LAND SETTLEMENT.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 191, 10 February 1912, Page 10 (Supplement)

LAND SETTLEMENT.

AMERICAN SUCCESS: BRITISH POLICY. Nothing but close, compact settlement will rapidly raise land values to comparatively high levels. Yet, ever since the days when the Hudson's Bay Company with unvarying severity preserved the solitude of the Great Lone Land by forcing back as long as possible the onward march of white civilisation, and missed thereby the immense rewards (amply proved by present developments) that an active settlement policy might have won for its shareholders, all our big land companies have dropped the substance of a constantly increasing prosperity and grasped at the barren shadow of an empty and scarcely remunerative if very dignified quasi-sovereignty over thousands of square miles of unpopulated estate.

Yet the Hudson's Bay Company never prospered before like if has since the Canadian Government unloosed its octo-pus-like grip on the North-Western Territories. Where the American, who has made such a success of land companies in the States, Mexico and Canada, will turn his money over two or three times at a beggarly 50 per cent, profit and settle numbers of small capitalists in the process, his British prototype is to be found still doggedly hanging on to his frequently non-interest paying original purchase. He is waiting for an undeserved rise to come in values; or at least he is trying to work the land himself on some combrous, wasteful and temporary system of gigantic runs or farms, which to his great satisfaction entirely excludes the working white settler, who alone can increase the value of his investment a hundredfold.

Even to-day the same short-sighted policy (admittedly slightly modified since an inkling of truth seems at last to be permeating our directorates) is everywhere in operation, -from the Chartered Company downwards, and until we as a nation generally recognise that it is not the kid-glove gentleman-farmer with a minimum of capital of at least £SOO to £IOOO, but the practical man, willing to do much of the actual hard work himself or with the help of bis children, and often starting with a surprisingly small capital, that "makes" a country, and is worth fostering as a financial investment, there will be no great organised progress in Imperial land settlement. —Outlook. ,