho land, with the minerals excepted. If the purchaser is entitled to a conveyance of tho whole fee simple of tho land, including the minerals, he would be entitled to something which was not included in his lease, and which lie had not paid for. Apart, therefore, from Section 177 and Bonnie's case, Section 31 of the Act of 1912 does not appear to me to give' the lessee tho right to purchase more than the fee simple of the land demised, that is, tho land without the minerals, and the fee simple of the minerals would remain in tho Crown.

So end 3 another of the attempts to discredit the Government. Even had Mk. Massey and his colleagues erred in the manner alleged, the criticism of some of the anti-Reform papers was unduly harsh and one-sided. As it is, the critics have been made to look extremely foolish—it would be too mu,ch to expect them to have the grace to 'apologise for the injustice they have done.