The Daily News THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11. LAND.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 15, 11 February 1909, Page 2

The Daily News THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11. LAND.

A'eary reiteration of essential facts are iccessary from lime to time ill case people forget. Tlie repetition of tr\itii is excusable if people who live under artificial conditions liave been misled into mistaking the lalse for the real. Here is the old truth. All worlilh wealth is created by land. Wealth is useless except for the mild. the slid* I den cessation of productiveness in the land would make the possession of means of exchange totally usek'ss. Land, that is idle is robbing someone ' of sustenance. Land ihat is not used

except as a medium for increasing wealth that must be spent in thy produce from land that is used is a menace lu national prosperity. The primary reason for tlie cultivation of land thai man shall be fed. A vast proportion of people in New Zealand arc fed merely because they nold nuculiivatcd land and batten on tlie work of others. The greatest thing that lias ever been lought for is land. The oniy source of social success power, and government is laud. Wealth, station, education, food and success are all dependent on land. Th.' source of ail evil and of all

material good is the land. Towns .ire merely tra Hicking centres for the distribution of the products of the laud. Speculation in land is not increasing the public wealth if it only gives the speculator more of the means of exchange. Because Smith buys land ;it £IOOO and sells it for £2OOO there has 1 been no increase of wealth to anybody over the transaction. The laud will not produce more because it ha* increased in " value.'* If a square foot of land produces twelve pounds of potatoes for the man Who has paid t'2o an acre for it, it will not, produce twenty-four pounds of potatoes to the square foot when tlie t.»vnor has sold at C4O an acre. Valuations of land are gauged on the vagaries of the local wind. Smitih. of Taranaki, has bought land «t ClO an acre and runs cows on it. Rrown notes that Smith is doing cxtremeU well and is garnering quite a lot of money. Urown buys Nmiil'.t

land al £l3 an acre, not because he lias ail v legitimate desire to make money liv feeding and milking cows. Iml because ho has ail idea thai lie ean sell to Robinson for £3O. Robinson doesn't know much about it and buyt-J Jf he is the ordinary kind of New Zealand speculator, he hustles nil he knows to get £4O per acre, hi the meantime the land isn't running any mow cows, and if the last buyer has paid four times the original value he will run fewer cows, because between the mortgagee and the bank and other obligations he has no money to improve. Hut the crying evil of this extraordinary and pernicious system of increasing the monetary price of land is that the man who has sold his CIO for £4O is looked upon as a wildly .successful person, whose wretched (but most natural) tactics are to be followed. The evil of such speculative values or prices lies in the fact that the largest possible price to be obtained for land . in Taranaki is the value nsse«.st'd by valuers, so that because Green has ob- [ tained C4O an acre for his country White, who lives on an adjoining section, has his land valued at the same price as Ureen. White, naturally, would like to obtain £4O an acre, too, and he <|uits if possible; so that it lias come to be believed in many parts of New Zealand that the only possible us- for land is to pass it along to sonic other fellow at a huge price. The fellow, as far as Taranaki is concerned, who has been persuaded to pay a fictitious value for country is in the meantime doing all the work for the man who has taken the money. It is particularly pathetic thai it is not the men who work the land who make the profits, but the men who work the workers.

The wickedness of the system which has stained every kind of commercialism in New Zealand is shown ill the tremendous ell'orts the legitimate landworkers have to make in order H

"make both ends meet," a-,id to pay the mortgagee. This pernicious system has led to the allegations about the.

"child slaves of Taranaki." The success of n. few speculators has led to the creation of a whole army of similar simulators, whose sole object i;i life is to put nothing into the mouths of anyone l»ut themselves and to take as nim-li food from the -months of everybody vKe as possible. J-Yr it must be recognised that primarily every human id'ort is made because tile human stomach ha?) to be filled. Striving more means of exchange than are necessary for the filling of th<- lmmun stomach is an abnormal condition. In norma) conditions the land is the people's, and each gets as little or as much out of it as he desires. The fact that people born to a part possession of any coun/-t try see value in mere land ia shown by the extraordinary freedoir with which com|iieied natural people alienate it and struggle ever after t regain what is the first essential of thoi existence. "The history of Maol land matters in Xew Zealand is tli 1

istory of the decay of tlit* race. The listnvv of the white man's boudling" m any country is the history of tin* decay of the wWe man's moral sense. The present stringency in this country is due in no small measure to the false value placed on land. As ton# as th< speculator is allowed to believe that it is hettev to get a .115 rvse on H 7« acre of land than to get to work and grow Clfl worth of produce on it, so long will ii lie. more fashionable to speculate than to work. Adversity is the road tlialj lead* to a nohler estimate of the uso-.-S of life. To sull'er and be .strong is good discipline, but there is enough suffering by way of gaining strength in the ordinary evevv-day life of the people without the added and pernicious and perennial land trouble. The end of tile soulless shark hi New Zealand is perhaps coming. The impossibility of making a proper, a comfortable living out of much of the Dominion's land at the present inflated prices is already to be seen: the undesire of the holders of capital to keep paving out on unproductive holding.- is also »een: and all portend n reversion lo a natural condition of tilings, and will wake for the true advancement of the Interests of the country.