Manawatu Herald. THURSDAY, AUGUST 6,1891. Large Land Owners.

Manawatu Herald, Volume III, Issue III, 6 August 1891, Page 2

Manawatu Herald. THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 1891. Large Land Owners.

The " Liberal . Government with I which the colony is blest, has spared no pains to prove that .the large landowners have been the ;" pests " of the country. , There may be cases, ! but we can point to other cases' jiist i the reverse, though the owners, or late owners, of the two estates we shall" mention, have been foolishly declaimed against by a 1 young man eager to enter Parliament, and who spoke without the slightest knqwledge of the real state of theicases. The estates we refer to are the Oroua Downs and the Mptoa properties. lii some respects both are similar,, as both properties had a very .large area of swamps, and these having been drained, the properties appear very different from the day the owners first entered into possession. The.ilotoa swamp, previous to, the purchase of it by Mr Larkwbrthy> laid unsaleable many years. A , few sections near the town were sold and

some of the sections along the river bank at Motoa, the remainder some five oi six thousand acres Was looked upon as being utterly worthless. Fortunately Mr Larkworthy thought differently, and purchased the land from the Provincial Government for one pound per acre, with the providon, however, that an amount, equal to 10s per acre, out of the purchase money should be spent in draining the property. To those who have resided in the neighbourhood, the history of the developement of this large area of useless land into well drained, fenced and grassed paddocks, has been the subject of many conjectures^ showing that almost up to now, it was never thought, by those who had the knowledge of the expense resulting from such experiments, that the pufchaser had made much of a "spejj." Yet this estate was referred to by agitators at the 8 last election as an example of the selfishness of large landowners ! The owner, more's the pity, never made a penny piece, and sold, out to a disadvantage. The swamp was first tapped by one main drain, then by two others, drains in name, but in reality more .like^cjanals. i Heavy 'floodgates had to ; be erected on the river bank, then miles of smaller drains were cut, then in a year or two all the drains had to be deepened, and expense after expense incurred, until thetime was reached when the swamp' may be considered drained. Work* never ceases, as further drains will still have to be out, more fencing and clearing to be done. AS [■•an answer to those who think badly of a capitalist iaying out his money in the improvement of land in this, colony we have here an instance where the owner went into a very risky concern and after an outlay of -some £25,000 hard cash, has : . succeeded in transforming a waste piece of land into a valuable grass growing country now carrying eleven thousand sheep and twelve hundred head of cattle. If a man is entitled to honor who makes two blades of grass grow where only one did before, what ought to be said of the efforts made by Mr Larkworthy ? The. enterprise of Mr Larkworthy has not only resulted in this expenditure being made to the very great advantage to the labour market of the district, but the yearly payment made to the hands permanently employed,, the annual heavy expenditure that has to be made in keeping the miles,, of drains cleared, ' and the benefit to the general trade by the carriage of so much export of meat, has also to be reokoned, Fortunately -we can say again -that this is not all that has arisen from the drainage of the Motoa swamp. We mentioned before, that along the river bank at Motoa a inumber of small sections were 501 d ... Thpse had nearly half their acreage, in this swamp, and 'were thought oflit.fele account until a 'year, of tw.o.ago, when the effective drainage of .the lower portion put all these other sections dry. The work that has been done by this large landowner has been of great advantage to the labourer, the townspeople, and the adjoining settlers— but what a moral -not to himself. We are not therefore likely to view with favour the proposal to punish such men with a penal tax.