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Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 160, 18 June 1884, Page 2

Here is something for the working men of Poverty Bay, as well as the working men throughout the Colony to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. There is a complaint running through the land that hundreds of men are holding large areas of land which have been purchased to the exclusion of thousands of cultivators of the soil. No doubt this is and has been the case; but there is a little publication known as a “ private trade circular ” issued to subscribers which shows the names of men who have been compelled to mortgage their lands to meet the debts due upon them. Returns show that of every ten of the large land owners eight have their estates under mortgage or lien, and that the incomings from these estates do not pay the interest due upon them—that in fact in a large number of instances the land holder is an anxious, unhappy man, in constant fear of losing that which he has striven and schemed so hard to obtain. Nineteen millions of borrowed capital now holds these large estates in pawn. When the working man receives his Saturday afternoon’s pay, or his wages at the end of the time he has agreed upon to serve he is in nine cases out of ten a more independent man than his payma .er. What he has got is his own. honestly worked for and fairly earned, while the landowner in too many cases is anxiously thinking how long his land will belong to him.