MR GREEN'S SCHEME

Feilding Star, Volume III, Issue 89, 10 April 1883, Page 2

MR GREEN'S SCHEME

Mb M. "W. Gbeen, M.H.R... addressed a crowded meeting at Dunedin on Thursday last on his proposed scheme for the removal and prevention of pauperism. Briefly his scheme is a triple one, and seeks first an entire revolution in the traffic in intoxicating liquors, bv having

the number of public-houses regulated by the number of the population in any district, and vesting what few ther< 1 would be in the local bodies, who should have sole charge of the sale of drinks, the profits to go to a fund for the relief of the sick and destitute. He further proposes to find employment for a larger amount of labor by having tbe locomotive engines, railway carriages. &c, manufactured in the colony. The third part of his scheme deals with the settlement of the poorer classes upon the land by cutting up the unoccupied tracts of eouutry, and also the sheep runs into small allotments of 5 to 50 aeres, to be let at a rental of 3s per acre. Such is Mr Green's three-fold scheme to prevent drunkenness, crime, disease, and indeed, according to Mr Green's idea, almost every "i* • that flesh is heir to," which he " defies anyone to look at and say it is impracticable." WTiatever view may b^ taken of Major Atkinson's now famous proposition for compelling people to be provident, it must be pretty evident to any person who looks seriously, and from all sides, into Mr Green's plan for couipulsorily securing sobriety and industry that it :s a visionary and Utopian theory, and whatever he may say to thc eontray, is an impracticable scheme. If Major Atkinson's scheme is as Mr Green says, " a direct interference with the liberty of the subject," and a "grinding tyranny," we should like him to explain what he calls his own proposal for regulating every man's beer and grog. Although Mr Green says much he suggests little that is of a tangible and practical nature, aud although he may think that he has " a mission," that mission, in our opinion, is not that of a reformer of the political and social economy of the Britain of the South.