PROGRESS AND POVERTY.

Manawatu Standard, Volume IV, Issue 136, 8 May 1884, Page 2

PROGRESS AND POVERTY.

i Of all the men m. the community whom we should expect to find disseminating the doctrines of Hugh George m his ' Progress and Poverty/ Mr Josiah Clifton Firth, of the Matamata estate, is the least likely and the last. Yet so it is. After a Harvest Home and a Thanksgiving Service at Matamata, on Saturday last, we find Mr Firth propounding m the very widost and fullest sense the whole essence of the doctrine of Progress and Poveity. Mr Firth has a large and magnificent stretch of v-ccmniry. Every man who knows what Mr Firth has done musb credit him with great energy and great enterprise, and he has had hitherto an apparently unlimited command of capital. His flocks and his herds are celebrated as the very best m the country, and he has employed machinery of- the most modern und best construction of an extent \*-hich no olher person m these districts has been able to attempt. But for all this, at the end of one of the very best seasons we have had for many years, with a most successful harvest well stored, he tells his assembled work people that he is compelled, iv the presence of the low rates for wool, cattle, and wheat to suspend his operations and discharge his hands ; In fact he is deliberately endorsing the foregone conclusions of political economy, both of Hugh George and of all other writers since Adam Smith upon that science, that ihe engrossing of large areas of land m the hands of few persons, and the compulsory aggregation of the people around tho large centres of population must and does lead to that depression which is now being felt throughout the whole of this colony. Never before was there a more triumphant justification of the do trine that when the land owner takes a larger portion, the labourer must put up with the smaller portion, and thab wherever land is relatively high, wages will he relatively low. vVe have no doubt that Mr Firth must see an absolute necessity or he would not' dismiss his workmen and add them ai ihe present moment to an overstocked market. But probably the workmen themselves will m time learn the bitter lesion that it would be better for them to set up on their own account.