Old Grumble DISCOVERS THE CONNECTING PRE-ADAMIIE ANIMAL.

Feilding Star, Volume VI, Issue 38, 11 September 1884, Page 3

Old Grumble DISCOVERS THE CONNECTING PRE-ADAMIIE ANIMAL.

Searabea should be Hudibras, "when to raise him -fr_*f)fr lethargic dump he tweaked his no_e.^ So Searabea wants to know what has become of Old Grumble does he, and why the old fellow does not write upon the political crisis, and of course those whose " phantastic tricks" have brought the crisis about P The truth is they are too many for him— they are harlequins in a big pantomime, and as each makes his appearance Old Grumble takes up his admonishing pen to correct them, when before he can do so they pop out.of Sight again. They are J acks-in-*the-box. No they are not, for they do not wait long enough to get the lid of public opinion squeezed down upon them properly, but disappear as rapidly as they shoot into prominence. The whole thing is an ignis-fatuus, caused by the decomposition of the rats in the political swamp of New Zealand, and Old Grumble is not to be decoyed into trying to ascertain what substance there is in such flickering gasses, to discover nothing after all but that he has to retrace his steps through apolitical bog. Nevertheless Mr and Mrs Grumble have been conferring quietly over the evening fire (that is, as quietly as Mrs Grumble's cold will let her, although she will have it that it is nothing but the tobacco smoke, which she avers Mr Grumble blows into her face purposely because she beats him in argument) when he shows what a simple minded person it must have been who wrote, " Man wants but little here below." Whoever it was, he had not the same knowledge of the world aa Old Grumble ha_, or he would never have uttered such an absurdity. Grumble's experience of man in general is that he wants all he can grab hold of and more too, especially in the way of land, and in this respect Grumble discerns the connecting link between him and the first animal creation dame Nature has given us any record of. "The mere living stomach" (which Savants regard as the parent of all animal life, and from which noble and aspiring man has evolved) .that in. the dim far away past— so far away that imagination can scarce wing, its flight to such a measureless distance of time— led its solitary life, and whose food was earth, for man, if not positively a dirt eating animal, yet shows : nucha propensity for devouring land that tens of thousands of acres are swallowed up I>y Bomeof the species, and block after block disappears from the map of -avail able land in New Zealand and is monopolised by these insatiable beings. Of course Grumble has been taught to believe that it :s*the poor who inherit the earth,' and taking this view of it, if the poverty of a man is .to be measured by the quantity of land he owns, to what a state of mendicity have some become ; the extreme of poverty they have reached. Yet the uncomplaining way they bear their cross is a matter.. or the admiration of the world, the only" murmur* we hear from them of their hard case being the land tax. This is a burthen they cannot bear, and they loudly ?ry to have it removed fiom them and placed on property. Far better is it that they should lock up land and keep whole districts so , unproductive that they will scarce find employment for a man and a boy than that trade should flourish and production proceed. In their noble desire to relieve ♦heir fellow creatures of the misery of inheriting the earth, and so remove their claim to poverty, these few— land graspers —become almost selfish. This is a calamity we must avoid, or a few more years of such spoliation, and our children will be reduced to living on the earth; inly on sufferance and haW to " crave a little earth for charity." A. f<-w niore years, and these land monopolists, if left unrestrained, will hold such power that it will be better that a mill-stone were tied round our necks and we were cast into the sea than to offend one of these "living stomachs," who have stomachs for nothing but that of accruing to themselves all the best land, of New Zealand. Old Grumble.