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South Canterbury Times, Issue 2583, 1 July 1881, Page 2

“ Lakd Ho !!” is the title of a wellwritten pamphlet on what is sure to be the burning question of the immediate future. The subject is the nationalization of the land. The writer carries us forward to 1933, and relates a conversation on the results of the system of nationalizing the land of New Zealand, which came into force in 1883, Considering that only a couple of years have to elapse before the Land Reform party are to prevail in the Legislature, the author most be regarded as very sanguine. Still this is a lightning age when ideas change rapidly, and wonderful may be the strides made in public opinion before 1883. Mr Sealy’s pamphlet “ Are We to Stay Here,” will do much to educate the minds of colonists, in South Canterbury at any rate, on the Land question. It would be well if Mr Sealy’s work was placed in the hands of every Liberal in the country. It would be a good preparation forunderstanding and appreciating “Land Ho ! !” Of course, the writer of the last-named will be considered Utopian in his ideas by a great many people, but then all reformers have been considered Utopian. The writer commences in a happy strain. He relates in a conversation with his grandfather, that he has Just

arrived at Wellington from Melbourne after a passage of forty-six hours, having made the run across at the rate of thirty knots an hour, u the new rotatory magnetic engines driven by petroleum gas doing their work well and quite smoothly; none of that wretched vibration from the screw as in the old steamers.” The grandfather proceeds to tell the new arrival of the great prosperity of the country which had been brought about by the nationalisation of the land. Looking back fifty years, the old man sketches the deplorable condition of affairs when the colony owed thirty million and the land was held in blocks of from ten to a hundred thousand acres. The old man then proceeds to describe the modas operandi of the bursting up policy. A land tax was the first move in the right direction. Each landholder was required to make a return of the value for purposes of taxation. That was about three years before the National Land Act came into operation. The valuations were far below the actual value, and it was declared by the Act that the proprietor’s value should be taken as declared three years before, leaving him to prove increased value for the time thht had elapsed. He was paid in debentures, and it was found that those debentures never fell below par. The State made such a large profit by the transaction that all the coat of Government was met by the land revenue alone. The Government let the public estate on lease in moderately sized sections.

The space at our disposal will not admit of our entering more fully into the matter. The pamphlet, from its nature, is more interesting than instructive. Its object, doubtless, is to set people thinking. This question of the nationalisation of the land amongst British communities is yet in the region of political philosophy, though men are taking a more practical view of it every day. It is a question which is rapidly coming to the front.