POSITION VALUE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 50, 6 January 1872, Page 11

POSITION VALUE.

We congratulate the Provincial Government, the province, and the Colonists' Aid Corporation, on the success which has attended the Hon Colonel Fielding s mission to New Zealand j for they all ought to be, if they are not, well satisfied with the result of his negotiations. The Superintendent has obtained by this means a more signal triumph over his political opponents than either he or they, while the Parliament was in session, could have anticipated. There is a better prospect of the province being more rapidly colonised in the course of eighteen months than ever existed during the eighteen years its affairs were administered by Mr Fitzherbert s predecessor. The directors of the aforesaid corporation have been fortunate in securing the services of so efficient an agent as Colonel Fielding, and the scheme they have initiated proves they are more wise in their genertion, and possess more of the spirit and foresight of true statesmanship than falls to the lot of the usual run of those professional politicians who too frequently constitute the staple of Colonial Governments. In proportion to the success of the corporation will be advantages the province will secure by its colonising operations, it is even possible that the sale of a moietv of the land which is comprised in the too well known Manawatu block will be the means of immediately doubling the market value of the unsold portion of that block. In any case, the plan the corporation intend to carry out, of reserving from sale every alternate section until it has attained a position value, will commend itself to the approval of all who have made the subject of colonisation the study of a life. It is a plan which the writer, for the last twenty years, has been vainly urging the Provincial and Colonial Governments to carry out. “ The idea,” says the Independent, “ is that these reserves will achieve in time an extra position value through the settlement of the adjoining blocks of land and it is an idea, we will venture to predict, that will be sure to be realised. This idea is by no means a new one. It has been adopted with success by several colonising bodies; and it was carried out with the happiest results by the Government of Upper Canada, some forty years ago, in settling the wild forest country then lying between Lake Simcoe and Lake Huron. The roadmen, who were employed in the construction of the main road from the former lake to a military post on the latter, were granted, on certain conditions, 100 acres of land each. These sections were laid off on the road side in separate locations, or villages, each location, if we remember right, being distant about five miles from each other. The road, and these settlements, in a very short time, raised the market value of the intermediate land more than 400 per cent; while the town lots on Kempenfelt Bay, Lake Simcoe, which had in the meantime been carefully reserved from sale, fetched from £2O to £IOO each ; though they would have realised but little more than as many shillings if they had been opened for sale before the main road was made, and the back country had been not even partly settled. In all countries, and moreparticularly in young colonies, harbors, navigable rivers, roads, water-power, and other natural advantages, give to the land in their vicinity a position value; but none of these could be turned to account without population. It is this which raises the price of land in all cases, and in some instances to an incredible amount. The moment a railroad is constructed through public land, in the United States, its market value is double. As population settles upon it, its value increases, not merely at an arithmetical, but at a geometrical ratio ; and yet this fact has either been strangely sight of, or wilfully ignored, in :neatly the whole of the land laws which have bebnput into operation in New Zealand. Tin's has resulted not only in loss to the^revenue, but to the obstruction of settlement. In London the tiny bit of land at the coroner of St Paul’s Cathedral, is worth not less than £60,000. When New Oxford Street was being built the land cost on the average £57,000 per acre ; and in Manchester, building allotments have been sold at the rate of £200,000 per acre. At Birmingham, the space

occupied by the London and NorthWestern Railway was sold for £60,000. It is the same with regard to the prices realized for building allotments in all the principal towns of the United Kingdom. It is the presence of population, itself the cause and consequence of the progress of national wealth, which makes land near London Bridge as valuable as a gold mine. It is the absence of population in New Zealand, notwithstanding the gold mines, which renders land in the interior of this country comparatively valueless. But we need not go all the way either to England or America in order to dis cover whether the idea of the Colonists Aid Society is likely to be realised. Our own province furnishes abundant evidence that it will be so, if ordinary prudence be only manifested. In 1855 the Provincial Government set aside a small block of land in the Three Mile Bush, Wairarapa, for the location of the immigrants brought out under the “ Black Ball” contract. To each family was granted a section of 10 acres, on the condition they paid up their passage money. At the’same time the whole of the land on the opposite side of the road was allowed to be purchased with absentee scrip at the nominal price of 10s an acre. Immediately the greater portion of that land was leased with d right of purchase not at 10s but at 303 an acre, and it was considered by the leaseholders that they had got a great bargain. It had at once attained a position value: first, by the construction of a road; and second, by the formation of a settlement. But instead of the land revenue being benefited in consequence, the whole benefit was allowed to be secured by absentees, who had not contributed a single penny to the provincial revenue, and who have since scarcely contributed anything towards those roads and settlements by which their land has been so largely enhanced in value. The town acres in Greytown, immediately alter it was founded, if we have been correctly informed, rose from 10s to £lO per acre, and could not ten years after be purchased for much less than ten times that amount. In the same period, the unoccupied rural sections rose in value from 10s to 60s per acre, and to even a still higher amount. These facts show that if°four-fifths of the land in a defined block, through which a main trunk road is made, were absolutely given away, if by that means the land thus given away was beneficially occupied, a very handsome profit might be realised on the sale of the remainder. These facts, consequently; also show that the idea of the Colonists Aid Corporation is not so extravagant as at the first blush it appears, and that the money realised by the Provincial Government from the sale of the block is a matter of but little moment compared with the advantages the province and the revenue will derive from the introduction of 2000 adult immigrants into the country, and their settlement on the Manawatu block. The Corporation will not only give a position value to the land they reserve from sale, but also as a natural consequence, to the Crown lands in its vicinity.