The Daily News. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23. BACK TO THE LAND.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 141, 23 September 1910, Page 4

The Daily News. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23. BACK TO THE LAND.

Away back in the dim ages the feudal barons did not muster factory operatives to help them smash the next-door neighbor or to undertake enterprises of great danger. The population of Britain was composed largely of people who occupied the land and who depended entirely on their own handiwork in making all they needed from the products of the soil. There were no overcrowded cities, no element in public life that placed the factory operative before the tiller of the soil, nothing that stole from a man his manliness or persuaded a woman that she was to be admired and nothing else. Tillage was paramount, and the tillers were the paramount people. Personal fighting for territory was a less harmful method of acquisition than inheritance, legal methods, sharking, and the innumerable ways of peace. Craft and [cunning took the place of skill at arms, the sturdy home virtues of the tillers and the manipulative skill weakened with hereditary acquisition, the peasant was driven to the city, and the essential quality of the land was forgotten. To-day, in every country of the world, there is an urging movement to "get back to the land." The people are beginning to understand that food does not grow in looms or on pavements, in workshops or in factories. They are even beginning to | see that bread is of the earth and not of the baker's counter, that butter means broad pastures and healthy, kine and not merely a city purveyor in a white apron. They hear that the earth is wide, that much of it is greedily held and produces nothing, that, within gunshot of great cities with slums and starvation and the nameless horrors of poverty are smiling fields given to the pleasure of the owners. In Britain, because of stress of circumstances, the countryside has thinned of population and the cities have grown ungainly. Tie fat stockbroker in his motor car is a more frequent spectacle than the ploughman, the idle rich are commoner than the toiling poor, and the toilers .who have been driven to the cities are beginning to inderstand the reason why. The peer who frankly says that he will be ruined if his fifty thousand pounds a year is taxed is beginning to be told that the man who has nothing at all to be taxed has as much right to food' as himself, should feed from the potential produce of his fat idle acres, and should be able to stand upright and unfearing in the presence of rich drones. If there is decay of national strength it is because of idle lands and the idle rich and the wicked persistent landsnatching that every true statesman is doing, his best to fight. The man on the land who pays more to his landlord than he himself receives for his toil drifts off the land in disgust. This decided drift is apparent not. only in England, but in America, in Australia, in New Zealand, and in Canada. Parasites have been at work in all these countries. . Land is not looked upon as a commodity that will grow food but as a means of speculation. The days of free land are almost over. Tens of millions of acres of land are idle becalise tillers cannot afford to buy it. It would produce ten times the value in produce than the price asked for it if it were given free to the tillers. In Australia there is a call from the pavement to the bush, but the bush is held by the squatter. In New Zealand bold experiments are being made to depopulate the towns and to populate the country. No experiments can he too bold to effect the essential need. The Government that offends one squatter by dividing up his land and by handing it over to a thousand people will thoroughly prove its productiveness is not ruining a, country. People like Foster Fraser contend that the pioneer spirit is dying out and that the present-day people won't face the wilderness." They won't face the wilderness that costs a lot of money. The old-time pioneers hadn't got to be millionaires before they started on their pilgrimages, and every pioneer must have inducements. In the near future every oountry with spare, land will be absolutely obliged, for the very best of reasons—the virility of the race and the support of : the population—to give the people land at the lowest price, or at no price at all. Any system of landholding that breeds parasites is a bad 6ystem. Any system that looks upon land for what it will bring in the market and not what it will grow for the market is a false one, and any system that keeps an acre of land idle while there is a man ahout aching to cultivate it is at present driving a nail* in the coffin of the nation.