MARTINBOROUGH RETURNED SOLDIER’S GRIEVANCE

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 160, 2 April 1921, Page 12

MARTINBOROUGH RETURNED SOLDIER’S GRIEVANCE

Sir, —In your issue of March 12 was a letter headed "Featherston Soldier Settlers’ Grievance.” Now, whether Messrs. Arcus and Holmes are unreasonably trying to force their neighbour io fence and cause him heavy expense, or whether the road is poached up by the hundreds of dairy cows that aro driven over it to graze on Holmes’s or Arcus's sections in winter , or by their neighbours’ cattle, does not interest me. Mr. M’Leod, M.P., is reported to have stated that the said returned eoldiers had been put on tho land without ballot or oompetition, and inferred that they had been given in unfair advantage over other returned eoldiers. Now, my grievances refer to tho above. I am a returned soldier, having done over three years’ active service, and before I enlisted I had been waiting to try my luck at the ballot on the Hikawera and Mahapuku Settlement Government sections when they would be thrown open for ejection, because it is easily the best grazing country in the Mairarapa or the North Island for that mat ternene lietter. I got back to find it all gone to those soldiers who got their discharges first (which was easy to got at first), and I have been trying eier since I came back to get a piece of decent grazing land, and cannot. 1 consider such good land was cut up into too large sections. There ought to be double the number of solibere settled on it. The argnment-not suitwon’t hold water, , for look at Tablelands, 50 per cent., inferior land, cut up in 245 acres 18 yeare ago. and all have done well on it. Mhy should one returned soldier hare a town house and live the life of a retired .gentleman and anoth<jr scrap© a living xntn a longhandled shovel. I consider such land ought to have been held till we were all back. X , Now, as regards Messrs. Holmes and Arcus’s remark that Mr. M’Leod has evidently had very little to do with returned soldiers, this shows now little they know what they are talking al'out because there is po man in the district who has had more to do, or done more, for tho returned soldier than Mr. A D. M'Leod. —T nm. etc.. MARTINBOROTTGH RETURNED SOLDIER.