KINOHAKU.

King Country Chronicle, Volume I, Issue 9, 21 December 1906, Page 3

KINOHAKU.

This branch of the Farmers' Union, by resolution, ask the settlers of Te Kuiti and Otorohanga to organise and oppose, by hostile resolutions at their meetings, the State-paid socialistic orators, upon their presumptive Educational tour, in connection with their Land Bill. The farmer, with this Land Bill, is in the same position as the man in the bog. The boy told him it had a solid bottom, and when he got up to his neck in it, he said to the latter: " You told me this bog had a solid bottom." "So it has," says the boy, " but you haven't reached it yet." And once the farmer allows the thin edge of the city socialistic theories, he will find he is a long way from the bottom. We hear these people talk lightly of sentiment —the main spring of human nature. The love for this faculty is Stronger than love of life itself; it was this that created the Magna Charta, and it is this freedom of action and freedom of ownership, that must go hand in hand with progress and prosperity. Seeing the farmer has no wages question to drive him to combine, they should, as a body, demand from the Minister representing their interests —virtue of principal. The principal the Minister advocates, should be the one he uses and follows. With this Land Bill, we see 9. Minister accepting freehold for himself, and advocating leasehold for the mass. We see Mr McNab playing Scylla to the socialistic. Charybrdis, but they may talk as they like, a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. The farmer would certainly prefer to sit upon a tawa log (providing he owned it), rather than upon a crowded velvet cushion. He would rather own four acres of earth, with freedom of action, than forty acres of heaven," burdened with a malaria of State ownership. So we ask the settlers in the above districts to organise arid try to retain that, which the Ministers calls unearned increment, but which the farmer knows is his sum total of stored labour; living lines of isolated misery. No roads, although we are loaded five shillings an acre for making them. No doctars, no telephones, or civilised facilities of any kind. Educational facilities are refused our children, and after a life spent upon the closest economy, and isolated from all the above civilising influences, ourselves and our children are to be robbed of our interest, earned through those many years of stored misery.