NATIONAL STOCKTAKING

New Zealand Times, Volume XLIV, Issue 10292, 29 May 1919, Page 4

NATIONAL STOCKTAKING

Tho cable nows recently to hand, showing tho manner in which the coalbenring lands of Great Britain are monopolised by the few and the huge mineral-rents, royalties, and wayJoavcs that these few levy upon the coal industry in tho Mother Country, makes one long for a stocktaking of tlie man-power of tho nation as radical and searching ns that suggested (see extract in another column) by 1 •Punch, ’’ the world-famed Londoh comic- journal, many years before tho world-war brought the problem of reconstruction so urgently to tho front. We have tho Duke of Northumberland confessing to tho Coal Commission that ho owns mineral rights over 24,450 acres, and' that the royalties —tho very word itself shows that these charges should bo State dues —bad yielded him a net average income for six years of £55,931. His gross income last year, he stated, was*£B2,4so, on which duties and dues had amounted to £58,560. including £42,153 for supertax. The Marquis of Londonderry gave evidence that he owned 5800 acres of tho Durham coalfields, and that his average income from royalties was £9608 and from way-loavef £5726, a total levy on the coal industry of £15,334 per year; while the Marquis of Bute stated that he owned 12,852 acres, the royalties from which yielded an average revenue of £109,277. He added that his ancestors acquired the bulk of this land by way of a grant from Edward VI. for raising an army. In all probability that army was raised for the jiurposo of holding down the people while the sinister few, who constituted the powor behind the boy King, robbed them of the laud and of everything else they could fay their hands on. But the -Marquis of Bute, very naturally, did not go into such utterly irrelevant details. Lord Tredegar told the Coal Commission that he owns 82,000 acres in South Wales; but the cables do not state tho income he draws from mineral rents, royalties, and way-leaves. It stands to reason, however, that, at an average of Is 3d per ton for steam coal, that income must be very considerable indeed.

Small wonder that, in view of such facts and figures, out of eleven political economists examined by the Coal Commission, eight, including tlirce university professors, favoured tho nationalisation of the coal mines. Small wonder, too, that Lord Londonderry declared that he was opposed to nationalisation, believed in private property, and was “an individualist,” as His Lordship misunderstands that much-abused term; or that His Grace of Northumberland said that ‘‘ho would be opposed to nationalisation, because it would he the first step towards a deadlier and more drastic move, namely, the nationalisation of land andl all sources of production and industry.” “His Grace,” it is added, “admitted that he would claim all the coal under his property, oven if science made it possible to mine to a depth of twenty thousand feet” ; and ho opined that “it'would be a bad thing to give a million miners control of the coal, but ho thought it an excellent thing for one man to own the mineral rights on 24,450 acres.” No doubt' the Duke of Northumberland felt very -badly used, seeing that out of a gross income last year of £82,450, duties, dues, and supertax ; took £58,560, leaving him only a beggarly £23,890 a year on which to make ends meet at this time of war-inflated, prices.» ; ..But . a Man- , fewer Commission, engaged m a national stocktaking on the lines suggested by “Punch,” might well be pardoned for doubting whether Hie Grace was worth to tho nation, not the £23,890, but even the odd £B9O per annum; foi that means the yearly wages of five or six coal-miners, and it is v.erv certain that the Duke does not do, all told, the work of one of them. For the rest, the evidence given by the land monopolist in “Punch’s” clever skit might well have, been given by the Duke of Northumberland himself. His Grace, who holds 180,000 acres ,in .Northumberland County alone, levies upon industry all the tolls therein mentioned, and many more not there enumerated—toll on all fish caught in the sea within the three-mile limit of his land, toll even on the crabs, the mussels, and the worms taken for bait from tho ducal foreshore. His Grace, or his father before him, has been known to charge 1000 years’ purchase for land required for a cemetery for tho miners who dig his coal, rather more than that for land required for a school, and for a site wonted for a Methodist chapel two guineas per square yard for land rented at 30s an acre, which works out at only 6796 years’ purchase! Mr .T. Hodges, M.P., a member of tho Coal Commission, quoted to Lord Tredegar a speech delivered by Mr Lloyd George, at Swansea, in 1912, in which he stated that landlordism so ground down and oppressed the miners that when they came out of tho mines, instead of finding renewed vigour and strength, they found crowded houses which wore unfit for human habita. tion, and which bred disease and degradation. Tho mqn whoso wealth they made at the risk of their lives grudged them every inch of sunlight and airspace. Lord Tredegar denied that this was a fair statement of the conditions in South Wales. If his lordship had said that it was nob an adequate statement, he would have shown more respect for tho truth. Only those who have seen them can realise how utterly bad are the conditions under which far too many miners have to live and work at Home. The conditions, had as they sometimes are in our New Zealand mining townships, are not a circumstance to those obtaining in the Old Country. What Mr Lloyd George said of South Wales is equally true—or, rather, equally inadequate—in regard to Durham and Northumberland and other mining centres; though in ceitain mining districts, as in Derbyshire, garden village conditions of lato years been introduced. Speaking some years ago of the conditions' obtaining in Durham and Northumberland, the Eight Hon. John M. Robertson, a member of Mr Asquith’s Government, and then M.P. for the Tyneside Division, stated that the bulk of the miners in those two counties lived, many of them amid indescribably filthy and sordid surroundings, in cottages consisting' of one bed-living-room-kitchon, with a small scullery ' lean-to, and a tiny cock-loft above, tho cock-loft being so small that if a folding-up bod was not used it would bo impossible to open the door, and if any person died in tho bed a hole had to be made in tho roof to get tho corpse out. And even such miners’ cottages were too often three or four , miles a Way from the pit-head—the royalty-owners refusing sites any nearer—so that, wintei and summer, rain, shine, or snow, the miners had to tramp, day in and day out, three weary miles to and from thoir work 1 The Man-Power Commission would also have to take into account tho ; other big land-monopolists, especially

the twenty-sis dukes who hold between them 4,250,000 acres of British soil. The greatest landholder of them all, so far as area is concerned, is tho Duke of Sutherland, who possesses 1,358,000 acres; so that sixty land monopolists of his calibre would ho-d more than the whole of tho 77,0U0,wj acres of tho British Isles. But, area is not everything; for, while the rentroll of tho Duke of Sutherland is .pub ot £150,000 a year, that of iho Duke of Devonshire, with 180,000 acres only, is stated to be £IBO,OOO. And the Duke of Westminster, with a much smaller acreage, a portion of it, however, amongst the most valuable laud in London, is credited with receiving 30s a minute —50 tier cent, more per minute than the pre-war weekly wage that a very great proportion of tho workers at Home got for the hardest toil, often working twelve to fifteen hours a day 1 It seemed bad enough that, while the trimmer on tho Lusitania got only 30s for the round trip of ten days from Liverpool to Now York and back, tho royalty-owner drew in tolls on tho coal consumed no less than £1050,/ or 700 times tho trimmer’s wage. But the royalty-owner’s £lO3 per day sinks into insignificance before the Duke of Westminster’s 30s a minute, or £2160 a day. 'Verily, the Man-Power Commission, we have imagined, would have some most heart-searching questions to put to the royalty-owners and other great land monopolist® of Britain, ducal and otherwise. At present the rewards of lordly idleness are far out of all proportion to tho pittance received by honest toil; and a readjustment of industrial and social values on the lines suggested by “Punch,” distressful as it might prove to a handful of dukes, to a few score of marquises, earls, aud so forth, and to some hundreds of profiteering plutocrats, would go far to make England again the “Merrie England” that she used to be before the days of .the enclosure of the commons and the driving of the people from the countryside into miners’ hovels and city slums. Verily, for Great Britain reconstruction is n mighty, well-nigh an impossible task, even if tackled at once aud in downright earnest by a truly representative Government What of disaster may it not portend with an Administration in power that is-the merest caricature of a representative Government, and shows little or no earnest intention of dealing with the pressing problems that now confront the Old Land.

Of course, the problems that face us hero in New Zealand, though like m kind, are of much smaller magnitude and far loss urgent. But, in theii degree, they are- serious enough, and the longer they are neglected, or merely played with, tho more serious they will become. A Man-Power Commission, engaged in re-assossing industrial and social values, would not unearth such tremendous anomalies and scandals here as in tho Motherland; but, in their degree, similar anomalies, similar scandals, do exist hero; aud the sooner they cease to exist, the bettor for all concerned, not 'only for those now under-assessed, but also for those grossly over-assessed. At best, undeserved wealth is only less demoralising than undeserved poverty.