Poverty Bay Standard. PUBLISHED EVERY WEDNESDAY & SATURDAY. SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 1881.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 949, 4 June 1881, Page 2

Poverty Bay Standard.

PUBLISHED EVERY WEDNESDAY & SATURDAY. SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 1881.

We shall sell to no man Justice or Hight; We shall deng to no man Justice or Hight ; We shall defer to no man Justice or Hight.

How easy it is to be virtuous when there is no opportunity or temptation to sin. It is instructive to the keen observer of men and their actions to notice how alarmingly good they are when they diagnose for the iniquities and short-comings of their fellows. How differently men get accustomed to view the same kind of disease at different periods of their lives. Experience, or necessity, or party, or personal obligation may cause them to condemn, ultimately, the very thing they created years before. A schoolmaster preaches morality from the text books, to his pupils, but he swears “ like a trooper ” behind their backs. A clergyman ascends the pulpit on a Sunday, and denounces to his congregation many of the sins he has, himself, committed during the week. Tradesmen, as a rule, consider it a smart thing to “do” anyone else: but to be “ done ” themselves is a demoralising intolerance. So with our political, and other public men. Any little bit of scheming that will out-manceuvre their opponents, however mercenary it may be, has the plaudits of the unthinking crowd, so long as it is but successful. And to be honest, we admit that even newspaper men aie not altogether free from the taint that sits upon the moral actions of thote around them like a plague. They must, in a measure, arm themselves with weapons certainly not inferior to those brought to bear against them. If the atmosphere is charged with noxious vapors, some of them must be inhaled even by the most healthy ; and if we escape the moral disease that invariably follows, we are lucky. We have been led into this train of abstractive thought from the perusal of Sir George Grey’s recent speeches ct Auckland, and other places. We co abated the idea of re-producing num, in part, in our columns ; but did not see the necessity, owing to th ir contents being nothing that the venerable Knight has not said, in other words, many scores of times

before. The fact of their reiteration, however, does not, with Sir George Grey’s utterances, destroy their usefulness, or lessen their importance ; but it does aid in calling more emphatic attention to what he says than would, possibly, otherwise be the case. 'Sir George Grey never tires of condemning what he has all along called the system of “gridironing” the lands in the Provincial district of Canterbury. Sir George Grey said he “ spoke of these things because there were always strangers coming into the Colony who were ignorant of them, and his opponents thought that by raising such cries as he had already referred to, they would induce him to remain quiet upon them and allow them to be forgotten. No man who got property in that way acted rightly. It was a public crime, and that crime he would continue to denounce.” Sir George Grey then said, in reference to the land question generally : —

Think of the enormous tracts of land that are being taken up—the Patetere block for instance. What is the meaning of it ? It means poverty in a very short period of time, and it means a breach of every natural law—every provision which the Creator has made for his creatures. For example, I think you will all agree with me in this : that every baby born into the world has a right to live. If you do not admit that, you encourage infanticide. I say that no child born into the world can live unless there is ensured to it some of the elements necessary for its existence. Unless tke baby can have air and water and land you take from it that which God provided for it when it came upon the face of the earth. ’Cheers]. To say that the child is to have no natural right in the land is to say “ throw it into the sea and drown it ; it does not belong to the dry land of the earth.” I think that is really a self-evident truth, and I think, following it out one degree further, that we must admit this : that past generations had no right to say that “We will so apportion the earth among a few people that no one else hereafter shall have a right to it except by the will of the occupants.” When a man is born into the world he has a right to a share of the earth for his days, and one generation should not be allowed to make laws binding it up from the generations which follow and thus shutting out hope from the hearts of millions of the people. Those men who have not the courage in the present day to avow a doctrine of that kind are traitors to their race.

I say that the men who deliberately allow, in the unjust manner hitherto done, immense blocks of land to be picked up by a few individuals, are providing misery for the people who are to follow them.

Now this is just one of those positions that a public man takes up, and in which he forgets in 1881, what he did in 1853. We do not pretend to follow Sir George Grey in to the realms of nurserydom; nor can we say what effect, “air, water, and land” may have on babies. The “ infanticide ” theory, too, w r e leave to deeper scientists on that subject than we pretend to be ; but we must join issue with Sir George Grey on the views he now promulgates, as against those of an earlier period of his life. Sir George Grey says it is a “ public crime ” to “ gridiron ” the country. So it is. He also says that to allow men “ deliberately ” to obtain immense blocks of land is to provide misery for those who are to follow. There we agree with the speaker, and latter-day moralist. But does Sir George Grey forget that he is the father, the patriarchal progenitor of what, in those days, was termed “spotting?” Surely he cannot have forgot that his own Land Regulations of the 4th March, 1853—proclaimed by himself when the Colony was in its infancy — have been a very curse to those portions of the North Island which continued them unto the end. Look at the splendid estates—immense blocks ” —in the neighboring district of Hawke’s Bay that have passed into the hands of private speculators. The cream of the land that has, since then, changed hands at so many pounds sterling, was “ spotted ” by Sir George Grey’s personal and political friends at five shillings an acre ! How did Mr. Chambers, “ Lord Henry,” and Purvis Russell ; Mr. Tiffen — for many years Commissioner of Crown lands; “Joe” and “Barney” Rhodes, Doctor Featherston, and a host of others become possessed of their lands, which, it appears, ought to have been set apart for babes and sucklings, but through the system of “ gridironing ” which Sir George Grey’s Land Regulations gave them permission to do. It is in the writer’s recollection that both Mr. Domett and (then) Mr. Fox, as Commissioners of Crown Lands, strenuously opposed the interpretation of, if we remember rightly, the Bth and 13th clauses, which gave the enormous and exclusive monopoly to runholders of which Sir George Grey now complains. And then, after years of wrangling, what was the result ? The runholders, holding under all years’ lease, at one farthing

an acre rental, began “spotting,” and, led by Mr. H. R. Russell, shook the 80 acre homestead clause in the face of everyone who dared to apply for either 5s or 10s land wi-hin their boundaries. The conditions for fencing, too, were all in favor of the runholder. He was not obliged to fence against the few who did succeed in purchasing on his run. And the backward state of the surveys (in many cases purposely withheld by the Survey Department, for ulterior purposes) fostered this state of things to the borders of iniquity. Hence there arose an opposing faction. A class of professional land agents took up the “spotting” system, to help their clients, to annoy the runholders, and to make profit for themselves. They found that the Commissioner of Crown lands (who was also a large land monopolist, and Chief Surveyor interested in keeping the surveys back) was periodically certifying to indefinite lands (for which the runholder applied) as being of an “ Unagricultural character,” so they

likewise applied for definite blocks to go to auction, and generally for the purpose of either tormenting the runholder, or for extorting terms for withdrawal. But, great as this evil was, it was little as compared with that covered by the “ certificate ” of the character of the land which, according to Mr. Russell’s reading, and subsequently acquiesced in by the Land Office, practically shut out the area included in it from sale. After this it could not be bought even at the maximum price of 10s an acre, and must go to auction at the minimum price of ss. Besides those runholders we have named, let the observer of events during the last twenty years (for it was about 1858 that the struggle took place) cast his memory over the large areas of land that were originally bought at 5s an acre —Waimarama, Porangahau, Maraekakahu, and others. What would the Cannings, the Ormonds, the McLeans, Lamberts, Newmans, Whitmores and others be worth to-day, had it not been for the system of “ gridironing,” which, under another name, has deprived Hawke’s Bay of its land revenue? We fear it is not so much the iniquity alleged by Sir Gerge Grey to be involved in the system, as it is an illconcealed chagrin at the success which has attended Mr. Gibbon Wakefield’s “sufficient price,” and other conservation of their laud for which the Canterbury Land Association has been conspicuous from the first. The very people and the system Sir George Grey now condemns, are those who would have nothing to do with Sir George Grey’s Regulations. They saw the end from the beginning ; and the avowed hostility that has ever subsisted between the Canterbury settlers and Sir George Grey, at the distance of a quarter of a century, does not appear to help his memory that he is battling with the air, while endeavoring to expose errors of administration of which he, as Governor of the Colony, was primarily guilty of himself.