The New Zealand Times. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1913. “REFORM” PRETENCES

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVII, Issue 8361, 22 February 1913, Page 4

The New Zealand Times. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1913. “REFORM” PRETENCES

A specious pretence captured a number of young Liberals at the last general election. The pretence was that the politics of the “Reform” party were really Liberal—that nothing in fact really divided politics except the pretensions of red socialism. It was socialism of the red on one side and Liberalism under the banner of “Reform” on the other. The pretence entered the inexperienced mind of the young, and the result was that they voted for the “Reform” party. They slept through the events of the session, these young men of the Liberal persuasion, lulled by the hope that groat things would bo done by the “reformers” in their place of power to justify their assertions of adherence to truly Liberal principles. They have already had a disagreeable awakening. . As they look around them the signs all point to some conclusion quite different from the expected one which took them int 6 the folds of “Reform.” The pretence of the graduated land tax has been followed by suspicious errors of land administration which can not bo said to speak of Liberal instinct, whatever else they may discourse of with or without the eloquence that convinces. The loan issue has taken away' the glamour from the baseless prestige of. the “Reform” finance. The tenderness to the land sharking fraternity plainly visible in the native land policy is shocking many minds from one end of the Dominion to the other. There is, in fact, in the political sky, a series of signs and portents very disquieting to the truly Liberal mind. It is time for these young politicians to inquire for themselves what is the history of the party which has deceived them so egregipuely, and has, to boot, carefully refrained from performance of any of its promises. A retrospect under the circumstance* becomes necessary. First, on© asks “who are the men of reform?” The names of the chiefs speak for themselves: Buchanan, Russell, Ormond, Duthie, Bell, stand for the connection with the party which preceded the first great Liberal Government on the Treasury benches. They will be enough for the most careless of inquirers. Their friends were the celebrated Continuous Ministry which began by upsetting the Liberal Grey administration, and continued in office with one interval of three years until the Liberal victory of 1890 Tho head of that Continuous Ministry in its palmy days was Sir John Hall, and his name recalls pioneering and something else. That something else is the Gridiron. Our young Liberals have never known this celebrated figure of the past. For their information, it may be described as the sign and symbol of the policy which alienated the lands of the Crown into tho present monopolising hands whoso grasp is the cause of so much . of the heartburning _ of our day, Canterbury province was the home of the Gridiron. It was a Canterbury squatter-statesman who invented the Gridiron. Once a year, tho country party, being the majority of the Provincial Council, decided the fate of the public lands, and then set bounds to the ambition of the cultivators of tho soil. They set a price on tho lauds—£2 cash—and they decreed that twenty acres should be the minimum area sold. Hence it became possible to select blocks of twenty acres each separated from its neighbour by a block of nineteen. In this way, a man acquired the best part of his run, and the map resembled a gridiron. As access was impossible to the nineteen-acre blocks, and as they moreover could not be sold, being under the legal limit, it followed that tho buyers got their estates at half the price of the legal tender for cash. Furthermore, it became necessary to build bridges for the proper communication so necessary for the advancement of agriculture and the small farmer. But when tho very best engineers were imported from abroad, it was discovered tii at the bridge problem was almost insoluble by reason of the tremendous expense of the bridges required in that extraordinarily difficult country. Thus until an enterprising contractor, one TV. White, arose and bridged the Waimakariri for £12,000 where tho imported men had estimated many times that sum, the rivers went unbridged and settlement could not bo developed. What hap. pened in Canterbury was a type, perhaps more advanced, but still a fair type of what happened elsewhere under the old provincial regime which ended by living on the price of its lands in the most extravagant and unsound way. Among the wits of tho time, these legislative and administrative feats were known as the doings of the “Ovine Republic and the Bovine Majority,” Here we hare the first ancestor of the <fEeform” 1 party—the true founder of the House of “Reform.” When the country recovered from tho excitement of the Public Works' policy and the abolition of the provinces, it began to look into the condition of its Janded estate, and the

party of Grey came into power. That was the first Liberal Ministry, and its advent marked the first cleavage admitted between Liberal and Conservative. Its first act was to attack land monopoly with a land tax. But it 101 l before the men who formed the Continuous Ministry. In power, their chief venture in the region of finance was the property tax, which taxed all a man had without reference to his power of bearing taxation as without thought of his- profits or consideration for his losses. The tax locked the wheels of industry, and the country sank into stagnation, while soup kitchens and starvation wages vied with each other for tho attention of the public, and the bone and sinew left tho country for pastures new in appalling numbers. Tho great strike of 184 W helped the natural reaction against the Conservative policy, and it went down in a great unexpected whirl at the general election of the named year. But the “Liberalism” of the beaten party was not exhausted. It did not loose its grip of power until it had appointed a number of its adherents to life seats in the Legislative Council. The political descendants of these men are joining them now in trying to make the constitution of the Legislative Council something in which this unprincipled Conservative action cannot be repeated. But the energies of tho beaten party were not exhausted. On the contrary, they hoisted the banner of ‘ ‘The Seven Devils of Socialism,” and under it they resisted the whole of the Liberal programme which now occupies such an extensive and beneficent place on the statute-book. The property tax they defended, by predicting a “galloping to a deficit” for the new finance, and the new finance has replied with’ a series of surpluses which now stands at eight millions sterling, proving the soundness- of tho Liberal finance. They resisted John McKenzie’s Land Act and his assaults on dummyism, but they only succeeded in drawing attention to their own past of the Gridiron, and dummyism was proved in many an open court to bo the illegitimate child of their own land policy. As for the rest of the series of Liberal measures, it is undeniable that they opposed them all, and their inability to propose their abolition now is a proof of the correctness of the great policy they strove so hard to bring to nought. It is but a light sketch we have attempted. But it enables one to understand the extraordinary blunders—to use the mildest possible tenu —which have recently begun to disgrace the land policy of the Government. It does more. It gives the younger Liberals good reason to know that “Reform’s” professions of Liberalism by which they have been taken in are absolutely contrary to tho life political history of the men who made them. The older Liberals had lived through the period we have briefly traversed and were not so easily deceived.